A Hole in the Head: A History of Trepanation | The MIT Press Reader
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In 1865, in the ancient Inca city of Cuzco, Ephraim George Squier, explorer, archeologist, ethnologist and U.S. charge d’affaires in Central America, received an unusual gift from his hostess, Señora Zentino, a woman known as the finest collector of art and antiquities in Peru. The gift was a skull from a vast nearby Inca burial ground. What was unusual about the skull was that a hole slightly larger than a half-inch square had been cut out of it. Squier’s judgment was that the skull hole was not an injury but was the result of a deliberate surgical operation known as trepanning and furthermore, that the individual had survived the surgery.
