In the earliest days of medicine, people needed a trip to the doctor like a hole in the head. Because that’s exactly what they got: Healers and witch doctors were downright wanton in their use of trepanning — the practice of sharpening a stone to cut away a section of skull in fully conscious patients. Trepanning was done to relieve headaches, remove fractured skull fragments, provide spirits with an easy entrance or escape, sometimes just to provide rondelles — the leftover bony disks valued as charms or talismans.
At 7,000 years old, the stone trephine is considered the earliest surgical tool, but it’s not its antiquity that makes it important; it’s how the concept has remained relevant from the Neolithic to the now. Modern neurosurgeons don’t dangle rondelles around their necks, but they do still remove sections of skull.
The procedure, now called a craniotomy, is used to relieve pressure on a swelling brain, or grant access to a stroke victim’s hemorrhaging blood vessel, among others.
Although the trephine was the first tool to transform medicine, it was far from the last. Here, in no particular order, are 14 others carrying on in that heady tradition.
