Patient H.M. Read Online Free

discovered at a seven-thousand-year-old grave site in Ensisheim, France—the holes seemed to be evenly divided between the left and the right sides of the head. This was taken as evidence that not all the skull openings had been made to treat war wounds. But if not, then what were they for? To release evil spirits? To cure headaches? To accelerate enlightenment? Nobody knows for sure.
    One thing we do know: Having a hole cut in your skull, even seven thousand years ago, didn’t necessarily kill you. A close examination of the edges of the holes in those ancient skulls revealed that in most of them, stretching inward from the serrated or punched or smooth edge where surgeons made their marks, new bone had grown, the beginning of an attempt by the skull to reseal itself. The bones in our heads grow slowly, and stop growing as soon as we die. Which means that the owners of those skulls, with their indications of postoperative growth, had survived their surgeries.
    In some skulls, in some cultures, the holes weren’t so much cut as they were scraped away by surgeons wielding tools more like Brillo pads or sanders than scalpels or drills. Paul Broca, a pioneering French nineteenth-century neuroanatomist, was fascinated by these scraped skulls. He noted that they predated anesthesia—which originated in its crudest form around 400 B.C.E. , when Assyrian surgeons would induce unconsciousness by compressing the carotid arteries of their patients—by at least 3,500 years, and speculated that the surgeries must have been performed when the patients were young children, because a child’s thinner skull wouldn’t take so agonizingly long to rub through. To prove his point, Broca obtained a number of corpses of all ages and demonstrated that while it took him almost an hour to rub through the skull of an adult, he could do the same to a two-year-old child’s in less than five minutes. Others took exception to Broca’s theory, noting that although dying from these operations was evidently rare—see again: the evidence of postoperative bone growth—it did sometimes happen, and if ancient brain surgeons had been scraping holes in ancient infants, you would expect to find at least a few ancient infant skulls with holes in them, victims of unsuccessful operations. No such skulls had been found.
    These sorts of debates will go on and on. People continue to study these silent skulls, trying to read the stories their preliterate former owners couldn’t document.
    Eventually, of course, humans did gain the ability to record their own lives. We began to write. And among the first things we wrote about?
    Brain injuries and how to treat them.
    —
    In 1862, an American collector of antiquities named Edwin Smith bought a scroll of papyrus from a dealer in Luxor, Egypt. The papyrus was fifteen feet long, and an unknown ancient had used a reed brush and inks derived from clay and burnt oils to cover it in a thicket of hieratic script. Hieratic was the less formal and ornate descendant of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, their version of shorthand. For almost all of the thousand years prior to Smith’s purchase, both forms of writing—hieroglyphs and hieratic—had been relics of a dead language, unused and untranslatable. The Egyptians themselves debated whether the two scripts even represented a language at all or whether their ancestors had just enjoyed covering scrolls and tombs with meaningless decorative symbols. In one often-repeated tale, an Italian merchant visiting the Giza pyramids in the 1700s was offered a wooden chest containing forty ancient papyrus rolls. He purchased only one of them, and the villagers supposedly “burned the rest in order to enjoy the smell they gave off.”
    But by 1862, things had changed. The 1822 translation of the Rosetta Stone—which contains versions of the same text in hieroglyphs, hieratic,
and
Greek—provided sudden access to an entire epoch of the ancient world that had been previously sealed off.