Ever-rising healthcare prices are the subject of much criticism nowadays. However, when living in a society where medical amenities are readily available, the importance of such facilities is sometimes forgotten. By contrast, people from earlier eras did not have access to the convenient medical systems of contemporary time periods. So, then, what did our ancestors do to solve the bodily problems that arose from time to time? Were they left to merely cross their fingers and hope for the best?
While scientific discoveries have shown us that rudimentary forms of medical practices did exist in earlier societies, they have generally been looked upon as a barbaric and mostly ineffective affair. Having lived in a more primitive society with limited scientific knowledge about the human anatomy and the cause of diseases, the expectation is that medical diagnosis and treatment in this age were a far cry from the advanced knowledge and tools that characterize our current medical abilities.
Take trepanation, for instance. This practice, which is the oldest human operation that archeologists have found fossil evidence for, is a surgical procedure in which a hole is scraped or drilled into the human skull. Practiced as early as 5000 BC and continued into the Middle Ages – even up to Renaissance for some cultures – this surgical procedure has for a long time been viewed as an uncivilized custom possibly affiliated with ceremonial purposes.
This initial interpretation of the practice does seem to make sense. At first glance, trepanation seems more like an ancient torture method than a medical operation; after all, what doctor in his right mind would present a solution of drilling a hole in your skull for some, say, headache symptoms? An analysis of trepanation holes over a data set of multiple skulls, however, has shown that there is a consistent pattern in the placement of trepanation holes that suggests that their purpose went behind that of spiritual or religious motivations.
Archeologists found in 1997 and 2011 a mass of trepanated skulls distributed among multiple grave sites, with many of the individuals buried in close proximity to each other. While finding multiple human remains on the same site was not a rare happening, the fact that many of them had been trepanated was. What was even more remarkable was that all of these trepanation holes had been made just above the obelion, a particular pressure point on the skull. The consistent nature of the trepanation process and the fact that creating an opening through the obelion, which is located above a major convergence point of blood vessels in the brain, was very risky and could possibly entail death, suggested that the trepanation procedures that had been performed on these individuals would likely have had more significance than religious reasons.
Perhaps in some cultures trepanation could have been part of a ceremonial ritual of some sort – and this idea is supported by the few trepanation holes found in skulls without any signs of injury or illness – but this is likely not the case for all trepanation practices, as most trepanated skulls show some sign of physical injury or hint at possible neurological diseases that could have been the reason for the trepanation procedure.
While it is known that trepanation was practiced throughout North and South America, Africa, and parts of Eurasia, the best preserved trependated human remains have been found almost exclusively in Russia. This limited pool of quality data has deterred substantial conclusions from being drawn from the investigations, although further research is being conducted. However, signs of physical and neurological trauma in most trepanated subjects, coupled with the fact that these patients were able to live for a good few years following their operations, show us that there must have been some kind of medical issues that ancient doctors had been trying to solve with trepanation––and whatever the problem was, they survived it.
It is somewhat startling to think that earlier surgical interventions were much more advanced than we might have initially expected. Drilling a hole in your skull for a medical purpose, although practiced from time to time in the modern age as well, is very risky and frankly terrifying. Even without the carved portion of the skull being filled in with an artificial replacement, the aforementioned fossils show that the trepanation surgeries performed on them were largely successful, a reflection of the unexpectedly advanced anatomical knowledge these earlier doctors possessed.
Modern medical treatment is inarguably expensive, and generally may be an absolute pain. Nevertheless, it is safe to assume that most people are thankful that the practice of trepanation has been replaced by the surgical advances of today.
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