Stone age brain surgery

[wnylib]

Interview with Ira Rutkow, a medical historian, on the history of surgery. He discussed evidence of stone age brain surgery and the history of surgery from ancient times through the Middle Ages into modern times.

The interview was on NPR's Fresh Air program.


https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/03/29/1089213668/ira-rutkow-surgery-empire-of-the-scalpel

[Warpy]

1. The surgery might have been done for seizure or psychiatric illness

but I find the most logical reason for it frequent and lengthy migraine headaches.

That's about the only thing that would have let me allow someone to chisel a hole in my skull without anesthesia.

There must have been some sort of cure rate since they kept at it for a very long time.

[wnylib]

2. Anesthesia as we know it did not exist,

so I guess they just accepted it as it was.

But, I bet that they knew the numbing or pain relief effects of some plants to help. They must have known how to handle bleeding and prevent or treat infections, too.

The one treatment that always puzzled me is the blood letting that continued into the late 1700s and early 1800s. Why would they continue it when it must have been evident that the patients got weaker and sicker afterward?

[Warpy]

3. Not all of them got markedly sicker

For instance, it probably worked well for people in hypertensive crisis. They wouldn't have known what was causing the headache or other symptoms, but they knew reducing circulating volume reduced the crisis. It left them markedly anemic for a while, unlike today's diuretics, but it worked.

It would also work for the various polycythemias.

It just did nothing much for everything else. It was what they did when they didn't know what else to do.

The problem, of course, was the church and its monopoly over health care, stressing the four humors theory and rejecting any study of anatomy. One thing the Black Death did for us is start to break that monopoly.

[wnylib]

4. The church opposed scientific developments

Last edited Thu Mar 31, 2022, 12:14 AM - Edit history (1)

on religious grounds in cases like Galileo. It also opposed the use of cadavers for medical students to study during some periods, but by the time that Lister, Semmelweiss, and, before them, Nostradamus, and other well know physicians, were studying medicine, autopsies to learn about diseases and anatomy were being done.

In the case of blood letting and the 4 tumors, though, physicians in Europe and in Islamic countries were committed to the humoral theory of disease causes based on studies of Greek and Roman pre-Christian physicians and philosophers, not the church. Philosophies of humoralism existed in ancient India, Egypt, and Persia before the Greeks and Romans picked up on the ideas and systemstized them into their own medical theories and treatments. That happened about 5 1/2 centuries before the beginning of Christianity.

Europe stuck with that theory for centuries because they had represented the height of civilization and learning as Rome carried civilization into the rest of Europe through conquests. Islamic physicians and philosophers picked up and adopted the medical theories from ancient Rome and Greece as they conquered southern European lands.

So adherence to humoral theory was secular more than religious in origin and continuity.

Agree that the Black Death shook the foundation of peoples' religious beliefs, and of the church's authority, as evidenced in how the flagellants expressed their independance. But I would not credit them with bringing reason and science to medicine. Just the opposite.

Religion has obstructed scientific learning at times and continues to do so today in some, though not all, religious circles. But I don't think the adherence to blood letting and humoral theories of disease fall into that category.

[Warpy]

5. Guy de Chauliac wrote what could be called the first modern medical text

in which he stated, against church teaching, that a foundation in anatomy had to be the basis for any medical treatment. It would be nearly another 2 centuries before large enough scale grave robbing had led to actual anatomical texts, but I credit him with being the first to identify the problems inherent in treating illness with herb (and worse) stew and prayers.

The church absolutely did obstruct studies of anatomical research, which is why grave robbing for fresh bodies was such a lucrative business. Eventually the church relented to the point they said executed criminals could be used for such studies, but by then the work was largely complete.

While I give monasteries props for coming up with the early technology that led to the industrial revolution,harnessing wind and water power for everything from mechanical fulleries to the earliest blast furnaces, please don't try to tell me the church facilitated the early study of medicine, it most certainly did not.

Even today, they're standing in the way of a lot of cutting edge research because of a 50 year old fetal stem cell line. That research is happening elsewhere every time a Republican gets into office.

[wnylib]

6. Yes, the church did obstruct the dissection

of bodies for anatomical studies. I did not say otherwise.

Yes, there are some churches today that obstruct scientific development in medicine, e.g. the study of stem cells. I believe that my post did point out that some churches, though not all, continue to obstruct scientific studies today. But there is no "THE church" today. There is no central church authority today as there was for many centuries in Europe in the past. There are some religious denominations that have a central authority structure for themselves and their members, but they do not speak for or represent the views of all religions.

So the only disagreement between us that I see is on the historical mutual influences of religion and philosophy on each other and how science evolved into a field of its own out of the two. The following article explains the historical connections and developments going back to the ancient Greeks and up through history to the present.

https://explorable.com/history-of-the-philosophy-of-science

[wnylib]

7. From the above linked article:

"Until the 18th and 19th centuries, there was no real distinction between scientist and philosopher, and many of the great scientist-philosophers of antiquity were also theologians."