In the 1860s , a U.S. newsprint editor , author , and amateurarchaeologistnamedE.G. Squiertraveled to Cuzco , Peru . He visited the home of a wealthy char who gather up antiquities to watch an ancient skull , discover in an Inca cemetery in the Valley of Yuca and date to pre - Columbian times . Notably , it had a large , orthogonal yap at its top .
Squier — a well - educated polymath whose areas of expertness also included Latin American culture — was immediately intrigued . He bring the skull to New York in 1865 and give it to members of the New York Academy of Medicine .
Squier believed that the skull was clear evidence that Peru ’s ancient people had performed brain surgery . The hole ’s cross - hatched outline were the piece of work of a human hand ; Squier note that they were most likely made with a burin , a pecker used by engraver on wood and metal . Even more shockingly , he observed , the skull designate sign of healing — mean the patient had live the procedure for at least one to two weeks before they give way .
Members of the aesculapian community were skeptical that the cuts were made prior to death . Squier attempt the opinion of renowned French surgeon and anthropologistPaul Broca , who examine the skull and conclude that Indigenous order had been performing “ advanced surgery ” long before Europeans arrived .
It was surprisingly sophisticated Stone Age surgery.
Trepanation is the practice of drilling or scratch up a pickle into the skull ’s cranial vault to expose brain tissue paper and treat injuries . First mentioned by theHippocratic Corpus , it ’s one of the world ’s oldest surgeries ( the wordtrepanationcomes from Greek and means “ plumber’s snake ” or “ borer ” ) . Today ’s aesculapian community mention to it as acraniotomy .
Throughouthistory , trepanation has been practiced in most every part of the world . It was do in ancient Greece and Rome , and reportedly is used in parts of Africa , South America , and the South Pacific even today . In ancient Greece , doctors performed trepanation to let off pressure , remove skull fragment from the mastermind after a traumatic fortuity , and drain fluid . From the Renaissance until the beginning of the 19th century , trepanation was routinely used to process head wounds , and into the eighteenth century , it was used to regale epilepsy and mental disorders .
westerly physicians of Squier and Broca ’s fourth dimension thought it unlikely that non - European refinement throughout chronicle may have attempted the function . Since survival rate from the surgeries performed in the 19th century were so poor due to infirmary - acquired infections , they doubted that ancient patients could have know for long following the operation .
After Broca acknowledge Squier ’s breakthrough , however , scientist set about discovering trepanned skull across the globe , dating backto the Neolithicperiod . Hole - drill heads were found in Western Europe and the Americas . Over the years , it became readable that many lodge across the globe had set about trepanation , starting in the previous palaeolithic period at least 10,000 year ago .
Physicians developed trepanation tools and techniques.
Surgical techniques varied from polish to refinement . Prehistoric trepanations performed in other Peru were done with a ceremonial knife called atumi , which was used to skin or cut through the bone . The Hippocratic schooltime invent the trepan practice , which bored holes into the skull . In the South Pacific , they used sharpened seashells to cut ivory ; in Europe , flint and obsidian . By the Renaissance , physicians routinely perform trepanations with specially break instruments .
Trepanation was perform on young and old , male and female person . fit in to inquiry by the cognitive neuroscientist Charles Gross , estimates for survival compass from 50 to 90 pct and some prehistoric patients had lived for old age after the surgery . In many case , though , the pathology that necessitated the subroutine remains undecipherable .
John Verano , an anthropologist at Tulane University who studies trepanation in Peru , tell Mental Floss in 2016 he ’s confident that “ in Peru , the South Pacific , and many other contribution of the humankind , trepanation began as a very practical discussion for head injuries . Say somebody has a capitulum wound that ’s torn up their skull . You ’d clean it out and remove little broken fragments and allow the brain to swell a petty bit , which it does after injuries . ”
In some case , trepan skulls show well-defined evidence of trauma — meaning there must have been an implicit in reason why the operation was do . However , archaeologists have also uncovered trepan skull that do n’t show depressed fractures . Squier ’s famous skull , for representative , did n’t indicate any signs of a head wound . Skulls with multiple holes have also been unearth , revealing that patient likely had — and survived — more than one operation .
modernistic eyewitness accounts from Africa and the South Pacific commonwealth that trepanation is still used to treat head wounds , vexation , or pressure on the brain , Verano said . In other part of the world , it ’s consider that trepanation might have once been used to release malign spirits , or to address mental illness or epilepsy . But without any write record , we ’ll never roll in the hay exactly why these kinds of surgical process were performed in the absence of obvious wound .
Trepanation was probably performed without anesthesia.
Patients may have been unconscious during the surgery if they had bear a straits wound , Verano said . Otherwise , they would have been awake . “ The scalp has a good deal of nerves , so it hurts to reduce your scalp , ” he articulate . “ It also bleeds a raft , but then it stop over . But the skull has very few face , and the genius has no cheek . ” Plus , ancient surgeons were n’t cutting through the brain ’s dura mater , the outmost layer of three protective membranes covering the brain . ( If they had , the patients would have develop meningitis and died . )
In modern hospitals , trepanation is no longer viewed as its own curative subprogram . Surgeons perform craniotomies to murder dead or infected tissue from wounds , allay pressure in the skull , or perform exploratory surgery . It ’s fascinating to realize that this technique survived many millenary — and that in prehistoric times , humans understood that the brain controlled the torso .
extra source : A Hole in the Head;Trepanation : HIstory , Discovery , Theory
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A version of this write up was published in 2016 ; it has been updated for 2025 .
