MUSEUM EXHIBIT.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20539, 14 February 1935, Page 1

MUSEUM EXHIBIT.

Examples of Primitive Surgery. LONDON, February 7. The Brighton Museum has obtained the rarest exhibit of the bronze age, a skull on which two trephining operations had been performed. The primitive “ surgeon ” used flints to scrape holes which completely penetrated the skull, while the patient must have been held down. The skull is that of a type of human being now represented by the Australian aborigine. It was trawled off the Sussex coast, having presumably fallen into the sea in a landslide. Dr John Battie, Conservator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and director of research, expresses the opinion that both the trephinings were carried out in one operation, the surgeon scraping the bone with flint flakes and making funnel-shaped holes an inch and a quarter in diameter. The microscope reveals that some bone pores were renewed, but also destruction of bone through septic periostitis. Dr Beattie estimates from that that the patient survived the double operation for six weeks. Britain possesses two more recent trephined skulls, one indicating that the individual recovered splendidly, and the other being incomplete, indicating that the patient died during the operation.