How Trepanation Worked

One of the oldest medical procedures in human history is also one of the riskiest. For thousands of years humans carried a type of proto brain surgery where a hole would be cut into the skull. And they were pretty good at it too.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, and Jerry's even here,
which means this is a bona fide bonafid they shut

(00:21):
your mouth episode of Stuff you should Know, right until
Jerry's like, who go to Google? You know, I wasn't
gonna outer like that, but you did, so She'll probably
end up being sore at me about it, though. We're
all busy these days. Seriously, life man, lifetime's a hundred, right, Yeah,
I mean thirteen years in and we're still working out

(00:42):
technical difficulties. I know, I know, but we're working it out.
We're working it out. Chuck like a brilliant scientists, one
of my all time favorites and a frequent guest star
of the show in the early years. Paul Baroka, Yeah,
it's been a while. Huh Yeah, Like he worked out
a little puzzle that he had handed to him almost
literally in the eighteen seventies. That's right. This is one

(01:07):
of those where I was positive we had covered it before.
Oh really, no, I knew, I knew four a fact
we had and I'll explain why in a minute. I'll explain.
Did it had to be on an Internet roundup or something?
I don't think so. I know we talked about the
movie Pie when he drilled a hole in his head.
I forgot about that. Uh. I just can't remember what

(01:30):
episode or what it what format it was? Maybe or right,
maybe it was an Internet round up, because I could
see us talking about that Internet group doing that kind
of stuff, the International Trepid Nation Advocacy Group. I'll bet
I even went to our Wikipedia page because they have
a place where they list things that we've redone. Oh yeah,

(01:51):
I didn't see that. Yeah. And by the way, I
wanted to put out a call if you are a
Wikipedia editor, our pages years and years years out of date.
It says that we're writers for how stuff works. We
haven't written for them in what like eight years. It's
been a little while. Yeah, so if anyone wants updated,
it's got I mean, God bless her, I miss Rebecca,

(02:12):
but it said that Rebecca is our web publisher right
a long time ago. Yeah, it has been a little while.
So anyway, if anyone feels like blowing the dust off
of that thing, well free Okay, so well, that was
a great call out, Chuck. But let's get back to
trepid nation. Okay. And like you said before we started recording,
no No, Chuck said he has no trepidation about trepid nation.

(02:35):
That was for year years. That was great though it
is definitely worth sharing terrible. But so maybe I mentioned
it before then because I always associate trepid nation with
this little second one second long snippet from those time
life Mysteries of the Unknown book ads from the and
there's like one moment where they like show somebody like

(02:58):
doing a trepid nation surgery on somebody else's head in
like a cave by torchlight. I think I remember that. Yeah,
And I was like, wait, what is that? I want
to know more about that. So this has been sitting
in our back pocket all this time, and I guess
we busted it out at least once before. It had
to have been Internet round up. It definitely wasn't an episode. Yeah,
I think you're probably right. Unless we talked about it

(03:19):
during lobotomy is I don't know, it could have been.
It could have been Chuck, because a lot of people say, well, yeah,
the lobotomy was the natural progression to um trepid trepid
nation and not really no, no, it's actually that's incredibly false.
It turns out trepid nation is maybe one of the

(03:40):
oldest medical techniques, if not the oldest medical technique we have,
aside from like slapping someone on the back when they're choking,
that might be older, but we don't have any evidence
to back that up. We actually have the evidence from
trepid nation. And to get back to Monsieur Broca um
famous for the Broker area, which is the first region

(04:02):
of the brain that demonstrated localized UM function like the
speech center is um. It produces speech, and it's the
first time we could ever say this part of the
brain is responsible for this function. And Broca was the
guy who did that. He had a skull handed to
him in the eighteen seventies and it turned out to
be an inc in skull. I couldn't find out anywhere

(04:24):
how old it was, but we can guess that by
the time Broca got his hands on it, it was
at least a couple of hundred years old, if not
more than a thousand years old. Yeah, can you imagine
the feather in your cap of you're just sitting around
with your other cohorts. You're like, I have a part
of the brain named after me, by the way, So
I don't know what you guys have done, but I

(04:45):
know they're like Paul, you in every argument with that Hi, Um,
Paul broke broke his area. It says it on his
card to Paul broke a comma broke his area. Uh yeah,
So yeah, he was obviously like, well, this is an
interesting thing because what he was looking at was a
piece of skull, what was his human skull where a

(05:07):
piece of it had been purposefully cut away and removed
remarkably well, and it actually actually started to grow back,
which indicates that whoever had this performed on them. That
means they survived and was trying to heal. Yeah, at
least for a little while. Yeah, Like it takes a

(05:27):
little time for the bone to heal around like a
skull cut away. So yeah, they had to have lived.
I think in some cases I've seen, um, when the
skull starts going back, it indicates at least a year
of survival. I was gonna ask that. So I only
saw that one or two places. I didn't see exactly, Like,
I don't know a d percent, but it seems like

(05:48):
it's it's a little while right, It's not like a
right yea. So the thing is is like Broca's sitting
here saying like, Okay, this is this is evidence of
like this is a purposeful medical procedure. I believe that
this person had what had their brain cut into to
treat some form of malady or something like that. It's

