Ancient surgical practices included trepanation (also called trephination or trephining), the craniotomy or drilling and cutting through the skull vault. It was practiced either on the living person (antemortem) or just after death (postmortem). Squier (1863–1865) and Broca (1876, 1867) were probably among the first to draw attention to the antiquity of this practice in Peru. Piggott (1940) thought that it had begun in Europe around 5,000 years ago. In Asia trepanation is evident from around 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age of Jericho in Palestine (Parry and Starkey 1936; Giles 1953). In the Indian subcontinent, trepanation was known among the Bronze Age Harappans (ca. 4300 BP) people of the Indus Valley Civilization (Sarkar 1972). He attributed a squarish hole on the right temporal skull of a child of 9–10 years skull found at Lothal, a Harappan site. Roy Chowdhury (1973) noticed the evidence of trepanation in two Harappan skulls (No. H 796/B and H 802/B from Cemetery R37), adding...
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Notes
- 1.
The sagittal plane is a vertical plane passing through the standing body from front to back. The midsagittal, or median, plane splits the body into left and right halves.
- 2.
Either of two large, irregularly quadrilateral bones between the frontal and occipital bones that together form the sides and top of the skull.
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Acknowledgments
The author thanks the Director, Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata, for research facilities and to S. R. Walimbe, a paleopathologist at Deccan College, Poona (India), for useful discussions. G. H. J. Weber (Switzerland) prompted the author to carry out this work and made the literature available besides taking much pain to get the critical comments and helpful suggestions of Prof. Th. Böni of the Universitätsklinik Zurich, Switzerland and cand.med. B. Hunger.
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Sankhyan, A.R. (2008). Surgery in Ancient India. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4425-0_9727
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