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posted by mrpg on Sunday June 10 2018, @08:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the trepanation++ dept.

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666

[...] After all, who needs a hole in the head? Yet for thousands of years, trepanation -- the act of scraping, cutting, or drilling an opening into the cranium -- was practiced around the world, primarily to treat head trauma, but possibly to quell headaches, seizures and mental illnesses, or even to expel perceived demons.

[...] "In Incan times, the mortality rate was between 17 and 25 percent, and during the Civil War, it was between 46 and 56 percent. That's a big difference. The question is how did the ancient Peruvian surgeons have outcomes that far surpassed those of surgeons during the American Civil War?"

[...] Whatever their methods, ancient Peruvians had plenty of practice. More than 800 prehistoric skulls with evidence of trepanation -- at least one but as many as seven telltale holes -- have been found in the coastal regions and the Andean highlands of Peru, the earliest dating back to about 400 B.C. That's more than the combined total number of prehistoric trepanned skulls found in the rest of the world.

Source: Remarkable skill of ancient Peru's cranial surgeons


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Sunday June 10 2018, @10:36PM (12 children)

    by Gaaark (41) on Sunday June 10 2018, @10:36PM (#691195) Journal

    How do they know the mortality rate of the surgical procedures?
    17-25%
    They don't for sure know how the pyramids were built, but they know the mortality rate in the Incan empire?

    They must SURELY know who Jack the Ripper was, then...that time is much nearer the Incan times.

    "This kids about to die and we wouldn't want our good mortality rate to rise, so SACRIFICE AWAY! If she becomes a statistic of the ritual sacrifice, she can't become a statistic against the surgeon.
    There.... yes....that fixes the whole thing. We'll show those modern people....muahahahaha!"

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:41PM (6 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:41PM (#691209) Journal

    I see you've finally started to grow a healthy skepticism bone.
    Good On Ya.

    Their head surgeries were performed mostly on crazy people, for which they could find no other cure, but who were otherwise healthy.
    Civil War surgeries were to remove bullets.

    Not the same thing.

    Their statistics came from modern grave robbers, and such. We can't even find all the graves in the Jungle.
    We measure their success by the degree of healing. We don't have a clue about their rate of curing crazy.

    Civil War statistics came from medical records. We know pretty much where those graves are, but we resist digging them up.`If the survivors went home drooling, it was still a success.

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    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:54PM (1 child)

      by Gaaark (41) on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:54PM (#691215) Journal

      I'm also wondering: did they know "wash your hands" worked better than "Next! No...the blood and gore on my hands will be just fine inside this next body"

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      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Monday June 11 2018, @08:48AM

        by pTamok (3042) on Monday June 11 2018, @08:48AM (#691319)

        It took a while.

        Read about the sad story of Ignaz Semmelweis [wikipedia.org], the Austrian physician who determined that if the attending physician washed his hands before attending to a women in childbirth, the woman was significantly less likely to die of puerperal fever. He was ignored. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Senior) [wikipedia.org] had observed the connection between contact with the physician and puerperal fever, but offered rather impractical advice "...he insisted that a physician in whose practice even one case of puerperal fever had occurred, had a moral obligation to purify his instruments, burn the clothing he had worn while assisting in the fatal delivery, and cease obstetric practice for a period of at least six months."
        Preventing sepsis in wounds only really became accepted practice after Joseph Lister's work [wikipedia.org]. There's a readable, more in-depth history written in 1964 (hyperbaric oxygen therapy hasn't fulfilled what appeared to be its early promise) here: The Lister Lecture,1964: Wound Sepsis - From Carbolic Acid to Hyperbaric Oxygen [nih.gov] and here: Listerism, its Decline and its Persistence: the Introduction of aseptic surgical Techniques in three British Teaching Hospitals, 1890-99 [nih.gov]

