Trephining may have appeared, in these contexts and cultures, to have been an effective empirical approach to head injury and the headaches that often accompany them. ", "Earliest Animal Cranial Surgery: From Cow to Man in the Neolithic", "Cranioplasty in the Muisca Confederation (Spanish)", "Dental Mutilation, Trephination, and Cranial Deformation", "Agyafúrt magyarok – Koponyalékelés a honfoglaláskorban – Sírásók naplója", Why our ancestors drilled holes in each other’s skulls, "Reprint of-Differential diagnosis: Trepanation", "A Hole in the Head: A Complete History of Trepanation", "An Interview with the Woman Who Drilled a Hole in Her Head to Open Up Her Mind", "Like a hole in the head: The return of trepanation ", "I Drilled a Hole in My Own Skull to Stay High Forever", Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (2000), "Hole in the Head" – documentary on trepanation, Skeptic's Dictionary entry about Trepanation, Interview with self-trepanner Heather Perry, Misinformation related to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience, List of topics characterized as pseudoscience, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trepanning&oldid=981315572, Articles containing Ancient Greek (to 1453)-language text, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2013, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2014, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2007, Articles with unsourced statements from October 2016, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 1 October 2020, at 15:39.
The Hippocratic doctors believed that stagnant blood (like stagnant water) was bad. [17] The hair may or may not have been shaved depending upon the site of the operation. Since they presumably had no notion of intracerebral pressure, why did they want the blood to run out? You consent to our cookies if you continue to use our website. Similar to bloodletting, trepanation was carried out for both medical reasons and mystical practice. Trepanation is the ancient practice of drilling a hole in the skull. A survey of trepanation, or trephination, the oldest surgical procedure known to humanity. Cao Cao screamed and awoke, his head throbbing unbearably. The fourth method, the use of a circular trephine or crown saw, may have developed out of the third. [8] Many prehistoric and premodern patients had signs of their skull structure healing, suggesting that many of those subjected to the surgery survived. Cao Cao was commander of the Han forces and posthumously Emperor of the Wei dynasty, and Hua Tuo was (and still is) a famous physician of the time. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus describes the Libyans as cauterizing the heads of their children to “prevent them being plagued in their afterlives by a flow of rheum from the head.”. In the 16th century, Fabricius ab Aquapendente invented a triangular instrument for boring holes in the skull. Aside from the racism characteristic of the time, the skepticism was fueled by the fact that in the very best hospitals of the day, the survival rate from trephining (and many other operations) rarely reached 10 percent, and thus the operation was viewed as one of the most perilous surgical procedures. Trepanation is a treatment used for epidural and subdural hematomas, and surgical access for certain other neurosurgical procedures, such as intracranial pressure monitoring. 150), one of the most famous Greek clinicians, and lasted into the 18th century. The main pieces of archaeological evidence are in the forms of cave paintings and human remains. . The earliest detailed account of trephining is in the Hippocratic corpus, the first large body of Western scientific or medical writing that has survived.