I'm enjoying a new book on the history of neuroscience by Prof. Charlie Gross entitled A Hole in The Head(MIT Press, 2009). It leads off, of course, with a splendid discussion of trepanation through the ages. My favorite line: "These findings finally established that Neolithic man could carry out survival trepanation but left unresolved the motivation for this operation."
Wonderful, disturbing images abound, like this one from Diderot's Encyclopedia of 1761. Is that a neck there or is this figure supposed to depict a free-range head?