        Evidence from the three hospitals suggests that the date of a surgeon's training was a more important determinant of a surgeon's attitude to asepsis than where it occurred. Thus Ogston and Butlin, who were born in the mid-1840s, moved slowly and cautiously in their adoption of elements of asepsis. Their initial training in surgery was in the pre-antiseptic era. Cripps and Clutton were both born in 1850 and received their basic training some years after the introduction of antisepsis. Their adoption of asepsis appears to have been quiet and painless. Lockwood was born in 1856, and, although eventually practising along mixed antiseptic/aseptic lines, promoted asepsis enthusiastically via bacteriology. His early medical education predated Koch's work. Wallace and Gray were born in 1869 and 1870 respectively. Trained in schools with committed antisepticians and where bacteriology was taught enthusiastically, they were active proponents and propagandists of aseptic surgery qua surgeons.'03 These chronologies support the notion that the career development of a surgeon at this time could without difficulty support one major change in practice, but not two. An analogy can be drawn with the economist's hypothesis of the "disadvantage of an early start", which suggests that old capital embodying old methods hinders the adoption of new methods, and, paradoxically, having it is worse than having none at all.

    • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday June 11 2018, @01:51AM (3 children)

      by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 11 2018, @01:51AM (#691248) Journal

      between 17 and 25 percent

      Their statistics came from modern grave robbers

      I am sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the mortality rate of those patients recovered by grave robbers closer to 100%?

      • (Score: 2) by lentilla on Monday June 11 2018, @05:07AM

        by lentilla (1770) on Monday June 11 2018, @05:07AM (#691291)

        isn't the mortality rate of those patients recovered by grave robbers closer to 100%

        Sometimes more - especially when the graves were protected by fancy booby traps!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @02:35PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 11 2018, @02:35PM (#691403)

        They probably look for signs of healing of the skull. If there is significant healing, the patient probably survived the trepanation, if not, the patient died shortly after the trepanation (not sure whether they can infer that cause of death was the procedure itself).

        • (Score: 2) by requerdanos on Monday June 11 2018, @02:52PM

          by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 11 2018, @02:52PM (#691418) Journal

          signs of healing of the skull...: if not, the patient died shortly after the trepanation
          (not sure whether they can infer that cause of death was the procedure itself).

          Well, thinking on this, even if 50% of those found with fresh skull ventilation died from an unrelated cause such as being sacrificed in a religious ritual or from an ASW/PDT (arrow shot wound/poison dart targeting), that would mean that the mortality rate from the cranial breezeway fitting procedures was only half what it appears (~8 to 13 percent).

          I don't, however, think that it's such a bad inference upon finding a body with nice sharp entrance wounds to the head to conclude a high likelihood that they were involved in some way with the demise of the departed.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by HiThere on Monday June 11 2018, @12:01AM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 11 2018, @12:01AM (#691221) Journal

    This is usually determined in archaeological finds by whether the bones started to heal. I haven't read this particular article, but I'd assume that was the practice in this study.

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    • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday June 11 2018, @12:42AM

      by Gaaark (41) on Monday June 11 2018, @12:42AM (#691232) Journal

      Ay, makes sense. Thanks!

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    • (Score: 2) by qzm on Monday June 11 2018, @05:53AM

      by qzm (3260) on Monday June 11 2018, @05:53AM (#691294)

      Perhaps you can also comment on why the study is comparing what are almost certainly severe trauma patients (civil war cases) with that are most likely religious/psychological patients (peru) who were most likely in otherwise good health?

      My assumption is that they wanted to push some preconception about 'wow look at those amazing ancients!'

  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday June 11 2018, @09:19AM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday June 11 2018, @09:19AM (#691324) Journal

    Bone heals and remodels at a reasonably well quantified rate as long as the person is alive. By examining the edges of the hole it is possible to come up with a reasonable estimate of how long the person lived after the hole was made.

  • (Score: 1) by Muad'Dave on Monday June 11 2018, @12:12PM

    by Muad'Dave (1413) on Monday June 11 2018, @12:12PM (#691362)

    I didn't RTFA, but I assume you could at least get a decent idea of the mortality rate by comparing skulls with trepanation holes with no bone regrowth at the margins (died) vs those that did (survived some amount of time).