Evidence of brain surgery 4,000 years ago

John Ezard
Wednesday August 21, 2002
The Guardian

He took his photocall yesterday, a man reduced virtually to a sliver of bone with an interesting hole in it.
He was found in the bank of the Thames, close to Chelsea and Westminster hospital in west London. And the discovery led to a hasty rewriting of medical history.
It shows that brain surgery was being performed in London at least 3,750 years earlier than so far thought - and that ancient British surgeons were world leaders.
The bone is the top of the skull of a male, now dubbed Chelsea Man, aged about 40, who lived in the capital when it was a series of small settlements among woodland.
The hole in the bone means he had been seriously ill. He may have had internal brain haemorrhaging or epileptic fits, heard non-existent voices, or suffered delusions.
A bronze age healer spent an hour peeling back his scalp and trepanning his skull - delicately scraping away bone with a flint to ease pressure within the brain, then plugging the hole with leaves or dried bark.
The excruciatingly painful operation, conducted without anaesthetic, was a success. Regrowth in the bone shows he lived several years. When he died, his skull was cast into the river with others, possibly as a ritual offering to a river god.
The skull is the first relic found in London of trepannation, a technique used by primitive peoples across the world. Some 40 others have been found in Britain, dating from 5,000BC onwards, and using the same scraping method which yielded "a remarkable level of survival" compared with the cruder sawing, gouging or drilling often tried in Europe.
Simon Mays, English Heritage's expert on human skeletal remains, said: "The skull shows that there were people in Britain at the time with significant anatomical and surgical skills, ones not bettered in Europe until classical Greek and Roman times more than 1,000 years later."
In a still unsolved mystery, hundreds of prehistoric skulls, many belonging to men aged between 25 and 35 without any accompanying skeletons, have been recovered from the Thames, along with newly forged weapons
The woman who found Chelsea Man, Fiona Haughey of the Institute of Archaeology, said the Thames foreshore urgently needed to be explored, because it was being eroded at unprecedented speed.
"We think this is to do with global warming", she added, "Much more fresh water is coming down the river because of increased rainfall in recent years".

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