Stuff You Should Know - How Trepanation Worked

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

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.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there and Jerry's even here, which means this is a bona fide, bona fide, shut your mouth episode of Stuff You

Should Know. Right, until Jerry's like go, go, go. I wasn't going to 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 100, right? Yeah, I mean 13 years in and we're still working out technical difficulties. I know. I know. But we're working it out. We're working it out, Chuck, like a brilliant scientist, 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 1870s. That's right. This is one of those where I was positive we had covered it before. Oh, really? No, I knew for a fact we hadn't,

and I'll explain why in a minute. I'll explain why now. Well, we did. It had to be on an internet roundup or something. I don't think so, man. I know we talked about the movie Pie when he drilled a hole in his head. I forgot about that. I just can't remember what episode or what format it was. Maybe you're right. Maybe it was an internet roundup because I could see us talking about that internet group doing that kind of stuff. The International Trepanation 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, I didn't see that. Yeah, and by the way, I wanted to put out a call. If you are a Wikipedia editor, our page is years and years and years out of date. It says

that we're writers for House of the Forks. We haven't written for them in what, like, eight years. It's been a little while, yeah. So if anyone wants to update it, it's got, I mean, God bless her, I miss Rebecca, but it said that Rebecca is our web publisher. Right. That's a long time ago. Yeah, it has been a little while. So anyway, if anyone feels like blowing the dust off of that thing, feel free. Okay, so, well, that was a great call out, Chuck, but let's get back to trepanation, okay? And like you said, before we started recording, Chuck said he has no trepidation about trepanation. That was for your ears. That was great though. It was definitely worth sharing. Terrible. But so maybe I mentioned it before then because I always associate trepanation with this

little second, one second long snippet from those Time Life Mysteries of the Unknown Book ads from like 1990. There's like one moment where they like show somebody like doing a trepanation 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 roundup. It definitely wasn't an episode. Yeah, I think you're probably right. Unless we talked about it during lobotomies, 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 trepanation. But not really. No, no, it's actually that's incredibly false. It turns out trepanation is maybe one of the 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 trepanation. And to get back to Mr. Broca, famous for the Broca's area, which is the first region of the brain that demonstrated localized function, like the speech center is, 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 1870s and it turned

out to be an Incan skull. I couldn't find out anywhere 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. I know they're like, Paul, you and every argument with that. Hi, I'm Paul Broca, Broca's area. It says it on his card to Paul Broca, comma, Broca's area. Yeah, so yeah, he was obviously like, well, this is an interesting thing because what he was looking at was a piece of skull was a human skull, where a piece of it

had been purposefully cut away and removed remarkably well. And it actually started to grow back, which indicates that whoever had this performed on them, that means they survived and was trying to heal, at least for a little while. Yeah, like it takes a 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 when the skull starts growing back, it indicates at least a year of survival. Oh, wow. Okay, I was going to ask that. So I only saw that one or two places. I didn't see exactly, like I don't know, 100%, but it seems like it's a little while, right? It's not like a day or two, right? Yeah. So the thing is, is like Broca's sitting here saying like, okay, this is evidence of,

like this is a purposeful medical procedure. I believe that this person had their brain cut into to treat some form of malady or something like that. It's a proto brain surgery, basically. And it was called trepanation. And Paul Broca went to the French Anthropological Society, I think what she founded. Yeah. That was another thing he did was the founder of the Anthropological Society. Yeah. And they still were like, no, you got this one wrong, Paul. Yeah. But he went to them and said as much 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 people, these members of the Anthropological Society,

or just people in general in France in the 1870s, were well aware of that procedure. It had a name, trepanation. 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, a non-European society, especially one removed in time, was capable of performing the 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 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. Yeah. It's pretty purposeful to me. Yeah. And so what Broca figured out was, he was the first one to really stumble upon this evidence that this medical procedure that they were carrying out in the hospitals, trepanation, 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 in the hospitals of France in the 1870s and elsewhere in Europe and America 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 18th century. It was known as the,

is it trepan or trepan? I say trepan. Trepan. The trepan century or because it's us, we'll call it the golden age of trepanation. Although now I'm doubting myself. 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 started out as a veterinary practice and we'll get a little bit to, a little bit, you know, they were, we'll get to the famous cow later on, the ancient cow. But in the 18th 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 were like, you know, we think it's useful. We think it helps out

