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Remarkable Skill of Ancient Peru's Cranial Surgeons

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

MrPlow writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:Histroy facts... (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.

  Parent

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