(06:09):
a proto brain surgery basically. And it was called trepi nation.
And Paul Broca went to the French Anthropological Society I think,
which he founded. Yeah, that was another thing he did,
was the first pay of the Anthropological Society. Yeah, and
they still were like, no, you got this one wrong,
Paul um. But he went to them and said as much,

(06:29):
and they're like, no, that's just not possible. And here's
the thing that stuck out to me, Chuck. It wasn't
that they were saying it's not possible that somebody could
cut into someone else's head. Because these these people, these
members of the Anthropological Society or just people in general
in France in the eighteen seventies were well aware of

(06:50):
that procedure. It had a name trepid Nation, and you
could go to the hospital and get trepanned, depending on
what kind of problem you had with your head. So
it's not like they were just totally unfamiliar with this.
They were super familiar with it. What they refused to
believe is that some other society, and non European society,
especially when removed in time, was capable of performing the

(07:13):
surgery and in performing it in a good enough way
that the person could possibly survive it. Yeah, I mean
they were like, I just I just don't know. That
sounds like they certainly weren't performing medical procedures. The Incas
weren't doing that. And he was like, I don't know,
look at that whole Yeah, it's pretty purposeful to me. Yeah,
And so what Broca figured out was he was the

(07:35):
first one to really stumble upon this evidence that this
medical procedure that they were carrying out in the hospitals
trepa nation was part of like a really ancient medical procedure,
virtually unchanged in a lot of ways, Like, yeah, the
tools that they used were kind of changed and kind
of updated, but basically the procedure they were carrying out

(07:56):
in the hospitals of France in the eighteen seventies and
elsewhere in Europe and America. It was basically the same
thing that people were doing thousands of years ago and
had been doing for thousands of years as well. Yeah,
I mean they were doing it so much. In Europe
in the eighteenth century it was known as the is
it tree pin or trip In I say trapin trip

(08:18):
in the Trepin century, or because it's us, we'll call
it the golden age of Trepa nation. Now I'm doubting myself,
and it seems like the Golden Age might have been
you know, a thousand years ago. Yeah, I think you
might be right about that too. But it's started out
as a veterinary practice. And we'll get a little bit too,
a little bit, you know, they were we'll get to

(08:40):
the famous cow later on, right, antient cow. But in
the eighteenth century they think that it started out as
a veterinary practice, correct, and then we'll get to the
ancient cow a bit later. But it extended humans after
the veterinary procedures, and you know, doctors at the time
we're like, you know, we think it's useful, we think
it hell us out with certain things that we'll get

(09:02):
to as well. But they said, it's also killing a
lot of people, and it's got a survival rate of
about ten. And here's the little like a whopper of
a detail here. The survival rate in ancient times was
really really high, Like it made the modern survival rate

(09:23):
just look embarrassingly low. It was flip whopped, really, wasn't it? Yes?
And the Golden Age, like you were mentioning, it seems
like the golden age of trepid nation occurred thousands of
years before modern medicine ever came around, and that when
modern medicine came around and kind of took over, trepid
nation really dropped the ball kind of well yeah, and

(09:45):
then you know, of course, once he finds that one skull,
other skulls start coming forward. They start walking forward and saying, hey,
check me out. I'm out here as evidence as well,
which was pretty remarkable. That's like compariously, that Mystery Science
Theater three thousand episode on the Screaming Skull. It's like

(10:06):
the villain in the in the movie is like a
skull that can move around and fly at people, kind
of like the money from uh Monty Python and the
Holy Grail, but it's a skull version of that, uh
they found or we now know that the oldest trepon
skull comes all the way back from about eight thousand

(10:26):
years ago in the Stone Age during the Meso Philic Mesolithic.
Sorry and my first and that was eight thousand years ago,
and like this is the beginnings of sort of uh,
planting things and eating vegetables and like building cities, like

(10:47):
the very beginnings of civilization basically, yeah, and we're like
cutting holes into one another's heads, and that we found
evidence of this stuff like all over the world. This
wasn't just like one one weird old city do doing this,
Like this was everywhere in places that were really removed
from one another. Like there's evidence of ancient trepid nation

(11:08):
among indigenous peoples in Canada and North America. There's the
same thing in Ukraine, North Africa, Portugal, everywhere that the Scandinavia,
the iraq Um, all over the place there there's evidence
of trapan skulls that turn up. South America is another one.
And so it just kind of goes to show you

(11:29):
either it was something that evolved independently in all these places,
or it's so ancient that it it originated somewhere and
then managed to spread out as people spread across the globe,
which is pretty interesting either way. Yeah, and it was
it like it got like really popular. This set really
got me. During the copper Age, which was just after

(11:51):
Stone Age, they found that about five to ten of
all skulls that they found from the Neolithic area where
Trapan's yeah not just yeah, like like up to ten
percent of all the skulls that have ever turned up
had holes cut into their skull. And the thing is
is like we were saying, like, if if that had
just been in, if that were the sum total of it,

(12:12):
that you know, wow, that's really interesting. People used to
cut holes in in their skulls and that was it. Um,
it would still be worth remarking remarking on, you know,
or talking about probably would have just stayed at the
Internet round up. But the reason that it's worth a
whole episode is because of that survival rate. That not
only do they cut skulls in each other's heads with