with certain things that we'll get to as well. But they said it's also killing a lot of people. And it's got a survival rate of about 10%. And here's the little, like a whopper of a detail here. The survival rate in ancient times was really, really high. Yeah. Like it made the modern survival rate just look embarrassingly low. It was flip whopped really, wasn't it? Yes. And at golden age, like you were mentioning, it seems like the golden age of trepanation occurred thousands of years before modern medicine ever came around. And that when modern medicine came around and kind of took over trepanation, it really dropped the ball kind of. Well, yeah. And 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, have you ever seen that Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode on the screaming skull? No. It's like the villain in the movie is like a skull that can move around and fly at people kind of like the bunny from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But it's a skull version of that. They found or we now know that the oldest trepan skull comes all the way back from about 8000 years ago in the Stone Age during the Mesophilic Mesolithic. Sorry. I take back my first. And that was 8000 years ago. And like this is the beginnings of sort of planting things and eating vegetables and like building cities like the very beginnings of

civilization, basically. Yeah. And we're like cutting holes into one another's heads. And we found evidence of this stuff like all over the world. This wasn't just like one weirdo city doing this. Like this was everywhere in places that were really removed from one another. Like there's evidence of ancient trepanation among indigenous peoples in Canada and North America. There's the same thing in Ukraine, North Africa, Portugal, everywhere. The Scandinavia, the Iraq, all over the place. There's evidence of trepan skulls that turn up. South America is another one. And so it just kind of goes to show you either it was something that evolved independently in all these places or it's so ancient that it originated somewhere and then managed to spread out as people

spread across the globe, which is pretty interesting either way. Yeah. And it got like really popular. This stat really got me. During the Copper Age, which was just after Stone Age, they found that about five to 10% of all skulls that they found from the Neolithic area were trepans. Yeah. Up to 10% of all the skulls that I've ever turned up had holes cut into their skull. And the thing is, it's like we were saying, if that had just been it, if that were the sum total of it, that while that's really interesting, people used to cut holes in their skulls. And that was it. It would still be worth remarking on, you know, or talking about, probably would have just stayed at the internet roundup. But the reason that it's worth the whole episode is because

of that survival rate, that not only do they cut skulls in each other's heads with rocks, actual rocks, 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 trepanation in like the Mesolithic and Neolithic era, 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 sometimes up to 90%, 50 to 90%.

And then a survey of skulls from the Iberian Peninsula, 75% showed evidence that they had healed or at least were healing at that site, which means they lived for a while. Like you said, skull just doesn't grow overnight. It takes a little while. As long as that blood's flowing, I guess it's healing. And then that actually dropped. So like I said, that's flip flopped from success rates, thousands and thousands of years later in Europe. 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 use knives and then like wiped them off and the knives got really dirty. Whereas in the olden days, they would fashion like brand new tools out of bone

and rock and stuff. And they were, I guess, comparatively pretty sanitary. Yeah, because if you nap, cut off the face of a rock to create a new stone tool to perform a trepanation, that rock hasn't been exposed to anything. It's basically sterile now, because you 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 bacteria 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 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 Neolithic seem to have understood a couple of things. And one was you stay away from the duramator, which is that really hard, tough, not hard, but really tough membrane that encases the brain and the spinal cord 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 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 fused together when you're born, they fuse as you grow older. The places, the lines where your skull plates form together, those are called sutures.

And they also knew 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 survival rate is going to go through the roof. Yeah. And, you know, before 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 roll. Yeah, that's right. All right. I guess we should take a break. Great setup. Yeah, I thought so too, man. And we'll come back and try and answer the big question after this, which is, why the heck were they doing this?

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get

messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and

let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So they know this was happening. They know it was working pretty well and that people were surviving at remarkable rates. But the big $54,000 question that they had then and

that we're still trying to figure out and we don't know for sure is why would they do this to begin with? Why would they dig into a person's head and cut out a piece of their skull 8,000 years ago? And we've got some decent ideas that all make sense to me. Yeah. And the whole problem is it's kind of like you have to put yourself in the mentality and the shoes in the worldview of somebody who was... Yeah, no shoes. Right, exactly. There's a huge difference right there. The bare feet of Tuck Tuck.

