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[...] 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
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday June 10 2018, @11:50PM (2 children)
Could it just be that they had a lot more "volunteers" (or victims) to practice their trepanation on? Lots of human sacrifice -- willing and unwilling, prisoners of war and all kinds of unseemly people that probably didn't mind terribly to die for their Gods (or had a choice). I guess they could have also just practiced the old scientific method of erasing all their failures from history. The once where it succeeded and the patient survived was left alone as successes, those are the skulls found. The not so lucky patients went on the refuse pile somewhere -- or since they where clearly possessed by demons met some other untimely skull crushing fate.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday June 11 2018, @02:14AM (1 child)
I think Civil War surgeons got all the practice they could handle...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday June 11 2018, @11:46AM
As someone else already noticed, drilling a hole in their skull during or just after battle when you have a pile of patients isn't really the same as being able to take your time. So conditions probably do matter.