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Darrera modificació: 2023-04-26
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Mitchell, Piers D. - Bendrey, Robin, "How cranial surgery was performed in Italy during the centuries after the Roman Empire but before the rise of the medieval universities: Integrating paleopathology and medical history", International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 33/2 (2023), 185-186.
- Resum
- Intermittently, we witness how evidence from one academic field can have a significant impact on researchers working in other specialties; in this case, the fields of osteoarchaeology and medical history. In this issue, an article by Micarelli et al. (2023) entitled “An Unprecedented Case of Cranial Surgery in Longobard Italy” presents a fascinating example of surgery from the early medieval period. A cross-shaped area of inflammatory change on the outer table of the skull of a 6th–8th century female from Castel Trosino is described. This cruciform change also contains linear parallel scratch marks suggestive of the use of surgical instruments. At the center of the cross is an oval area where the bone is markedly thinned in a way that would be compatible with a healing trepanation, where the outer table of the bone was previously scraped as part of the surgical procedure.
While population-level studies of trepanation of the cranium have been undertaken at a number of European contexts such as 6th–8th century CE Germany (Weber & Czarnetzki, 2001) and Bronze Age to Byzantine period Greece (Aidonis et al., 2021), what is special about this case from Castel Trosino that the cruciform area of inflammation with scratch marks likely indicates that a cross-shaped incision was used to allow a surgeon to peel away the scalp from the deeper tissues and expose the bone. This is not something found in those earlier cases of trepanation and shows us how such operations could actually be performed.
- Matèries
- Arqueologia
Història de la medicina
Medicina - Cirurgia i anatomia
- URL
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oa.3208
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