[Old_Mil]

They may have been trying to let "evil spirits" out, but in the case of a traumatic head injury it was the right thing to do.

You are assuming that they performed such surgeries on people who actually had traumatic head injuries.

[AnAmericanMother]

Well, since a number of the skulls show obvious fractures and star-shaped impact patterns, yeah.

It was the idiots in 17th c. France and the Netherlands who recommended trepanning for all sorts of things having nothing to do with brain injury . . . . I think it was Prince William of Orange whose physician trepanned him something like 75 times. His skull must have looked like Swiss cheese.

Somewhere there's a Gillray cartoon of some poor soul being trepanned (without anesthetic.)

[blam]

"You are assuming that they performed such surgeries on people who actually had traumatic head injuries."

That was an ancient way of dealing with Democrats/socialists. They recognized it as a brain problem.