![]() ![]() The whole thing was carefully prepared, but more than anything I prepared myself psychologically. I used an electrical drill with a flat bottom and a foot pedal, and tested the drill head on the membranes of my hand to see if it would damage the skin. I was obviously very cautious and prepared myself very carefully. After four years of unsuccessful searching, I decided to do it myself.Ī trepanned skull found in Peru. In fact, he had a hole in his head from an accident as a child. I started to seek out a doctor who would trepan me, including a doctor to the royal family who was very interested. Later, another friend had it done who had chronic headaches that caused him to lose a day or two a week, but he hasn't had those headaches for the last 30 years. I knew him exceptionally well and did notice a difference. Even though I was interested in trepanation, I wasn't particularly concerned with having it done myself.īut I had another friend who did it and I noticed a definite change in him that was very subtle-a mellowing, a lessening of the neurotic behavior that we all have. I didn't know him before he was trepanned, which meant I didn't know what changes had come about. In the 60s I was doing a lot of work on comparative religions and mysticism, and I heard of a Dutch scientist who had trepanned himself and had a theory of the underlying physiological changes brought about by it. The lifting of the baseline brought about by trepanation gave them less of a distance to come down from after the drugs wore off. I'd suggest this was because, particularly in South American societies, these were the ones taking psychoactive drugs. In fact, it's still regularly used today to enter the brain for operations, but the hole is often filled.įor some, trepanation was a ritualistic practice in which the shamans, the kings, and the priests were trepanned. My father's encyclopedia from 1912 says that trepanation was being increasingly used in the treatment of mental disorders. In other places it was described as "letting light in" or "letting devils out." It has been successfully used to treat chronic headaches, epilepsy, and migraines, and it was surprisingly common until the First World War, when doctors started doing lobotomies-that's when it was suddenly seen as a primitive practice. ![]() These civilizations couldn't hypothesize scientifically on the physiology behind trepanation, so they gave it their own esoteric explanation. I knew someone from Nigeria in the 60s who said that, when he was 13, the "hip" boys of the village went out with the shaman and got trepanned.ĭid it have a legitimate medicinal purpose?Ībsolutely. Shiva, the Hindu god of altered consciousness, was trepanned it was done by monks in Tibet and up to the modern day in Africa. From South America to Neolithic Europe, the practice has a rich and diverse history. VICE: So Amanda, can you give me a short history of trepanation?Īmanda Feilding: Trepanation is the oldest surgical operation in the world, dating back to at least 10,000 BC, and has been carried out by independent civilizations in nearly every continent on the planet.
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