Biblical city yields unusual case of 3,500-year-old head surgery

[Jilly_in_VA]

Archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Megiddo in modern-day Israel have discovered a window into medicine’s ancient past: the 3,500-year-old bones of two brothers, both bearing signs of an infectious disease, and one scarred from cranial surgery that may have been an attempt to treat the illness.

A recent paper in the journal PLOS ONE describes the discovery, which is one of the region’s earliest examples of a widely practiced type of surgery that creates an opening in the skull. The work should help scientists and anthropologists understand how surgeries developed and became more effective over time.

The procedure, known as cranial trephination, was performed thousands of years ago in different parts of the world, including Europe, Africa, China and South America. A 2020 paper listed trephination as one of “the first three procedures that marked the dawn of surgery,” along with circumcision and bladder stone removal.

Versions of the procedure, called either a craniotomy or craniectomy, are still practiced today “as emergency treatment for brain swelling, bleeding, as well as for surgeries to treat epilepsy and to remove some tumors,” said John Verano, a professor of anthropology at Tulane University, who described the new paper as an interesting case report.

https://wapo.st/3yEicGc

Of course this type of head surgery is even older, nonetheless a fascinating article. No paywall.

[Warpy]

1. Cranial surgery was one of the common ones in prehistory

and a lot of people survived it, many showing the signs of years of healing around the drill hole.

I think a lot of it was an attempt to treat migraine. I've had a lot of bad ones where I'd have gone for it, just on the off chance it would relieve some of the pressure and let the pain out through the hole, such is the nature of migraine. They suck and opiates make mine worse, not better. When opiates failed back then, they probably brought out the drills. I just wonder if it worked.

We don't know how precise their knowledge of anatomy was back then or how sophisticated their medical knowledge, so much has been lost through millennia of empire building and organized warfare, not to mention destruction of ancient texts by waves of new religions. Oetzi, the man found preserved in Alpine ice, has tats that suspiciously resemble acupuncture points, and we know he suffered from Lyme disease and arthritis.

Speculation is all we've got to work with after all this time, and mine says the treatment was for migraine. I don't know if they were far enough advanced to realize epilepsy was in the brain or how to differentiate tumors from normal tissue or have the skill to remove them. Migraines are an obvious choice.

[Ziggysmom]

2. As a fellow migraine sufferer for over 50 years, I share your opinion. Have you read about

Amanda Fielding, who in the 70s was famously filmed performing self-trepanation? She is also involved with promoting psychedelics for treating mental conditions as well as chronic headache, quite a fascinating woman.

[Warpy]

3. My mother noticed I was getting them when I was four

when I'd go quiet and she'd find me crouched in back of the sofa, where it was dark and noise was muffled. I inherited them from my dad's side of the family, lucky me. Half my cousins lucked out, too.

I'm sorry you're a fellow migraineur. They're not fatal, but sometimes you wish they were so they'd be over.

I vaguely remember Fielding. I thought she was a space cadet, but it turns out a few of her ideas were sound. Besides, there have been days when I've eyed the electric drill and wondered which bit I should use for my own operation.

I can't find it now, but there was an article a few years ago about a Siberian trepanation center in prehistory. The archaeologist wondered why so many skulls had the holes in the same place, a dangerous place to put them since it was adjacent to a major artery. I understood perfectly, it was the main place I've wanted a hole in my own head to relieve the pressure.

Fortunately, mine have decreased with age and I can go weeks without one.