Forensic Friday: Trepanation (or trepanning) is a surgical intervention in which a hole is drilled or scraped into the human cranium. The hole is made to expose the dura mater as a way to treat intracranial diseases, or to release pressure.
Image Source: Rama. Trepanated skull of a woman-P4140363-black. Wikimedia Commons.
Trepanation is one of the oldest surgical procedures with archaeological evidence.
Many prehistoric, and premodern patients had signs of bone healing, this means that many of these patients survived the surgery. Most of the crania with trepanation belong to adult males, but women and children also had the procedure done. In the New World, trepanation is commonly found among the Andean civilizations, and also in Mesoamerica.
Image Source: Wolfgang Sauber. Monte Albán - Trepanierter Schädel 2. Wikimedia Commons.
In a cramped stone grave beneath the medieval town of Imola, Italy, a 1,300-year-old woman lies dead with a hole in her skull and a fetus between her legs.
The fetus, now just a collection of tiny bones trailing below the mother’s skeletal pelvis, was likely delivered in the grave through a phenomenon called “coffin birth” — essentially, when an unborn child is forced out of its mother’s womb by posthumous gases after both mother and child have died.
It’s a rare sight in archaeology — but rarer still might be the peculiar circular wound bored into the mother’s skull.
Archaeologists from the University of Ferrara and University of Bologna attempted to unwind the mystery of this mother’s and child’s deaths in a new study published in the May 2018 issue of the journal World Neurosurgery. According to the researchers, these remarkable skeletal remains may present a rare Middle Ages example of a primitive brain-surgery technique called trepanation. This procedure involved drilling or scraping a hole into the patient’s skull to relieve pressure and (theoretically) a whole host of medical ailments. In this case, sadly, that relief may not have been enough. Read more.
