How People Used to Treat Headaches With Trepanation

There are a lot of bad ideas in human history, but “drill a hole in someone’s skull to help them feel better” has to be one of the longest-running hits. For thousands of years, people treated head injuries, seizures, strange behavior, and good old-fashioned headaches by literally cutting into the skull. It was mainstream. Even common.

Trepanation, as it’s called (or trephination, if you want to get medical about it), was done all over the world, from Neolithic France to pre-Incan Peru to medieval Europe, by people who genuinely believed that opening up your skull was the best way to deal with whatever weird thing your brain was doing. And somehow, some of them survived it. So, let’s explore the story.

The Prehistoric Neurosurgeons

Let’s go back to the beginning. Archaeologists have found skulls that are over 7,000 years old with neat little circles carved out of the cranium, the edges smoothed down like someone really took their time with it. These weren’t injuries. They weren’t caused by violence. These were intentional holes, made by humans who somehow figured out how to scrape and saw through bone without killing the person attached to it.

You know what’s worse? A lot of those skulls show signs of healing, meaning the person lived through the procedure. And in some cases, had it done more than once.

So… Why?

The best theory anyone has is that trepanation was a kind of medical-spiritual hybrid treatment. People didn’t separate physical illness from spiritual sickness the way we do today. If your head hurt, or you were acting strangely, or you had a seizure, it wasn’t seen as just a neurological issue. It was a possession. And the only way to release it was to make an exit.

And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean, they opened your skull with a rock and let the demon (or the pressure, or the bad energy) escape through a hole the size of a coin.

Ancient World

This continued through the ancient world. The Egyptians did it. The Greeks were all about it, even Hippocrates, the guy who gave us the Hippocratic Oath, wrote about the best ways to perform trepanation for skull fractures. Fast forward a few centuries, and you’ve got Roman battlefield surgeons casually carrying trepanation kits next to their cauterizing irons.

These weren’t fringe weirdos. To be honest, these were the best minds medicine had to offer back then. And they fully believed that sometimes, the solution to a headache was taking part of your skull off and seeing what happened.

Medieval Europe

By the time we hit the Middle Ages, trepanation got even more unhinged. Now it wasn’t just about pressure or injury. It was about the soul. The spirit. The devil, obviously. Headaches and mental illness were increasingly treated as moral or spiritual failings. Melancholy was sin. Mania was witchcraft. A seizure meant Satan had taken over your brain.

Trepanation became a kind of physical exorcism. Let the spirits out, relieve the pressure, let God back in. All with no anesthesia, no hygiene, and no real chance of not getting an infection. But hey, at least you looked devout while dying of sepsis.

Enlightenment Era

Even in the Enlightenment Era, trepanation didn’t disappear. If anything, it got more precise. Now, you had surgical manuals with detailed illustrations showing the “proper” angle to enter the skull. French doctors were debating the best time to perform the procedure, and English ones were arguing whether trepanation cured “madness” or just dulled the senses.

It was still often based on total guesswork. But it was also organized guesswork, with instruments, vocabulary, and sterile illustrations that somehow made it look more reasonable than it was.

Modern Times

Trepanation was supposed to be buried with the leeches and plague masks. But of course it wasn’t. Because the 20th century had LSD, counterculture, and guys with dental drills and a dream.

In the 1960s, a Dutch guy named Bart Huges became convinced that trepanation could increase “brainblood volume” and make you permanently enlightened. He wasn’t kidding. He actually drilled into his own skull. Then wrote a book about it. Then inspired other people to do it too.

One of them, Amanda Feilding, numbed her forehead and trepanned herself in her own bathroom, and filmed it. The short film is called Heartbeat in the Brain, and it’s exactly as disturbing as it sounds.

Even today, modern surgeons do something like trepanation — it’s called a craniectomy, and it’s used in extreme emergencies to relieve pressure and swelling. But it’s done in sterile environments. Also with imaging, scalpels, and most importantly, consent. Finally, it’s safe to say that we have definitely come a long way.