Stephen Stearns, teaching Yale's Evolution and Medicine course, opens this short segment by asking what counts as a patient once you look back before modern hospitals existed. He turns to archaeological evidence, including skeletons showing healed fractures and long-term injuries in early hominins and Neanderthals, to argue that some form of caregiving for the sick and injured stretches deep into human prehistory. Stearns uses these bones as data points in an evolutionary argument: creatures that could not survive injury without help nonetheless did survive, which implies some social support existed long before written medical records. The lecture sits early in the course, setting up the evolutionary framework the rest of the series will use to examine disease and treatment. It is brief and focused, functioning as a building block lecture rather than a stand-alone survey, but it lays out a clear claim backed by physical evidence from the fossil record.