(12:34):
with rocks, actual rocks, Um, the people survived these operations
and may have actually been improved as a result of
these operations, and that it had been going on for
thousands of years and still kind of continues today. That's
what really makes the whole thing noteworthy. And when you
look back at trepid nation in like the Mesolithic and

(12:56):
Neolithic era, um, like that's part of medical history. It's
not just some weird thing that people used to do
in other cultures. Like that was the beginning of a
surgery that we still carry out today. I don't think
we can get that across enough. Yeah, there's a neuroscientist
named Charles G. Gross that put the estimate of survival

(13:16):
sometimes up to fifty And then a survey of skulls
from the Iberian Peninsula showed evidence that they had healed
or at least we're healing at that site, which means
they lived for a while. Um. Like you said, skull
just doesn't grow overnight. It takes a little while. And
as long as that blood flowing, I guess it's healing. Uh.

(13:38):
And then that actually dropped, so, like I said, that's
flip flopped from success rates, you know, thousands and thousands
of years later in Europe. Uh. And then when the
Holy Roman Empire was doing this in medieval Europe, they
weren't doing it as good. They had a higher mortality rate,
and the thinking is is because they used um knives
and then like wiped them off and then lives got

(14:00):
really dirty. Waras in the olden days they would fashion
like brand new tools out of bone and rock and stuff,
and you know they were I guess comparatively pretty sanitary. Yeah,
because if you if you nap um, you know, cut
off the face of a rock to create a new
stone tool to to perform a trepidation, that rock hasn't
been exposed to anything. It's basically sterile now because you

(14:23):
just cut off the face and now you're using it.
Whereas if you're performing surgery using the same tools and
all you're doing is washing it off, like that's just
bacterious city and it's not that hard to get a
brain infection when you cut into a skull using reusing
tools that have just been kind of washed off with
water a little bit. So yeah, that was probably a

(14:45):
really good reason why the survival rate went down. But
one of the reasons why it was so high also
earlier is because people like even back in the Mesolithic
and Neil, they seem to have understood a couple of things,
and one was you stay away from the dura mater,
which is that really hard tough, not hard, but really
tough membrane that encases the brain and the spinal cord

(15:09):
and protects it from the outside. Even if your skull
cracks open, as long as you stay away from that
and don't cut into that, your your chances of survival
are pretty high. And ancient people seem to have really
understood this. They also knew to stay away from sutures,
which is where your skull the pieces of your skull
which are not set, which are not um fused together

(15:30):
when you're born. They fuse as you grow older. The
places the lines where your skull plates formed together. Those
are called sutures, and they also need to stay away
from those as well. So apparently, if you just do
those few things and create a new stone tool every
time you perform the surgery, your your survival rates going
to go through the roof. Yeah, and you know, before

(15:50):
we get called out, maybe we shouldn't refer to those
stone tools as sterile. Maybe we should just say like
pretty clean for the time, clean enough, How about that
clean enough for rock and roles? All right, I guess
we should take a break, right set up? Yeah, I
thought so too, man, And uh, we'll come back and
try and answer the big question after this, which is

(16:10):
why the heck were they doing this? All Right, so

(16:44):
they know this was happening, they know it was working
pretty well, and that people were surviving at remarkable rates.
But the big sort of question that they had then
and that we're still trying to kind of figure out
and we don't know for sure, is like, why would
they do this to begin with? Why a day dig
into a person's head and cut out a piece of

(17:04):
their skull eight thousand years ago? Uh? And you know,
we've got some decent ideas that all makes sense to me. Yeah, um.
And the whole problem is is kind of like like
put you have to put yourself in the mentality in
the shoes in the world view of somebody who was
no shoes right right exactly. There's a huge different people

(17:27):
who are still humans. They were modern humans in every
sense of the word, aside from not living in the
modern era. Um. But they didn't have the benefit of,
you know, a general knowledge of medicine that that just
about every human alive has today just from living in
the twenty one century UM, or just kind of under
having read about something on the internet, you know, like

(17:48):
there's just so many pieces of the way we see
the world that we take for granted because it's just
there's just so many ways that we absorb information, and
there's so much information available to us that wasn't before that.
To to kind of remove yourself from that and put
yourself in the position of somebody six thousand years ago
and and to understand what they were thinking when they
were cutting into someone's head that drove that purpose, it's

(18:11):
really tough to do. But yeah, like you were saying,
there's some some researchers have come up with some pretty
good ideas, general ideas, um, broad categories that you could
probably put just about anything into. And there's actually three
researchers that are worth shouting out. There was um Lopez,
Carro and Pardin, Yes, three Spanish researchers who wrote a

(18:33):
two thousand eleven paper that, um it was a pretty
one of the better recent comprehensive looks at at trepid
nation ancient trepid nation. Yeah, so one of the reasons
and like you said, you, I mean, I don't think
it's lazy, but you could kind of slap these reasons
on anything that happened back then. Uh, one of them
was magic a religious UM like, you know, free the

