Even more remarkable, discs of skull of the same size as the holes were found in these sites. The skulls had scalloped edges as if they had been scraped with a sharp stone.
A number of skulls in a Neolithic gravesite were found with roundish holes two or three inches wide. Seven years later a discovery was made in central France that confirmed Broca’s interpretation of Squier’s skull, or at least demonstrated that “primitives,” indeed Neolithic ones, could trephine successfully. But when, in 1876, Broca reported these conclusions to the Anthropological Society of Paris, the audience, as in the United States, was dubious that Indians could have carried out this difficult surgery successfully. Broca and More SkullsĪfter examining the skull and consulting some of his surgical colleagues, Broca was certain that the hole in the skull was due to trephination and the patient had survived for a while. It now resides in the American Museum of Natural History. The trephined Inca skull given to Ephraim George Squier. Today, of course, Broca is best known for his localization of speech in the third frontal convolution, “ Broca’s area,” the first example of cerebral localization of a psychological function, but at this time his fame seems to have been primarily for his craniometric and anthropological studies. Squier then brought his Peruvian skull to Europe’s leading authority on the human skull, Paul Broca, professor of external pathology and of clinical surgery at the University of Paris and founder of the first anthropological society. Another was that the operation was only attempted in very severe cases of head injury. The main reason for the low survival rate was the deadly infections then rampant in hospitals. Aside from the racism characteristic of the time, the skepticism was fueled by the fact that in the very best hospitals of the day, the survival rate from trephining (and many other operations) rarely reached 10 percent, and thus the operation was viewed as one of the most perilous surgical procedures. When the skull was presented to a meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine, the audience refused to believe that anyone could have survived a trephining operation carried out by a Peruvian Indian. More Tales in the History of Neuroscience.“