Trepanation

By Emi Gennis

I got sidetracked a bit by work and holiday travel but I’ve been reading and writing the whole time and just need to get around to typing and posting that activity. Look for some catch-up posts over the next few days.

Trepanation is the practice of drilling a hole in one’s skull. It’s generally presented (at least in my experience) as an exercise in quackery; an old “medical” technique that was practiced in a day when we didn’t have a good understanding of physiology or the causes of many common maladies. You may have been to a museum where you saw a skull with a nearly cut hole in the forehead with some explanation that trepanation was a common pracatice to let evil spirits out or some such nonsense.

I’m not sure if the current medical practice that s used to relieve dangerous brain swelling uses the same name or not but this comic tells about modern, elective maybe even recreational uses of trepanation. It’s almost like a documentary comic (docucomic?) for the modern history of the practice.

It begins with a Dutch Medical student performing his own trepanation in an attempt to get high. He thought that making a hole in his skull would make more room for oxygen rich blood and induce some euphoric feelings, restoring the same pulsating flexibility in the skull and brain that human children have before the fontanel solidifies. He wrote his theories on a scroll (like all good scholars) and tried to get his professors at med school to take an interest in his writings. It was the 1960’s. Weird shit was going on all over the place.

Things picked up for these ideas when he found someone to translate his scrolls into English. The translator found the information in the scrolls so compelling the he decided to trepan (trepanate?) himself…while on acid. He must have been really compelled because he tried three times before he was finally successful.

The translator described the high as more of an enlightenment…a physical and metaphysical lightening. A removal of depression. His girlfriend performed her own trepanation as well and made a movie about it which advocated for the procedure. There was a lot of high profile attention on the practice even though the recorded amounts of people actually having the procedure done were still low.

The story goes on to even more modern proponents of trepanation. There was a group setup to research and advocate for the practice and they even had a doctor in Ecuador who would perform a trepanation on anyone who worked with the advocacy groups and wanted one done.

There’s some talk about how much safer the process is today and a skeptical doctors perspective that say how little actual evidence of a significant change in the amount of blood in the brain resulting from cutting a hole in ones head and dismisses most of the reported effects as placebo. Believers still believe. They state that the effects might be part of a complex ecosystem of actions one takes as they explore whatever it is they are looking to get from a hole in their skull.

This comic at points feels like a documentary and sometimes like a brochure for the procedure. I came into the reading thinking that trepanation is total quackery but now I’m curious about the the procedure. Not enough to even consider a drill to my head, but I am curious. It’s hard to tell if our author is an advocate or just a skilled documentarian, but let’s just say that if you’re a highly suggestible person, maybe this isn’t the comic for you.

Comic read on 11/11/2017 on the couch at home.