(18:54):
demons from someone's head. I kind of read that as, uh,
possibly to help cure mental illness, which they were definitely
doing in Europe thousands of years later, So I don't
see why they wouldn't have maybe done the same thing.
But I mean, it's it's remarkable though, to think that
eight thousand years ago that they they knew enough or

(19:18):
we're guessing enough to know that there is even a
brain in there that was really important to the human body,
you know, calling the shots. Yeah, yeah, I mean how
they even know that, I don't know. And similarly, that
whole idea that like the third eye, that that part
that kind of connects you to the to the metaphysical

(19:39):
world UM was located somewhere, you know, in the front
of your head, which I think is actually right where
the pineal gland was, which was later associated with that too. UM.
That kind of falls into that same tranche as well.
The magic religious which is UM to kind of open
yourself to a greater plane of spirituality, like they think

(19:59):
that in some in some dimensions or in some cultures
UM like shaman or medicine people or UM. The high
priests whoever we were kind of responsible for that would
would possibly be trepanned to kind of connect to that
that different level, that other way of thinking. Yeah. Another one,

(20:22):
and this is definitely one that you could probably say
explains away a lot of things. Is some sort of initiation, right, uh,
child passing into adulthood at you know, the age of seven,
or uh, if you want to turn someone to into
a great warrior, maybe before some big battle, hopefully a
little bit before that big battle, you know, just to

(20:43):
give a chance to heal up. But that you know,
that makes sense. They did all kinds of things back
then for writes of passage, so why not this? Um.
There's also those two me are the ones that are
the hardest to to grasp, I think even harder than
magic religious the ones for initiations not grasp I mean
to to pin down definitively, to say, yes, that's exactly

(21:03):
what was going on here, you know what I mean? Yeah,
and then follow like real legit medical purposes like if
someone if tooktok had epilepsy or something, or chronic migraine headaches, uh,
any weird changes in behavior or convulsions or anything like that,
they maybe tumors um as a literal way to maybe

(21:24):
relieve like brain swelling or pressure on the brain, which
is I mean, if that's real, then that's that's remarkable
because that is very much a medical procedure that they
still do today. Craniotomy's right, and then kind of tied
into that is a treatment of trauma, UH, specifically head wounds.
And there's an anthropologist who specializes in I think UM

(21:47):
maybe the INCA. His name is John Rizzo, and he
thinks that the ink with the inc at least um
and the INCA went on to become prolific trepans. I
think maybe half of all of the Trapan skulls that
have been discovered came from the inca. They were big
time into trepainning um. But he thinks that there their

(22:07):
trepi nation may have started when somebody was picking bone
out of a head wound to like clean it or
treat it, and that that person went on to survive
and they thought, Okay, maybe this is a thing. Maybe
like you want a hole in your head or um,
if you have a hole in your head, it's supposed
to be a little more cleaner than you know, just
bone sticking out and that you know you can it's

(22:29):
not hard to make the leap to Okay, we're actually
going to carve a hole in your head to maybe
treat something else that is associated with the head. To
us um that that that's not really a big stretch
to tell you the truth. And I definitely bought into it. Yeah,
the one that didn't see, which um, I think is
is sort of plausible. Is just like ancient curiosity, Sure,

(22:54):
what happens when I carve a hole in my friends?
Or what's in that thing? What is in this round
thing that had this very hard protective covering, Like maybe
something important is in there that we should take a
peek at. I wonder because I know that there's like
a mechanism among people against self harm, and if I
feel like there's a mechanism against harm as well, I

(23:15):
don't know how just letting that, yeah, or harming somebody,
like doing that to somebody else, you know what I mean.
Like there's just it's almost like there's some innate sense
of like you shouldn't shouldn't crack open ahead someone's or
yourselves or your own, um, and that there's like some
in a instinct against it. And I would guess it's

(23:36):
older than ten thou years old, you know. Yeah, And
you know you made a great point and you put
this one together yourself that even if it was to
like because there was a head injury or something like that,
that's a big difference. Like treating a wound with some
sort of surgical procedure is way way different than that
being the surgical procedure to begin with. Yeah, and it's there,

(23:59):
that's where it's like murky. That's where it's like, Okay,
you're really kind of making some assumptions and leaps here
when you put yourself in that person's position and try
to say, this is why they were doing it, you
know what I mean? Yeah, like the medical thing to
reduce influ Like maybe they did have some really vague
understanding of what swelling was in uh and on other

(24:20):
parts of the body, and maybe it just made sense.
I don't know, it's I mean, I think it it
might be an overlapping of all these reasons. Um. And
also like, hey, we did this for this thing, so
why not try it for this thing? Not gonna deal. Yeah,
And you know, I think like, um, like I get
what you're saying with the curiosity but I think tied

(24:42):
into that is is observation to like somebody falls down
and hits their head on a rock, or they're attacked
by some other group and gets hit on the head
with a rock and they see brain people, yeah, and
people like the other people around like watch what happens,
just out of natural curiosity, and they learn from that.
So I feel like it was probably a series of

(25:03):
accidents and that that knowledge was gleaned from that that
kind of got passed along and then developed into an
actual procedure, you know. Yeah, And then you know, there
are other cases where they may not fall into any
of these categories. I think people in modern day Hungary
during the Neolithic they did this after death as a

