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It's always odd that people display such disbelief when I say that science isn't necessarily better today than any given point in the past. To me, it's just obvious that systems of knowledge change over time and that they don't follow some teleological course of betterment that leads to good things for humans. Sometimes we make mistakes and we forget that certain options are available. Medicine is the perfect example because there are still so many things we get wrong even though we feel like we have made progress overall. That feeling of progress is, in my opinion, largely an illusion brought about due to the inaccessibility of the past.
The best way to see what I'm talking about would be to look through the lens of anthropology and the study of so-called primitive societies. Some tribes rely heavily upon traditional knowledge about plants and animals which has been passed down for centuries. Modern scientists have only very recently become interested in what they know. The dominant perception has been that they cannot possibly know anything beyond our specialized knowledge because they are less developed than us in the West or the "technologically advanced world". Yet even though these cultures differ from ours, they have many common traits and practices that we just don't recognize because we perceive them as other. When members of various groups are interviewed, they often reveal intimate knowledge of local flora and fauna which no biologist or botanist has previously been aware of. The knowledge systems they employ for everyday life often make distinctions between plants and parts of plants that no modern scientist would have thought of. This is not to say all of their knowledge is perfect, but that it often contains many facts which we had not been privy to. And all of these facts are now disappearing.
If you want to do a deep analysis of this sort of thing I would recommend Levi-Strauss' La Pensée Sauvage or "Wild Thought"
A fundamental work in the history of the sciences of man.
