I'd be careful about these assumptions, though. We know that many thousands of years ago, people performed trepanations (surgery on the skull to relieve swelling in the brain) successfully. But 100 years ago, it wasn't done because of the very high mortality.

This is something from Wikipedia, and so its truth must naturally be questioned, but for what it's worth: "European travelers in the Great Lakes region of Africa during the 19th century observed caeserean sections being performed on a regular basis. The expectant mother was normally anesthetized with alcohol and herbal mixtures were used to encourage healing. From the well-developed nature of the procedures employed, European observers concluded that they had been employed for some time."

I'm speculating somewhat, but if you think about it, what would be a difference between trepanation and c-section? Simply, trepanation leaves undeniable evidence, and you will find that evidence when digging up skeletons. But c-section doesn't, and so even if it was done in the past, we would never know it in the absence of written records. So it's difficult to judge. With trepanation, we do know with absolute certainty that ancient surgeons successfully performed surgeries that are not trivial.

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I would like to live in the Inca Empire, or perhaps somehwere North America (maybe as a Myan or Native American) BEFORE the arrival of the Spanish. I dont think they had many diseases, and life seemed pretty laid back, except for the occasional human sacrifice. . I think that the Incas dfinitely had potential to become a great civilization...If only Europeans were not so greedy and barbaric...

There's another major difference between trepanation and c-section, you know. The number of layers of tissue that have to be sewn independently in order for the operation to be concluded successfully. After all, you can't just sew all the layers together in one big stitch. The uterus must be stitched separately. This means far more chances for infection.

What's more, there's a heck of a lot of blood vessels around the uterus. True, there are in the head as well, but trepanation requires a far smaller cut. I mean, since the pain of childbirth is in no small part caused by the size difference between a fully-dilated cervix/vaginal canal (10 cm) and a child's head and shoulders (I'm not sure, but bigger--and my daughter's head didn't change shape like it's supposed to), there's no way a trepanning-sized hole would be remotely sufficient.

No, despite its relation to the brain, trepanning is actually simpler surgery.

Edit: Besides, the historical record shows that the first successful (ie, both mother and child survived) c-section in Western history was performed by a pig-gelder in (as I recall) the 16th century.

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"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Do we have any solid evidence on the survival rate thousands of years ago? Just because it was done doesn't mean there was a high survival rate.

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Umm, well, we drill holes in people's heads today in order to relieve pressure, but generally in the past it was done for such reasons as letting evil spirits out. So I wouldn't say they were successful trepanations, even though people could manage to survive. I would say they were unneccesary trepanations.

It would be fairly difficut to do. Obviously, the best solution would be to go back to the August BC 4000 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine, which had an excellent review of the subject, but unfortunately there are no copies left.

The only real way we could approach it would be to look at the number of failed trepanations compared to successful ones. It's fairly easy to tell, because in the unsuccessful cases there would be no bone regrowth. I'm not aware of any study dealing with that, but if it exists I'm sure it could be useful. Obviously, there could be problems even then, because there could be complicating factors, like perhaps the people most likely to be buried in good circumstances would also be more likely to get a successful trepanation, etc.

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As above, so below

How would you know?
When all you have as evidence is a skull with an obviously artificial healed hole in it, you know you have a successful trepanation but you have no idea why it was done.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

People wrote down why they performed trepanation in the middle ages and it wasn't done for what we would consider sound medical reasons. I don't know what the Egyptian medicine scrolls say about it, but I doubt they applied it in cases where we would use it today. Since there is no real way for them to know where brain tumours etc would be located it would only have been of use in emergancy cases of high intra cranial pressure and I don't know how they would have dectected this pressure. I suppose it would have been possible for them to shine a light into the eye to see if the optic nerve attachment was swollen, or they might have just put a hole in the skull of everyone who took a severe blow to the head and didn't regain consciousness. But we don't have evidence of a scientific method that would have let them evaluate the benefits of putting a hole in someone's head.

Here is one interesting article. It is very complete information on Prehistoric and Early historic trepanation includes:

Motives of trepanation

Surgical procedure

Repair and survival....etc.