(25:24):
funeral rite, which I think, I guess I could fall
into magic religious reasons, or write a passage even especially
if you believe that there's some other there's some part
of the body that survives after death that maybe needs
to escape or whatever. I could see trepanning a skull
to let that out to go onto the afterlife. Again,
I mean, I'm well aware I'm falling victim of the

(25:46):
very thing I was warning about that I'm just totally
putting myself into their shoes and answering for them like
it's I'm not a I'm not a professional anthropologist, just
an intense hobbyist, you know. And what was the deal
with the Russians that we're trepanning where the man bun sits? Yeah,
so that'sn't the Obelian I think? Yeah, Yeah, which is

(26:09):
a really risky place to trapan because that's where the
blood supply to your head collects, Like where I saw
it described I think on the BBC is where a
high ponytail would be gathered. Yeah, that's where the blood
that's going to be distributed throughout your brain first collects
and gathers. So it's really risky to cut in there.
And I think something like one percent or less of

(26:30):
all the trapan skulls ever found show a Trepi nation
site there. And yet there's um a number of uh
calculithic copper age skulls that have been found that are
endemic to Russia only that have the Trepi nation at
that site, and they seem to have been healthy, and
they most of them seem to have healed. So they're like,

(26:52):
we're pretty sure this is some sort of ritual maybe
in an uh an initiation, I could see that being
like a warrior thinging or like a you know, priestly
class kind of thing early KGB. Yeah. Probably probably they
stuck some sort of proto micro chip in there and
keep an eye on everybody. So I mentioned the famous

(27:13):
cow um Like we mentioned it was a purposeful veterinary
procedure in Europe in the in what they call the
Golden Age of trepid nation UH in the eighteenth century.
But they found a cow skull from about five to
six thousand years ago in France that was the so
far the first sign of trepid nation on an animal.

(27:36):
And this was another one where it was like it
was clear that it was very purposeful. It wasn't a fracture,
it wasn't a cow fight or a cow scrap uh
there wasn't a tumor or at least no signs of
anything like that. But they did find a very purposeful
trepid nation And it could have been It's either either way.

(27:57):
It's cool, it could have been then practicing on an
animal before they did it on humans, which shows pretty
decent amount of sophistication medically, or it's just early that
nary medicine, which is also remarkable. Yeah, and either way, it's,
as far as we know, the earliest example of either
one of those. So yeah, it's a it's a cow
skull worth hanging on to if it ever comes. They

(28:18):
all are into your possession. But I mean it's a
special one because it's got a whole like right in
the front. I've seen a picture of it. It's pretty cool. So, um,
once we enter history, things become a lot clearer because
by definition, everybody wrote stuff down. That's when you enter history, right,
it's recorded, and the ancient Greeks continued trepanning, and I

(28:42):
would guess, Chuck that the reasons and the procedures that
the ancient Greeks were performing, as far as chupin Nation
goes closely resembled stuff that that the reasons and the
procedures from prehistory as well. Yeah, we uh, like you said,
once they started writing stuff down, we could read it

(29:03):
in the Hippocratic Corpus, which was a collection of ancient
Greek medical texts, uh, from the teachings of Hippocrates. Obviously, Um,
they talk about therapeutic reasonings behind it. Some of the
ones that we already talked about basically UM, including something
called uh Places in Man, which is one of the

(29:25):
texts in there, and it recommended trepid nation for the
president prevention of UM probably swelling because of skull fractures
and swelling. And then they were also preventing infection of
that diameter um, that membrane that in cases the brain um.
And they were saying basically, if you have a fracture,

(29:46):
especially a fracture along one of the sutures, you want
to actually trepan and open up a bigger hole because
pus can get into the fracture that suture and it
can't get back out, and it's going to infect the
dirameter and the brain and have all calls, all sorts
of problems. So you want to open up a larger
hole to let some of that puss out and clean

(30:06):
some of the puss out. And that's pretty sophisticated. That's
brain surgery they're describing right there. And you know, Hippocrates
was in the third i think third or fourth century BC,
so UM like if they understood this by this time,
keep puss out of the derrimator. You know what did
they understand a thousand years before? Five years before they

(30:29):
just don't. They just weren't writing it down, but they
still they still had that knowledge. You know what I'm saying,
that's my guess. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and throw
in then this, this is so official, it can go
on the Wikipedia page I'm doing. With plus, that's my
worst word. Worse than moist. Oh, plus is way way worse.
What about really moist? A turkey can be moist, but

(30:50):
a turkey with plus, that's true, you know a turkey
could be moist with pus? Oh, oh man, I can't
take that word. It's pretty it's the worst. It's the
word for a three letter word, usually three letter. It's
not packing a big punch you need for letters. Yeah,
p us, I thought, Oh yeah, I guess never mind. Uh,

(31:15):
mentioning earlier that mental illness, like you know, releasing the
demons or something could have been a reason thousands of
years ago, and that they also did that in medieval Europe.
There was something called the stone of madness, uh that
where they believed that was an actual like stone inside
your head, like a foreign literal foreign object that caused
people to go crazy. And there are even painters, specifically

