I have always understood the passion that drives the earnest trepanation enthusiast. Ensconced in the pickling sarcophagus of my skull, my brain meats are trapped, thirsty for the sweet taste of fresh air. It’s maddening: my brain picks up an electric drill and knows it’s a trigger-pull away from the cranial equivalent of a Sunday constitutional, but it doesn’t quite dare, knowing full well that if the parietal lobe gets a breath of fresh air, the cerebellum’s going to start complaining next.

So I refrain. But over at Retrospectable, my hot imaginary neuroscientist girlfriend Shelley Batts has stripped down to her bikini and written a post pointing out this excellent history of trepanation by the Neurophilosophy guys. Heady reading. Why did cavemen trepan? To treat migraines, apparently.

An Illustrated History of Trepanation [Neurophilosophy]

The Neurophilosophy blog has posted a fascinating, concise and extremely moving write-up of the history of the prefrontal lobotomy. It’s utterly riveting, but the below quote — written by a boy who was given a lobotomy to curb his defiant behavior to his step-mother — is heart-shakingly poignant:

My stepmother hated me. I never understood why, but it was clear she’d do anything to get rid of me…If you saw me you’d never know I’d had a lobotomy.

The only thing you’d notice is that I’m very tall and weigh about 350 pounds. But I’ve always felt different - wondered if something’s missing from my soul. I have no memory of the operation, and never had the courage to ask my family about it.

So [recently] I set out on a journey to learn everything I could about my lobotomy…It took me years to get my life together. Through it all I’ve been haunted by questions: ‘Did I do something to deserve this?, Can I ever be normal?’, and, most of all, ‘Why did my dad let this happen?’

The Rise and Fall of the Prefrontal Lobotomy [Neurophilosophy] : Hugo Strikes Back! : Boing Boing : Mind Hacks

Three years ago, a 44-year-old man was admitted to hospital in Marseille, France, complaining of weakness in his left leg. He had no idea what doctors would find to be the source of the problem: a huge pocket of fluid where most of his brain ought to be.

Normally, fluid continuously circulates throughout the brain and is drained away into the circulatory system. But in this case, the man’s drainage tubes had narrowed, resulting in an accumulation of fluid in the ventricles and an enlargement of the skull due to the great volume of fluid pressing against it. This had squeezed his brain into a narrow layer around the outside of the fluid, doctors report in the Lancet1 today.

“We were very surprised when we looked for the first time the CT scan,” says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University, Marseille. “The brain was very, very much smaller than normal.” Nevertheless, subsequent tests showed the man to have an IQ of 75 — at the lower end of the ‘normal range’.

The man with a hole in his brain [Nature.com] : Posthuman Blues : Variable Gravitas Content

Just a reminder: trepanation is a proven cure for migraines, depression, myopia, nose bleeds, sore throats, constipation, dysentery, syphillis, plague, erectile dysfunction, seizures, nocturnal omissions, homesickness, wussiness, Jewishness, Caucasianism, menopause, Down Syndrome, hydrocephalus, night terrors, acne, Asian Bird Flu, Athlete’s foot, elephantiasis, sentient goiters, fetally absorbed twins, and many more besides.

However, due to a conspiracy orchestrated by the insidious HMO trepanation industry (see Michael Moore’s Sicko) most how-to guides are written in such a way as to merely mitigate medical issues through trepanation, as opposed to curing them outright. This guarantees future treatment. Just remember that all illnesses can be cured by following your DIY Trepanation guide up until step 9, then mentally substituting ectomo’s own step 10: while wiggling the handle, keep the bright yellow trigger of your electric drill depressed for an extra five seconds while applying equal pressure.

Trepanation Images at the Wellcome Medical Image Library [Bioephemera]