People who are still humans, they were modern humans in every sense of the word, aside from not living in the modern era. But they didn't have the benefit of a general knowledge of medicine that just about every human alive has today, just from living in the 21st century or just kind of having read about something on the internet. There's just so many pieces of the way we see the world that we take for granted because 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 kind of remove yourself from that and put yourself in the position of somebody 6,000 years ago and to understand what they were thinking when they were cutting into someone's

head that drove that purpose. It's really tough to do. But yeah, like you were saying, there's some researchers have come up with some pretty good ideas, general ideas, broad categories that you could probably put just about anything into. There's actually three researchers that are worth shouting out. There was Lopez Caro and Pardinias, three Spanish researchers who wrote a 2011 paper that was one of the better recent comprehensive looks at ancient trepanation. Yeah, so one of the reasons, and like you said, I mean, I don't think it's lazy, but you could kind of slap these reasons on anything that happened back then. One of them was magic or religious, like free the demons from someone's head. I kind of read that as 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 remarkable, though, to think that 8,000 years ago that they knew enough or were guessing enough to know that there is even a brain in there that was really important to the human body. They're just calling the shots, yeah. Like how they even know that? I don't know. And similarly, that whole idea that like the third eye, that part that kind of connects you to the metaphysical world was located somewhere in the front of your head, which I think is

actually right where the pineal gland was, which is later associated with that too. That kind of falls into that same tranche as well, the magic religious, which is to kind of open yourself to a greater plane of spirituality. Like they think that in some dimensions or in some cultures, like shaman or medicine people or the high priests, whoever were kind of responsible for that would possibly be Japan to kind of connect to that different level, that other way of thinking. Yeah, another one, and this is definitely one that you could probably say explains away a lot of things, is some sort of initiation, right? Child passing into adulthood at the age of seven, or if you want to turn someone into a great warrior, maybe before some big battle, hopefully

a little bit before that big battle, just to give them a chance to heal up. But that makes sense. They did all kinds of things back then for rites of passage, so why not this? There's also, those to me are the ones that are the hardest to grasp. I think even harder than magic religious, the ones for initiations, not grasp, I mean to pin down definitively to say, yes, that's exactly what was going on here, you know what I mean? Yeah, and then follow like real legit medical purposes, like if someone, if Tuk Tuk had epilepsy or something, or chronic migraine headaches, any weird changes in behavior or convulsions or anything like that, maybe tumors, as a literal way to maybe relieve like brain swelling or

pressure on the brain, which is, I mean, if that's real, then that's remarkable, because that is very much a medical procedure that they still do today, craniotomies. Right. And then kind of tied into that is a treatment of trauma, specifically head wounds. And there's an anthropologist who specializes in, I think, maybe the Inca, his name's John Rizzo. He thinks that the Inca, with the Inca at least, and the Inca went on to become prolific trapaners. I think maybe half of all of the trapan skulls that have been discovered came from the Inca. They were big time into trapanning. He thinks that their trepanation 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, well, okay, maybe this is a thing, maybe like you want a hole in your head, or if you have a hole in your head, it's supposed to be a little more cleaner than just bone sticking out. It's 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. But that's not really a big stretch to tell you the truth. I definitely buy into it. Yeah. The one I didn't see, which I think is sort of plausible, is just like ancient curiosity. Sure. What happens when I carve a hole in my friend's head? Sure. Or what's in that thing? What is in this round thing that has 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 is like a mechanism among people against self-harm. Right. And I feel like there's a mechanism against harm as well. I don't know how old it is. Like just letting someone do 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 crack open a head, someone's or yourselves or your own. And there's like some innate instinct

against it. And I would guess it's older than 10,000 years old, you know? Yeah. And 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. 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, like maybe they did have some some really vague understanding of what swelling was and on other parts of the body. And maybe it just made sense. I don't know. I mean, I think it might be an overlapping of all these reasons. And also like, hey, we did this for this thing. So why not try it for this thing? That's going to deal. Yeah. And you know, I think like, I get what you're saying with the curiosity, but I think tied into that is, is observation too. 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 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 funeral right, which I think I guess that could fall into magic religious reasons or right of 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 trapanning a skull to let that out to go on to the afterlife. Again,