(31:38):
Horonymous Bosh and others who depicted this surgery removing the
stone of madness. Yeah, have you seen that painting? It's
pretty famous one. Yeah, it's pretty great. I mean I
wouldn't want it on my wall, but and yeah, so
so it's almost like understanding of, um, you wouldn't want it,
you wouldn't want it next to your frame poster of
the guy melting with stoned again written underneath it, and

(32:05):
then that's right next to the kitten that's going to
hang in there, hang in there baby. Um. So it's
it's it's worth pointing out again that by the time
the Medieval area and even the Renaissance came around, we
had we had gotten really bad at trepid nation as
far as survival rates go, and our reasons for it
possibly had degraded as well, you know. Uh yeah, And

(32:28):
just real quickly, my favorite part of that painting is
the the funnel on the surgeon's head. Yeah. Well I
was reading about that and I read it. So if
you notice also there's a nun seated at the table
where the man is being trepanned, and she's wearing a
book on her head, And I mean maybe that was
for balance practice at least Supposedly, Bosch was basically mocking

(32:51):
the doctor in the nun um for like basically taking
them to tasks, suggesting they should know better, that that
a stone of madness was b s and that they
shouldn't be inflicting this on this poor this poor individual
who wouldn't necessarily know better, because I think he's depicted
as a fool in it, so he's he wouldn't have

(33:12):
any No, no, no no, the patient, the doctor, and the
nun should know better than to perform this kind of
sentrey on somebody because there is no stone of madness.
That was the interpretation I read, which makes me like
even more with the armadillo and his trousers. Yeah, really breaches.
So you want to take a second break and come

(33:34):
back and explain a little bit more about how this
might happen, Yeah, okay, and how they even did it? Good. Yeah,
we'll be right back, everybody, all right, So our old

(34:13):
pals Lopez Carro and Pardinis, the Spanish researchers who wrote
that two thousand and eleven paper um also kind of said, hey,
we've we've got some general ways from what we can tell.
There's some like three maybe four I saw, but you
can really lump them into three categories of how trepid
nation surgery was performed. Um, and they are basically they

(34:37):
boiled down to grooving, scraping, and boring and cutting. And
if you just wiggle in your seat, that's the appropriate
response to hearing about that. Yeah, the first one I get. Um,
that makes sense to me. If I had a skull
and primitive tools, the way that I would cut a
hole in it would probably be to groove it. That
is too Ah, take a hard stone, something really sharp

(35:02):
that you probably even sharpened further, and and carve basically
do little digging, little half turns or full turns in
a circle. Uh, you know, carving until you can kind
of just pop that thing off or lift it off.
You don't want to there's no where to pop it
into you know one of those Yeah, you don't pop

(35:22):
it into your into your brain. Um, you know one
of those like apple cores that's like kind of like
an open tube. It's like open in the middle. Yeah,
and there is such a thing as an apple core,
by the way, But if you took one of those
and you put a handle, a cross wise handle on
top to grip that's that was kind of the tool
that you would use for grooving, and there's actually the

(35:45):
Romans head it. The Greeks had it. I think there's
I saw a picture of a sixteenth century Trepi nation
kit that had one of those. It's a really ancient tool.
But like you're saying, you could also do it with
a stone, And I think grooven sounds pretty bad. Scray
being I think would be worse. Yeah, I didn't quite
understand scraping. It sounded like grooving to me. Oh no,

(36:10):
I'm no dancer. Imagine that somebody has peeled back part
of your your your scalp, and this is this is
worth pointing out, like cutting into your scalp is far
and away the worst part. Once you do that, your
skull in your brain, they don't have pain receptors, so

(36:31):
it's the scalp being cut back that actually really hurts
and produces the most blood. So they do brain surgery
with you awake like now, precisely because you don't can
You don't feel any pain um because there's not pain
receptors there. So once you have the scalp peel back,
what they do with scraping, or what they would do
is take a very sharp rock and then later on

(36:52):
tools too. But they're basically taking advantage of the fact
that your skull is curved and just making a straight
motion kind of like you would with like a would
um is it would laugh, a would grasp something like that,
where you're just scraping away a little by little would,
but you're doing this instead with the skull until you

(37:13):
finally wear a hole into the skull. That's the scraping technique. Okay,
I guess that sounds a little like grooving to me,
but no. Grooving is like taking a circular tube, putting
it down on top of the skull and twisting it
back and forth until you like that. Yeah, yeah, it's different.
It's definitely different. I'll show you. I'll show you. We'll

(37:35):
get a cow skull, uh, and then I have one
no problem boring and cutting. This one was not used
much in Europe. I think this is more of a
South American Arabic jam. Also in Africa. This is when
and this is something that it's sort of a carpentry trick.

(37:56):
If you're ever carpentry trick of your cot without the
right saw me be um. Let's say you wanted to
make a hole in a piece of wood and all
you had was a drill. You would drill little holes
in a circle and then you know, as close together
as you can, and then from there it's not too
hard to kind of punch out the areas in between.

