The ancient art of trepanation - A Greek bronze age 'hole in the skull'

摘要

The surgical art of drilling a hole in the head, that is, a skull trepanation, is clearly an ancient one. Thanks to a number of diligent scholars from around the world, a number of case reports have become available detailing trepanations now in virtually all parts of the world. What makes this case so interesting is that it comes from the birthplace of medicine for the western world. Equally interesting is the fact that this case has been dated to 1900 bc, some 1500 hundred years before the influential school of Hippocratic medicine (Figure 1). To Hippocrates and his followers we owe the first written guidelines for operations on the brain and skull. Writers within this school clearly detailed the good and the bad of trepanning a skull and clearly recognized the risks. In reviewing the cases of trepanation done in early Greece, the survival rates are impressively good with what looks to be mortality less than 1%, a number far better that what was achievable in the United States as recently as a hundred years ago.