According to this article the survival rate proved to be remarkably high.


Titana

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Also the Egyptian woman were known to use honey and natron as a contraceptive method. They also devised the first known pregnancy test. They moistened a small sample of barley and wheat each day. If the barley grew, the child would be a male. If wheat grew, the child was a female. If neither wheat nor barley grew, then it meant the woman wasn’t pregnant.



Titana

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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius (and a lot of courage) to move in the opposite direction....Albert Einstein.

I agree, burning at the stake is not much fun. Impalement is far more entertaining. Gladiatorial combat even more so.

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Do we know if it's a successful pregnancy test? We also know, for example, that quite a lot of primitive contraceptive devices didn't work--including pretty much all of the ones used by the Egyptians and the Romans.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Right. Most of this medicine seems like superstitious woo-woo to me.

It doesn't matter if they cut into people as part of their rituals. To be medicine, these people have to know what they're doing. They have to be doing it with some sort of purpose, according to some sort of knowledge based on how the body actually works. Otherwise, any positive result from their traditions is merely accidental.

The Romans cutting off limbs to prevent infection and death is medicine. The egyptians moistening barley to tell if a child is a boy/girl is superstition/magic.

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Well yes, Modern science has shown a fair degree of accuracy in the pregnancy aspect of the test but none in the sex-determination aspect.)

And according to original scripts the test was reliable in 25% of cases.

As for the contraceptive methods, I have not come across any article stating how sucessful they were. But, don't think anyone would really like to test them either, especially the crocodile dung method.....






Titana

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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius (and a lot of courage) to move in the opposite direction....Albert Einstein.

I wouldn't sell those old cures short... the Egyptians got a lot of practical medicine from occupational injuries (building those temples and pyramids). They got pretty good at setting bones and fixing wounds. Honey, as mentioned in one of the ancient medical papari, actually does make an antiseptic and protective coating for wounds (bees and ants evolved to secrete germicidal chemicals on their bodies to keep diseases from wiping out entire colonies). Garlic is also antiseptic and both it and onion will help purge the body of heavy metals (these were peasant foods in ancient Rome.... ever wonder why the common people seemed to do okay while the nobilty was "off in the head," what with all the lead pipe and high lead levels in wine... they even used lead salts as a flavoring agent in sauces). Spider web made a good wound filler... the little fibers created a connective network for the platelets to bond to and stop bleeding. If I remember correctly, the Egyptians also used crocodile dung in their contraceptives (the bile is supposed to be poisonous and was used in Chinese medicine for asthma).

There is usually some basis behind a lot of those old folk remedies other than simple superstition.

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mi hatenu yume no
hotsure kana---Choko
(This final scene, I
I will not see to the end.
My dream is fraying.)

So it was wrong statistically more often than random guessing would be? (50/50)? Lol! My point exactly! (Though how they managed to be wrong with greater accuracy than they should is curious.)

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I don't agree. What you really have in cases like the Romans cutting off limbs is a sort of long, not very well controlled clinical trial carried over a long period of time, but in the end it's still a clinical trial. People figured out that chopping off the limb had a beneficial effect (higher survival), and it was incorporated into their medicine. There are a lot of things that we know work, but even today (or at least until recently) don't know exactly why they work.

A good example is salicylic acid. Apparently, Hippocrates prescribed the bark and leaves of the willow tree as a painkiller back in BC. And then based on experiments, the substance was rediscovered, isolated and found to be a good painkiller, in 1887. But the mechanism wasn't known at all, and it was only in the 1970s that people started to understand the mechanism involved (through prostaglandins). And even today, we can't really say the mechanism is 100% understood.

In many cases, I think that things come to be understood because something works, and only later do people come to understand the mechanisms involved.

Now, I'm not arguing that the ancients were on the same level as us, just that we can't just assume a priori that they were backward in all areas. A lot of ancient civilizations, like Harappan civilization, had very advanced water and sewage facilities.

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The French!! Of course!!

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Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before,
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore.

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