I mean, I'm well aware, I'm following victim of the 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 were trapanning where the man bun sits? Yeah. So that's at the obelion, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a really risky place to trapan, because that's where the blood supply to your head collects. Like where I saw it described on the BBC is where a high ponytail would be gathered. The man bun. 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 1% or less of all the trapan skulls ever found show a trepanation site there. And yet there's a number of calcolithic copper age skulls that have been found that are endemic to Russia only that have the trepanation at that site. And they seem to have been healthy and most of them seem to have healed. So they're like, we're pretty sure this is some sort of ritual, maybe an initiation. I could see that being like a warrior thing or like a priestly class kind of thing. Early KGB. Yeah, probably, probably. They stuck some sort of proto microchip in there to keep an eye on everybody. So I mentioned the famous cow. Like we mentioned, it was a purposeful veterinary procedure in Europe

in what they call the golden age of trepanation in the 18th century. But they found a cow skull from about five to 6,000 years ago in France. That was the so far the first sign of trepanation on an animal. 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 cow scrap. There wasn't a tumor or at least no signs of anything like that. But they did find a very purposeful trepanation. And it could have been, it's either, either way, it's cool. It could have been them practicing on an animal before they did it on humans, which shows pretty decent amount of sophistication medically. Or it's just early veterinary 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 cow skull worth hanging on to, if they'd ever come on there into your possession. So over the door, put it on your front bumper. But I mean, it's a special one because it's got a hole like right in the front. I've seen a picture of it. It's pretty cool. That's right. So 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 would guess, Chuck, that the reasons and the procedures that the ancient Greeks were performing as far as trepanation goes closely resemble stuff that the reasons and the procedures from prehistory as well.

Yeah. Like you said, once they started writing stuff down, we could read it in the Hippocratic Corpus, which was a collection of ancient Greek medical texts from the teachings of Hippocrates, obviously. They talk about therapeutic reasonings behind it. Some of the ones that we already talked about basically, including something called Places and Man, which is one of the texts in there. And it recommended trepanation for the prevention of probably swelling because of skull fractures. And swelling. And then they were also preventing infection of that durometer, that membrane that encases the brain. And they were saying basically, if you have a fracture, 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 durometer 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 pus out and clean some of the pus out. And that's pretty sophisticated. That's brain surgery they're describing right there. And Hippocrates was in the third, I think, third or fourth century BCE. So like, if they understood this by this time, keep pus out of the durometer, what did they understand a thousand years before, 500 years before they just weren't writing it down, but they still had that knowledge. You know what I'm saying? That's my guess. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and throw in.

This is so official, it can go on the Wikipedia page. I'm going with plus, it's my worst word. Worse than moist. Oh, plus is way, way worse. What about really moist? A turkey can be moist, but a turkey with pus. That's true. You know? A turkey could be moist with pus. Oh, man, I can't take that word. It's pretty bad. It's the worst. Especially for a three-letter word. Usually three-letter, it's not packing a big punch. You need four or five. Is it just three letters? Yeah, P-U-S. Oh, yeah, I guess never mind. 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 medieval Europe.

There was something called the Stone of Madness where they believed that was an actual stone inside your head, like a foreign, literal foreign object that caused people to go crazy. And there are even painters, specifically, Hieronymus Bosch and others who depicted the surgery removing the Stone of Madness. Yeah. Have you seen that painting? It's a pretty famous one. Yeah, it's pretty great. I mean, I wouldn't want it on my wall. And so it's almost like understanding of, you wouldn't want it next to your frame poster of the guy melting with stone again written underneath it. And then that's right next to the kitten that's gonna hang in there. Hang in there, baby. So it's worth pointing out again that by the time

the medieval era and even the Renaissance came around, we had gotten really bad at trepanation as far as survival rates go and our reasons for it possibly had degraded as well, you know? Yeah. And just real quickly, my favorite part of that painting is the funnel on the surgeon's head. Yeah. Well, I was reading about that. And I read in... What's the deal? 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. Yeah. I mean, maybe that was for balance practice at least. Supposedly Bosch was basically mocking the doctor and the nun for basically taking them to tasks suggesting they should know better that a stone of madness was BS and that

they shouldn't be inflicting this on this poor individual who wouldn't necessarily know better because I think he's depicted as a fool in it. So he wouldn't have any... So he's wearing a funnel? No, no, no. The patient, the doctor and the nun should know better than to perform this kind of surgery on somebody because there is no stone of madness. That was the interpretation I read which makes me like Bosch even more. With the armadillo and his trousers. Yeah, really. Nice work there, Bosch. Breaches. So you want to take a second break and come back and explain a little bit more about how this might happen? Yeah. Okay. And how they even did it. Does that sound good? Yeah. We'll be right back, everybody.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general