(38:16):
But instead you're doing this with a skull, that's right,
and you don't have a drill, and uh, this one
to me would be the one that's the most rough
around the edges, probably right. Yeah, they know that this
is the technique used when they find a skull that
has like a serrited opening. And apparently the Inco were
super fond to that one, right sure, as as I

(38:39):
did this just last week actually, but not in a
skull because I was stuck without us all and all
I had was my drill. So I did that and
it works, Okay, you just gotta have like some sandpaper
file or something to kind of smooth it out. Well, yeah,
I saw like one of the ways that they thought
they might have done the drill is by rolling the
you know, pointed sharp guess rock in between your two palms,

(39:03):
you know, like you're trying to start a fire, which
is actually something I saw that that the ancient people
would have known you want to avoid heating the bone.
Whatever technique you're using, you've got to stop and like
rest for a little while to prevent the bone from
heating up because you don't want to transfer that heat
you want to start a fire inside the skull, which
is essentially what you could all also be doing if

(39:24):
you're not careful with letting the friction, the heat produced
by the friction to cool off in between little sessions. Yeah,
it's funny that this came up now because, um, you know,
I mentioned a couple of times watching that survival show
and History Channel Alone where you have you can bring
like ten things and then they throw out in the woods.
There's a new spinoff series now called Alone Beast where

(39:45):
it's only thirty days but you take nothing but the
clothes on your back. So the people that are dropped
here are are literally fashioning stone tools and stuff, and
it's it's kind of cool to watch. At least they
have clothes on. They have clothes, and that's it. I
guess the next step would be naked, and uh, the
beast thing comes in is that the only thing they
give you as a one large dead animal in the buyou,

(40:09):
it's an alligator. And the arc ticket's like a or
or a bore, and the arctickets like a moose or
a buffalo or something. It's not for a companionship. No,
no, no no, the animal is dead and they're like, this
is all you got, so you can, you know, use
their bones. Like an animal's jawbone is really useful because
that's like super sharp. A boar's tusk is can be

(40:31):
really sharp. So they make knives out of that stuff.
And they use some of these carving and boring grooving
techniques to break off bone to make like sharper things. Yeah,
I was gonna say, I'll bet getting your your hands
on that first tusk or that first jawbone to get
started as pretty messy. Well it is. And they have
to get in these I mean it's kind of gruesome,

(40:52):
especially if you're uh a vegetarian. But they have to
get into these animals without a knife to begin with.
So they have to start with like a sharper rock
as they can get basically and go from there. How ghastly.
This is just pretty reality television now, Well, I mean sure,
I guess. So. Wow. Next up is the Stone of Madness. Well,

(41:18):
I think it's kind of interesting. Because it's not like,
look at some cool modern reality idea. It's like, well,
let's take people back to the Stone Age and see
how they could do. No. I get that, I get that,
that's cool, but you just know there's a coked up
producer fifteen feet away. You're really kind of dragging the
whole thing down as far as the Stone Age goes. Yes. Correct,
So um, you might be saying, chuck. Uh, well wait

(41:41):
a minute, wait a minute, they're cutting into your head here,
and yeah, maybe the bone doesn't hurt and the brain
doesn't have pain receptors, but it's gonna hurt to get
to the skull. What are they're doing here? Um? And
it depends on where you are. Um. A lot of
places supposedly just used restraint. Like you were awake, you
were not innesthetized. There were just a couple of dudes

(42:01):
holding you down while whoever was performing the Trepid Nation
performed the Trepid Nation. Yeah, that's rough. Another thing they
would do, and to me, this is one of the
better band names we've had in a while. They would
use uh somniferous agents and that's you know, depends on
where you are in the world. And when it is,
it could be coco extract, could be poppy, it could

(42:23):
be just getting them super drunk on wine, just basically
anything to kind of dull somebody out a little bit. Yeah,
and one of the places that just used restraint was
among the Kisi I think I'm saying that right, the
Kisi people uh and Kenya who were practicing this as
recently as the mid nineties sixties, UM using basically the

(42:44):
old traditions and uh A, I think an anthropologist Im
sure El Margetts went back um tive years later, decade
or two ago and reported that they're still doing the
trepid nation surgery, but now they're using like local anesthetic
and some other stuff. But this is still performed in
some in some places, and um for that reason, there's

(43:08):
like a group of people in the Western world, UM
on the Internet even who basically who basically say like, hey,
you know what the Kisi people are doing in Kenya,
Like that's part of a really ancient tradition and we
are here for it. And there's a a trepid Nation
basically appreciation society that has developed pre Internet, but really

(43:32):
took off when the Internet came around. Yeah, and there
are people, and I know this is what we talked
about at some point because I remember self trepend Nation. Yeah,
I kind of talking about that. But there was an
artist name and a lobbyist name, Avanda Amanda Fielding, uh,
Countess of Wemyss and March whatever that means. And and

(43:54):
then night is that what that is? Yeah, she's got
she's royalty. She's a minor royalty. But that's for real.
I thought it was just something she made up. No, No,
I think she's ractual royalty all right. Well, in nineteen
seventy she performed an act of self trep nation. A
couple of years after that, a man named Pever Halverson

(44:14):
did it? Peter? Would I say, Pever? Why am I
sticking VS in there? Leave it to Pever? What is
going on with me? Can't you just see Peter Halverson
listening to this? And he's like, oh, they mentioned a
man Fielding I know I'm next to Can you hit
him with the Pever? And he's like, man, I'm so sorry, Pete,

