Re: VMs: Strange disorders

[RSRICHMOND@xxxxxxx]

Glen Claston asks:

>>Virtually *all* surgical manuals from the 15th/16th century have sections 
on opening the skull, with some very gruesome drawings and woodcuts to back 
them up. Certainly these operations were done to relieve imaginary humours in 
many cases, but cutting into and opening the cranium was apparently a common 
surgical practice. Any thoughts on this?<<

Actually, opening the skull to relieve peccant humors seems to have been 
practiced in prehistoric times in many places in the world, with skulls showing 
trephine holes with healing (rounding) of their edges. There was a lot of 
interest in this by physical anthropologists like Hrdlicka in the 1930's.

I've never seen any comment as to what people thought they were doing with 
all this skull-boring, or why this procedure emerged so many times in history. 
About the only valid reason I can think of for trephining the skull in the 
pre-modern world would be to relieve the pressure of a depressed skull fracture on 
the underlying brain. If I recall correctly, the Egyptians (perphaps the 
Ebers papyrus) understood this problem.

As to antiseptics, what they needed was plain soap and water. I imagine that 
plants containing a lot of phenols such as thyme or oregano (or better yet 
santolina) might have added some additional antibacterial activity. But if they'd 
invented soap, they probably would have had the maximum benefit right there.

Now Nick Pelling mentions hemp. This gets interesting in a hurry. There are 
two varieties of hemp (Cannabis sativa/indica/ruderalis/what have you), fiber 
hemp and resin hemp. I believe it isn't clear just how widely known resin hemp 
- hashish and so on - was in Europe before the Napoleonic wars. A most 
interesting piece of negative evidence on this point is Rabelais' early to mid 16th 
century Gargantua and Pantagruel, with its paean to "pantagruelion" - evidently 
fiber hemp - at the end of book 3. This long text doesn't refer to the 
medicinal or recreational use of resin hemp at all, at least not in the translation 
(Jacques Le Clerq) I'm looking at.

I'm surprised that Rabelais' curious book with its wealth of herbal lore 
hasn't been more extensively explored on the Voynich list.

Bob Richmond
Samurai Pathologist
Knoxville TN
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