can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in

and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So our old pals Lopez, Karo and Pardinias, the Spanish researchers who wrote that 2011 paper also kind of said, hey, we've got some general ways from what we can tell. There's like

three, maybe four I saw, but you can really lump them into three categories of how trepanation surgery was performed. And they are basically, they boil 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, 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 to take a hard stone, something really sharp that you probably even sharpen further, and carve, basically do little digging, little half turns or full turns in a circle, carving until you can kind of just pop that thing off or lift it off. You don't want to, there's nowhere to pop it into. You know, one of

those, yeah, you don't pop it into your brain. Into your brain. 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 crosswise handle on top to grip, that was kind of the tool that you would use for grooving. And there's actually the Romans had it, the Greeks had it. I think there's, I saw a picture of a 16th century trepanation 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 grooving sounds pretty bad. Scraping, I think, would be worse. Yeah. I didn't quite understand scraping. It sounded like grooving to

me. Oh no. But I'm no dancer. Imagine that somebody has peeled back part of your scalp. This is worth pointing out. Like cutting into your scalp is far and away the worst part. Once you do that, your skull and your brain, they don't have pain receptors. Yeah. So it's the scalp being cut back that actually really hurts and produces the most blood. Sure. Like they do brain surgery with you awake like now. Precisely. Because you don't feel any pain because there's not pain receptors there. So once you have the scalp peeled back, what they do with scraping or what they would do is take a very sharp rock and then later on 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 wood. Is it a wood lath? A wood rasp? Something like that? Where you're just scraping away little by little wood, but you're doing this instead with the skull until you 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. Yeah, yeah. It's different. It's definitely different. I'll show you. I'll show you. We'll get a cow skull. 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 is sort of a carpentry trick. If you're ever carpentry trick, if you're caught without the right saw, maybe 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. But instead you're doing this with a skull. That's right. And you don't have a drill. And 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 serrated opening. And apparently the Inco were super fun to that one. Right. Sure. As I did this just last week, actually, but not in

a skull. It's because I was stuck without a saw and all I had was my drill. So I did that. And it works okay. You just got to 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, I guess, rock in between your two palms, you know, like you're trying to start a fire, which is actually something I saw that the ancient people would have known. You want to avoid heating the bone, whatever technique you're using, you 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 don't want to start a fire inside the skull, which is essentially what you

could all be doing if 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 you know, I mentioned a couple of times watching that survival show on History Channel Alone where you have, you can bring like 10 things and then they throw you out in the woods. There's a new spinoff series now called Alone Beast where it's only 30 days, but you take nothing but the clothes on your back. So the people that are dropped here are literally fashioning stone tools and stuff. And 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 the beast thing comes in

is that the only thing they give you is a one large dead animal. Oh, it's dead. Like in the bayou, it's an alligator and the arctic, it's like a or a boar and the arctic, it's like a moose or a buffalo or something. I see. But it's not for companionship. 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 jaw bone is really useful because that's like super sharp and a boar's tusk can be really sharp. So they make knives out of that stuff. Gotcha. And they use some of these carving and boring grooving techniques to break off bone to make like sharper things. Yeah, I was going to say, I'll bet getting your hands on that first tusk or that first jaw bone to get started is pretty messy.

Well, it is. And they have to get in these, I mean, it's kind of gruesome, especially if you're a vegetarian, but they have to get into these animals without a knife to begin with. So they have to start with like a sharp rock as they can get basically and go from there. How ghastly. This is just reality television now. Well, I mean, sure. I guess so. Well, next up is the Stone of Madness. Well, I think it's kind of interesting because it's not like, ooh, 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 15 feet away. You're really kind of dragging the whole thing down as

far as the Stone Age goes. Yes, correct. So you might be saying, Chuck, well, wait 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 going to hurt to get to the skull. What are they doing here? And it depends on where you are. A lot of places supposedly just use restraint. Like, you were awake, you were not anesthetized. There were just a couple of dudes holding you down while whoever was performing the trepanation performed the trepanation. 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 somniferous agents. And that's, you know, depends on where

