But that is not the only purpose of this post, for she also idly commented that "On mornings like these, I wonder what the hell happened to trepanation." Ah, I'm so very glad you asked! I was intrigued by this question, and decided to waste a little time sniffing out trepanation (or trepanning) on the intertubes. There is, as usual, an embarrassment of riches when it comes to searching the world wide web, so I've only included some choice morsels, and links for further exploration below.
In 1978, a Briton named Amanda Fielding ran for Parliament in Chelsea and received 40 votes. Her platform promised that the National Health Service would offer free trepanation services to all and sundry. Yes, that's trepanation:
Most politicians assume their constituents have holes in their heads, but it is a true rara avis who promises to put one there for you. But it's only fair, I suppose, since Ms. Fielding had performed her own craniotomy with a dental drill and some local anesthetic. She decided to air out her cerebrum under the tutelage of Bart Huges, a Dutch almost-doctor who was denied his MD either for advocating marijuana use or for failing his obstetrics course. Or because he's a raving lunatic. Known as "the father of modern trepanation," Huges is the author of a number of works, including an eight-foot scroll articulating his view that people who drill holes in their skulls are representatives of the next stage in human evolution, or homo sapiens correctus. It should be unsurprising that most of his research seems to have involved dropping acid and drilling into his own skull. Trepanation is, for Huges and his followers, merely the next step in mind-expansion, following LSD and presumably preceding the injection of reindeer urine into your eyeballs. "Gravity," says Huges, "brings you down," so he used to stand on his head to try and defeat it.Yeah.
So anyway, poking holes in your cranium has a long history, and was generally used to help shamans communicate with the spirit world, or to drive out the evil spirits that inhabited people's heads. Want to chat with the ancestors? Pop! Hallucinating? Pop! Headaches? Pop! Speaking against the priesthood? Pop!
Well, I suppose "pop" is not quite the correct onomatopoeia. Another acolyte of Huges' by the name of Joseph Mellen (whose cooperative acid trips and skull-drilling with Amanda Fielding would lead to their eventual marriage and spawning of offspring), described his own experience thus:
"After some time there was an ominous-sounding shlurp and the sound of bubbling… It sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed out."OK, if the idea of "an ominous-sounding schlurp" coming from inside your bloody skull isn't enough to make you question the wisdom of this procedure, then you're a stouter (and stupider) man than I, Gunga Din.
All of this is not to say that cranial aeration doesn't have its place in the realm of legitimate medical procedures. Often, to relieve intracranial pressure or hematoma, it is necessary to remove a piece of the skull. However, there's a vast gulf between a trained surgeon doing so in order to save a patient's life and a drug-addled guru helping his disciples grind holes in their foreheads in quest of "expanded consciousness."
So that, then, is what the hell happened to trepanation. Next time you're wishing you could release those migranous miasmas, remember that a vote for Fielding is a vote for a dental drill in every home.
(For more insight into the people who drill for gray matter, check out "Lunch With Heather Perry" at Neurophilosophy, "trepanation" at The Skeptic's Dictionary, and "Like a Hole in the Head" from Cabinet Magazine.)
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