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Surgery:
(The ancient knowledge of Surgery)
On prehistoric brain surgery anatomist Professor Kappers reminisced, "It
is even probable that the trephine holes found in prehistoric skulls 50,000
years old were made for curative purposes".
(Ref:
http://www.time.com )
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Featured Items
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Trepanning
(Cranial surgery)
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Prehistoric Dentistry.
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In ancient Egyptian medicine the skills and
knowledge of doctors developed from the legacy of the prehistoric
age. Doctors in ancient Egypt were usually also priests, and
religious rituals continued to be used alongside rational
treatments as both were believed necessary for a cure. Important
deities invoked in medicine included Imhotep, the god of healing,
who was formerly doctor to Pharaoh Zoser in the 3rd millennium
BC, and Thoth, god of wisdom and learning.
A system of medical training was established in the temples and a
written language developed using hieroglyphics. Medical treatments
were recorded on papyri such as the Papyrus Ebers and the
Papyrus Edwin Smith. The standard work used by Egyptian
doctors was the Book of Thoth, a collection of ritual and
rational treatments. The religious practice of mummification, in
which the organs of the body were removed, helped Egyptian doctors
to gain an understanding of human anatomy, although dissection was
banned for religious reasons. However, Egyptian doctors began to
practise basic surgery such as the removal of growths on the skin
or cataracts from the eyes. Egyptian doctors believed that illness
was often caused by the body's channels becoming blocked because
of rotting food in the stomach, a practical theory based on their
observation of the River Nile. Patients affected were given
emetics to make them vomit or laxatives to loosen their bowels and
clear the blockage.
Ref:
http://encyclopedia.farlex.com
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Cranial Surgery (Trepanning):
Trepanation is perhaps the oldest surgical procedure for which there
is evidence, and in some areas may have been quite widespread.
An ancient site in Ishtikunuy, located near Lake Sevan,
in Armenia yielded two particular skulls from approx' 2,000BC that showed evidence of
head surgery. The first was he skull of a woman with a head injury which
made a hole a quarter of an inch wide. A plug of animal bone had been
inserted in its place. The fact that the woman survived was evident from the
cranial growth around the plug before she died. The second skull as another
woman, who had had a blunt object that had splintered the inner layers of
the cranial bone. The 'Surgeon' cut a larger hole around the puncture and
removed the splinters. Evidence shows that she survived another 15 years.
Obsidian razors have been found at the site that are still sharp enough to
be used today. (Ref: 9)
The well-preserved
skull of Gadevang Man, a prehistoric 'bog body', dated 480-60 BC, found
in Denmark. The skull shows signs of surgical trepanning.
The precise cuts that can be seen on some of the
trephined skulls, and the re-growth of the bone (which proves that the
patient/victim survived the operation), do indicate that prehistoric
people had the ability and knowledge to be
successful surgeons.
Out of 120 prehistoric skulls found at one burial
site in France dated to 6500 BC, 40 had trepanation holes. Surprisingly,
many prehistoric and pre-modern patients had signs of their skull
structure healing; suggesting that many of those that proceeded with the
surgery survived their operation
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanation
Archeologists have found
trepanned skulls dating from the late Neolithic, some 5,000 years
ago. Now a team of French and German researchers has suggested
that the procedure goes back even further, to at least 7,000 years
ago.
The evidence comes from the French village of Ensisheim. To date,
archeologists there have unearthed 45 graves containing 47
individuals. One grave held the remains of a 50-year-old man who
had two holes in his skull. Both holes were remarkably free of
surrounding cracks and were clearly the result of surgery, not
violence. One hole, in the frontal lobe, is about 2.5 inches wide;
the second, at the top of the skull, is about an inch wider.
Most questionable trepanations are rather small, and with some you
cannot tell the shape of the original hole that was made within
the skull, or whether it was a fracture, says archeologist Sandra
Pichler of Freiburg University in Germany, a member of the team.