you are in the world and when it is, it could be cocoa extract, it could be poppy, it could 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 Kesey, I think I'm saying that right, the Kesey people in Kenya who were practicing this as recently as the mid 1960s, using basically the old traditions. And I think an anthropologist, I'm not 100% sure, E.O. Margetts went back 25 years later, a decade or two ago, and reported that they're still doing the trepanation surgery, but now they're using like local anesthetic and some other stuff. Right. But this is still performed in some places. And for that reason,

there's like a group of people in the Western world on the internet even who basically say like, hey, you know what the Kesey people are doing in Kenya? Like that's part of a really ancient tradition and we are here for it. And there's a trepanation, basically appreciation society that has developed pre-internet, but really 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 trepanation and talking about that. But there was an artist name and a lobbyist named Amanda Fielding, Countess of Wimis in March, whatever that means. And in the 19... Is that what that is? Yeah. She's royalty. She's a minor royalty.

Oh, that's for real. I thought it was just something she made up. No, no. I think she's actual royalty. All right. Well, in 1970, she performed an act of self trepanation. A couple of years after that, a man named Peaver Halverson did it. Peter. What'd I say? Peaver. Why am I sticking V's in there? Leave it to Peaver. What is going on with me? Can you just see Peter Halverson listening to this and he's like, Oh, they mentioned Amanda Fielding. I know I'm next. You hit him with the Peaver and he's like, Peaver. Man. I'm so sorry, Pete. Very sorry. 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 Huges? Well, he's Dutch, so I'll bet we would say Bart Huges. Sure. Oh, really? Huges. It's probably that. He is a former med student and he got really into this. In 1962, he had a, he wrote something called large mechanism of brain blood volume. All one word. All one word. Yeah.

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. Mm-hmm. And he said it falls, it falls as we get older. And so maybe what we should do is to pan ourselves basically and open up our creativity. Yeah. 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 skull's fused. For the most part, you have a fused skull. Some very lucky people don't ever have their skull fused according to Bart Hughes.

And he actually apparently talked John Lennon out of self trepanation or being trepan because he said you probably wouldn't notice a difference because I suspect that your skull isn't fully fused. You're a very creative person. Yeah, I don't know about that. Is that real? Yeah. But then John Lennon went to recommend trepanning to Paul McCartney who said, nah, I'm not going to do that. This guy was like a guru of trepanation and ended up creating this following, including Amanda Fielding and Peter Halverson. And they went on to basically carry on this guy's vision. Halverson formed the International Trepanation Advocacy Group. Fielding runs the Beckley Foundation. And both of them help people get trepanation 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 more spiritual, happier person. There you go. Yeah. And so western researchers are like, no, this goes against science. This doesn't make sense. 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 trepanation. We call it craniotomy, but we do it. But if you're healthy, and you don't have inflammation in your brain and everything's 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 British medical 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. Yeah. And all the trepanation people were like, yeah, establishment. Yeah, exactly. My freedoms. So yeah, that's out there. It's a thing, and it's probably not 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, the only grooving you should be doing is on that wooden floor. Yeah. I love it when we're grooving together. Very nice. Uh, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, I don't either. So that means that this episode of trepanation has, oh yeah, I keep trying to end everything like a short stuff. Let me do it differently, everybody. If you want to know more about trepanation, go read up on trepanation. It's pretty interesting stuff. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, uh, Josh made me quit vaping. Oh, I saw this one. I was so proud. It's great. Hi guys. Never thought I'd have a reason to email, but now I do 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 he'd been smoking, uh, started smoking in his young teens and then quit in his adult years. Uh, I only started using a vape one year ago and hadn't really considered quitting anytime soon. I just kept telling myself I would get around to it. You guys made me get around to it. I pause the episode. Wow. Through the vape away. And now I'm one week off of it. And it's awesome. As a goal, I told myself I couldn't listen to the rest of the podcast until September 1st. Wow. I'd love this. Uh, and could only listen if I avoided vaping. So far, I've had no urge to go back. 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, uh, Tim. That's awesome. Tim, I was so glad to hear that. I haven't written them back quite yet, but he's in my inbox. Well, I'm going to tell me made listener mail. So hopefully Tim will be like, uh, 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 vape away too. 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. That's right. And that was from Tim, of course. So if you want to write to

us like Tim did, you can send us an email, everybody, stuffpodcast.iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.