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M I N D


Just for the French?


In the seventeenth century, English physician Thomas Willis made his opinions about trepanation clear when surgeon William Harvey suggested he use the method on a patient suffering from migraine. Willis considered it a dangerous operation that was, at the time, rarely performed except by the French. ‘Truly’, he wrote, ‘it does not appear to me what certainty we may expect from the Scull being opened where it pains.’


I think the opening


of the skull will profit nothing. English physician Thomas Willis (1621-75)


To ensnare


Dr Johnson’s dictionary defines the verb ‘trepan’ as both the process of cutting with a surgeon’s instrument and to catch or ensnare. In Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel Kidnapped, the protagonist recounts his fate as, ‘…I was trepanned on board the brig, cruelly struck down, thrown below, and knew no more of anything till we were far at sea’.


Opening the mind


In 1970, artist Amanda Feilding (b.1943) trepanned herself after observing that friends who had under- gone the procedure exhibited a ‘lessening of the neurotic behaviour that we all have’ or no longer experienced headaches. Feilding spent four years trying unsuccessfully to persuade a doctor to trepan her before, after much careful preparation, she per- formed the operation herself, using local anaesthetic and an electric drill. At the time, she described the immediate result as ‘feeling like the tide coming in… of rising, slowly and gently, to levels that felt good.’ Her dreams also became much less anxious. In 1979 and 1983, Feilding stood for Parliament


in her local Chelsea constituency, with the manifesto ‘Trepanation for the National Health’. She is now director of The Beckley Foundation, a trust that conducts research into consciousness and the functioning of the brain.


The ‘Hat On–Hat Off’ man


In 1958, Edward Margetts (1920–2004), the Canadian psychiatrist in charge of Nairobi’s Mathari Mental Hospital, reported on a Kenyan trepanation he described as ‘the most spectacular curiosity that one would ever hope to see’. When wearing his hat, 50-year-old Nyachoti from the Kisii district in Kenya looked entirely unobtrusive. When he took his hat off, the top of Nyachoti’s head appeared missing, thanks to a 30-square-inch hole in his skull, a result of multiple trepanations conducted to relieve chronic headaches. Margetts nicknamed the case, and Nyachoti himself, ‘Hat On–Hat Off’.


Nyachoti, also known as ‘Hat On–Hat Off’ Photograph Edward Margetts, 1958 Dr Sloan Mahone, University of Oxford


Read


Gross CG. A Hole in the Head: More tales in the history of neuroscience. Cambridge: MIT Press; 2009.


Kwint M, Wingate R. Brains: The mind as matter. London: Profile Books; 2012.


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