The Pre-Hippocrates History of the Brain

Hippocrates is called the "father" of modern medicine because he was the one who put forth the idea that the center of the "soul" is the brain. Previous to that, the general consensus was that the heart was of utmost importance. This view was strongly held by Aristotle among others. However, the people living before Ancient Greecian times were not oblivious to the fact that there was some significance of the head. This is proven by archeological findings of skulls of australiopithesis (I have no idea if that is spelled right) in which many had injuries to the head in the same places. Apparently these guys and gals knew how to kill eachother, and that was through the head.

Also, skulls were found in Peru which had holes drilled into their skull, usually in the area of the parietal lobe. Some had multiple holes and some of the holes showed signs of healing indicating that these holes were not meant to be fatal. The procedure seems like it would be quite a painful experience; it involved a couple people holding the patient down while another person, which I suppose could be called the surgeon, used an instrument called a tumi to cut into the skull. The tumi had a rounded blade on the bottom of a handle and it was rocked back and forth in a tic-tac-toe pattern to create a square of skull which could be removed. This whole procedure was called trephining.

So why would anyone let someone trephin them? It is suspected that it was done to release evil spirits that have inhabited the head causing headaches or illnesses. Personally I would rather keep those evil people in my head than have someone cutting criss-crossing patterns into my skull with little anesthesia. Coca and alchohol were probably used to relieve some of the pain, but realistically how much relief could those things provide? But ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

So there's a little history about pre-Aristotle times, and there's a whole ton of stuff that happened after that leading to our now modern understanding of the brain and nervous system. I think it's important to understand the history behind all of that so we can really see how far we've come, and still how many new things we have to discover.

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