Surgery and Superstition

Abstract

TO those unversed in the history of surgery it may come as a surprise that many of the appliances commonly regarded as the inventions of yesterday, are but the perfected forms of implements long in use. It is astonishing to find amongst the small bronzes of the National Museum at Naples, bistouries, forceps, cupping-vessels, trochars for tapping, bi-valvular and tri-valvular specula, an elevator for raising depressed portions of the skull, and other, instruments of advanced construction which differ but little from their modern congeners. The invention of such instruments, and the skill displayed in their construction, presupposes a long period of surgical practice. We find, accordingly, that four hundred years before our era, Hippocrates was performing numerous operations bold to the verge of recklessness. Thus he was accustomed to employ the trepan not only in depression of the skull or for similar accidents, but also in cases of headache and other affections to which, according to our ideas, the process was singularly inapplicable. Strangely enough, the Montenegrins are, or recently were, accustomed to get themselves trepanned for similar trifling ailments, and it is probable that in both instances the procedure was but the surviving custom of primeval ages. That such operations were then performed Dr. Robert Munro, in his admirable article upon prehistoric trepanning in the February number of the Fortnightly Review, conclusively shows. His paper records a strange blending of the sciences of mHicine and theology in their initial stages; for, whilst he makes it clear that during the neolithic period a surgical operation was practised (chiefly on children) which consisted in making an opening through the skull for the treatment of certain internal maladies, he renders it equally evident that the skulls of those individuals who survived the ordeal were considered as possessed of particular mystic properties. And he shows that when such individuals died fragments were often cut from their skulls, which were used as amulets, a preference being given to such as were cut from the margin of the cicatrised opening. The discovery arose as follows. In the year 1873 Dr. Prunieres exhibited to the French Association for the Advancement of Science an oval cut from a human parietal bone, which-he had discovered in a dolmen near Marvejols, embedded in a. skull to which it had not originally belonged. His suggestion that it was an amulet was confirmed on the discovery of similar fragments of bone grooved or perforated to facilitate suspension. When Dr. Prunieres's collection was examined by Dr. Paul. Broca he pointed out that that portion of the margin of the bone which had been described as “polished” owed its texture to cicatricial deposits in the living body, and that, where these were wanting, death had ensued before the pathological action was set up, or the operation had been post mortem.