Soundings

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32661, 17 July 1971, Page 6

Soundings

DENIS McCAULEY

by

It never ceases to amaze me first the amount of abuse the human body can take and second the amount of abuse it is purposely subjected to. For just about any reason you care to name, someone is prepared to subject his body to some torture or other. Fashion has been a major excuse for body abuse. New Zealand women no longer wear corsets so tight they compress the rib cage and the Chinese, I am told, no longer bind girls’ feet so they won’t grow. But other societies still go in for it. African women extend their necks to giraffe-like lengths, some people push bones through their noses or lips, and women in New Zealand still punch holes in their ears to hang bits of jewellery

In the field of sport the body is pushed to extraordinary lengths—as in the strain on the whole System induced by a marathon race or the battering received by the players in last week’s Rugby test. Admittedly Some of this sporting self-torture can be justfied in terms of health benefits from exercise, but the benefits of sport at the highest level are very dubious indeed.

There are many tales—many of them probably untrue—of industrial workers deliberately cutting off fingers for compensation and there are the much less daring but equally damaging everyday activities of smoking, overdrinking and overeating. In recent years political protest in some cases has taken the form of selfimmolation and for a long time fasting has been “in” as a method of political self-expression. In all of these things the selftorturer seems somehow to be admired for his actions. Recently I was talking with a friend about various things and the subject of

Vincent van Gogh cutting off his ear (during a row with another artist if I remember right) came up. The act struck my friend a* a fine romantic gesture rather than the act of a lunatic.

The most bizarre piece of self-tor-ture I have heard of is drilling holes in the head.

Trepannists (hole -in - the - head - drillers) held a world conference in Amsterdam a couple of months ago, and opened the conference to the press to show the world how admirable they were. Strangely, the world remained unimpressed and unadmiring. The theory of it all is that it returns you to the happy state of mind you experienced as a child. A child’s skull has a hole in it and this gradually closes until it is perfectly sealed at about the age of 20. According to the trepannists this sealing of the skull causes the gloomy state of mind we know as adulthood because the closed skull won’t let the brain pulsate freely. The answer, of course, is drill another hole and let the brain pulsate again.

Not surprisingly there are few doctors who would touch such an operation with a barge pole, so the trepannists are obviously do-it-your-selfers. In fact, at their conference one (a woman) showed a film she made of , herself drilling her own head with an electric drill and mirror.

Incidentally, she is an artist. According to a doctor I asked about the process, if the theory were correct the hole would have to be at least an inch across to approximate the hole in a child’s skull, but there is no medical evidence to suggest there is even a grain of truth in the theory. “The world needs trepanning like a hole in the head,” he concluded.