Okay, OUCH. Bronze Age skull from Jericho, Palestine, 2200-2000
Credit: Science Museum, London.
Trepanning is the oldest known surgical intervention in human history. Derived from the Ancient Greek for “drill”, this stomach-churning procedure involved poking or scraping a hole into a lucky recipient’s head. Archaeologists have excavated hole-bearing skulls dating from at least the Neolithic period, which means that starting around 10,000 years ago, our ancestors were legit poking each other’s brains. Many of these wounds show evidence of healing, which means the recipient lived.
Sometimes this was done for reasons that we today would consider acceptable, even neccesary. A brain bleed, or a head injury. Other times, ancient surgeons performed trepanation for religious, spiritual, or ill-advised mental health goals.
Pro tip: don’t let a guy with a funnel hat drill into your brain. Bosch, Hieronymus, The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, 1501-5, Museo Del Prado, Spain
I first encountered trepanning in Philip Pullman‘s marvelous His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy. In the first installment of that series, The Golden Compass, one character encounters an ethnic group with trepaned skulls. Those with these holes were believed to communicate directly with the Gods. In the third installment, The Subtle Knife, the main character visits a (real!) exhibit of trepaned skulls at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, and wonders if these humans undertook the procedure for the same reason.
Pullman used trepanning to reflect on several themes: spirituality, the nature of the afterlife, our desperate desire for enlightenment. As I am a huge Pullman fan, trepanning was in my head when I wrote THE GARBAGE MAN (haha – see what I did there??). But I perhaps see a slightly different angle than Pullman. While it plays a minor role in the book – one character mentions it briefly to another — I see it as a symbol of how, throughout time, humans have forever conceptualized the brain as a source and repository of magic. Yes, magic. Don’t believe me? Consider that here we are, thousands of years later, and we STILL haven’t cracked the code of the squiggly stuff inside our heads:
– Consciousness: Why does it exist? What is it even, exactly? How does the brain actually create consciousness?
– Memory: How do memories get stored? Where? In what format? What “decides” what gets remembered? Forgotten?
– Learning and Intelligence: What is the actual neural pathway for learning? For intelligence? How and where does “knoweldge” get stored? What is the neurological basis for why some people can “learn” certain subjects and not others?
– Sleep: Why do we sleep? How did it evolve? Isn’t is, basically, an evolutionary disadvantage? If so, why does it exist? If not, what’s the benefit?
– Personality: Don’t even get me started!
I could go on and on. Simply put – the human brain is MAGIC. Actual, real life magic. And it’s all in your head! And mine too! And I guess that’s one of the themes of THE GARBAGE MAN.
Oh, and for those wondering, doctors still do trepanning today. But now they have a fancy name for it: craniotomy.
Next month: Snippet time! I’ll be sharing my hardest-to-delete chapter from THE GARBAGE MAN. Deleting this scene was heart-wrenching, but it was the right choice. I’ll talk about why.