But in our case you can still see the very straight, slanting
edges of the larger trepanation, and this is artificial. There is
no natural explanation for a hole like that.
Both holes had time to heal before the man died--the smaller hole
is completely covered over with a thin layer of bone; the larger
is roughly two-thirds covered--and neither shows signs of
infection. So they must have had a very good surgeon, and there
must have been some way or another of avoiding infection, Pichler
says. Pichler and her colleagues estimate that it would take at
least six months, and perhaps as much as two years, for such
extensive healing. Since the two holes did not heal to the same
degree, it’s likely they were made during two separate operations.
The team doesn’t know why the man was operated on. Nor can they be
sure exactly how the trepanations were performed, although the cut
marks indicate that the bone was removed by a mixture of cutting
and scraping. Stone Age tools were certainly up to the task: flint
knives are actually sharper than modern scalpels.
The trepanations were done so perfectly that this can’t be the
oldest one, Pichler says. They must have practiced somehow, and
the knowledge of how to do this kind of operation must have been
passed down, Pichler says. The fact that there are two
trepanations is further corroboration: if there had been just one,
you could say that they were lucky. But if you survived two such
operations, your surgeon must have known what he was doing.
Ref:
http://discovermagazine.com
 Trepanation
in the Indus Valley culture: The skull on the right was found in a
Harrapan setting, circa 4,000 B.P. The le ink below leads to
fascinating article describing a neolithic skeleton with multiple-trepanated
skull found in Kashmir, the archaeological circumstances of the find,
the dating, the background, the skeletal evidence, the details of the
trepanation and possible affiliations to the Indus civilization. It
speculates briefly about possible medical grounds for the surgery.
Ref:
http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/sankhyan/burzahom.htm
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Open Heart Surgery.
The Soviet Academy of Sciences
announced in 1969 that a number of ancient skeletons, found in central Asia showed
signs of surgery having been performed in the area of the heart. Every
feature corresponded to what today is called a 'Cardiac Window', enabling
surgeons to perform open heart surgery. (9)
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Dentistry.
(Extract from 'THE TIMES', Thurs April 12th 2001)...
Prehistoric dentists may have been using stone drills to treat tooth decay
up to 9,000 years ago, a team of archaeologists has discovered.
Excavations at a site in Pakistan have unearthed skulls containing teeth
dotted with tiny, perfectly round holes. Under an electron microscope,
they revealed a pattern of concentric grooves, that were almost certainly
formed by the circular motion of a drill with a stone bit.
The
discovery, which was made at an archaeological dig in Mehrgarh, in
Baluchistan Province, offers the earliest evidence of human dentistry.
The
excavated village belonged to a civilisation that thrived between 8,000and
9,000 years ago, whose members cultivated crops and made jewellery from
shells, amethyst and turquoise.
Andrea
Cucina, of the University of Missouri-Columbia, who found the molars with
telltale marks, said: “At this point we can’t be certain, but it is very
tantalising to think they had such knowledge of health and cavities and
medicine to do this”.
Dr
Cucina, whose research is reported in New Scientist magazine, said the
holes would probably have been filled with some sort of medicinal herb to
treat tooth decay. Any filling would long ago have decomposed.
The
dental discovery was made while Dr Cucina was washing teeth from the
Mehrgarhing and spotted the tiny hole in the biting surface of a molar.
The hole was too perfectly round to have been caused by bacteria and the
tooth had been found in a jawbone, ruling out the possibility that it had
been pierced to be strung on to a necklace.
The Top
of the hole was rounded from chewing, suggesting that it was made while
the owner was still alive.
MSNBC (2006) - Proving
prehistoric man’s ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict
excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates
back 9,000 years.
Primitive dentists
drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients
between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday’s issue of the
journal Nature reports.
Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found
in a Pakistan graveyard.
That means dentistry is
at least 4,000 years older than first thought — and far older than the
useful invention of anesthesia.
Ref:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12168308/
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