Opening the head, or how to evict demons

Skull trepanation has been practiced by humans for thousands of years. For medical and magical reasons. Ancient patients often survived this dangerous procedure. Later, it was both better and worse.

Trepanned skull — 3300 BC — [Photo: Daderot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

In 2018, the journal World Neurosurgery published an article showing that trepanations by Inca surgeons were successful in up to 90% of patients. Evidence of wound healing, and thus life after the procedure, is the marked smoothing of bone around the cut holes. American medical scientist David Kushner, anthropologist John Verano and bioarchaeologist Anne Titelbaum examined 800 trepanated skulls from Peru, dating from the late 5th century BC to the 16th century, and noticed some regularities. Among them, there were only 19 belonging to children and women, suggesting that the procedure was mainly performed on men, perhaps to save their lives after injuries to their skull bones or to relieve some ailment thought to have originated in the head. That’s not all. It was shown that initially only 40% of those operated on survived, and after some time the effectiveness of the procedure increased by 50%, as if the medics had learned from their mistakes.

Although cultures changed over 1,500 years, and multiple skull operations (the record holder underwent it 7 times) were performed using different techniques, the medical tradition had to be passed on. It was also…