(44:41):
very sorry. Uh. And then there's a guy named Bert.
I'm sorry, Bart. You know what the real problem is.
I have a light off in here, and I can't
see as well. Oh, I would say that might have
something to do with it. Yeah, Bart, you just well
he's Dutch, so I'll bet it's we would say, Bart
here really just it's probably that. Uh. He is a

(45:03):
former med student and he got really into this. In
nineteen sixty two he had a he wrote something called
large Mechanism of Brain blood volume one word and he
said that you know what, a person's level of consciousness
really depends on how much blood is flowing to the brain.
Maybe there's something to that, and he said it falls, Uh,

(45:26):
it falls as we get older, and um, so maybe
what we should do is trepan ourselves basically and open
up our creativity. Yeah. His his whole point was that
if you look at kids, kids are way more creative,
they're way more free, they enjoy life more, and that
just so happens that their skulls haven't fully fused. So
his whole thing was, if you are an adult, your

(45:48):
skulls fused for the most part, you're you have a
few skulls. Some very lucky people, um don't ever have
their skull fused. According to Bart Hughes, and he actually
apparently talked John and out of self trepen nation or
being trepanned, because he said, you probably wouldn't notice a
difference because I suspect that your skull isn't fully fused.
Your very creative person. Yeah, I don't know that, but real. Yeah.

(46:10):
But then John Lennon went to recommend trapanning to Paul McCartney,
who said, no, and I can't do that. But this
guy head, this guy was like a guru of Trepi
Nation and ended up like creating this following including a
Mando Fielding and Peter Halverson, and they went on to
basically carry on this guy's vision. Um. Halverson formed the

(46:32):
International Trepid Nation Advocacy Group. Fielding runs the Beckley Foundation,
and both of them help people get trepien nation surgery.
I think from this one surgeon down in Mexico, and
they all believe that it's like this basically shortcut to
psychedelic existence and opening up the third eye and becoming

(46:53):
more spiritual, happier person, and so um, you know, Western
researchers like, no, this, this goes against science. This doesn't
make sense. Like, yes, if you have a problem in
your brain, if there's like if you have inflammation, opening
up your brain will help with blood flow. We know
that we perform that surgery. It's trepen nation. We call
it craniotomy, but we do it. But if you're healthy

(47:16):
and you don't have inflammation in your brain and everything
is just normal, this is not going to help you.
And the internet said, I can't hear you. All I
heard was what these other people said, and it kind
of took off on the internet first to some extent.
I don't want to say it's like huge, but it's
still got some sort of traction and following on online
I believe, well, it took off so much that the

(47:37):
British Medical Journal Journal felt the need to say, hey,
medical establishment, be on the lookout for this. If someone
shows up that has drilled their head, at least you
know what's going on. And all the trepen Nation people
were like, yeah, establishment, Yeah, exactly, my freedoms. So yeah,
that's out there. It's a thing, and it's probably not

(47:59):
helpful at all. So it's not going to cure depression
or anxiety or anything like that, which is some of
the things that tout. So be careful out there, everybody
meaning to wit. Don't trepan yourself or have somebody else
trepan you okay, No, the only only groop and you
should be doing is on that wooden floor. Yeah. I
love it when we're grooving together. Very nice. Uh you

(48:22):
got anything else? Like nothing else? Well? I don't either,
So that means that this episode of trepid Nation has
Oh yeah, I keep trying to end everything like a
short stop. Let me do it differently, everybody. If you
want to know more about trepreate Nation, go read up
on entrepren Nation. It's pretty interesting stuff. And since I
said that it's time for a listener mail, I'm gonna
call this Josh made me quit vaping. Oh I saw

(48:45):
this one. I was so proud. That's great. Hi, guys.
Never thought i'd have a reason the email, but now
I do. I want to say thank you for essentially
making me want to quit vaping. I was listening to
your child Labor episode and got to the part where
Josh said Eve been smoking. Uh started smoking in his
young teens and and quit in his adult years. I
only started using a vape one year ago and hadn't

(49:05):
really considered quitting anytime soon. I just kept telling myself
I would get around to it. You guys made me
get around to it. A policy episode. Wow, through the
vape Away and now I'm one week off of it
May That's awesome. As a goal, I told myself I
couldn't listen to the rest of the podcast until September one. Wow.
I love this uh, and could only listen if I
avoided vaping. So far, I've had no urge to go back.

(49:28):
Thank you guys for helping me get a jump on
quitting early on. I believe you saved me from some
unnecessary future misery. I appreciate everything you guys do, and
that is from Tim. That's awesome, Tim. I was so
glad to hear that. I haven't written him back quite yet,
but he's in my inbox. Well, I'm gonna tell me
he made listener mail. So hopefully Tim will be like, uh,

(49:48):
won't be like I started vaping again? Right, No, don't
don't don't do that. Um, congratulations Tim. I really do
think that was a very good move. And if you
want to be like Tim, then you just throw your
vapor away, to throw your pack of cigarettes away and
get started. It's like, um, It's like Bob Hope always said,
the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

(50:10):
That's right, And that was from Tim of course, So
if you want to write twist like Tim did, you
can send us an email. Everybody Stuff podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

(50:33):
to your favorite shows.