This volume will look at the history of trepanation, the identification of skulls, the tools used to make the cranial openings, and theories as to why trepanation might have been performed many thousands of years ago.

Essays on great figures and important issues, advances and blind alleys—from trepanation to the discovery of grandmother cells—in the history of brain sciences. Neuroscientist Charles Gross has been interested in the history of his field since his days as an undergraduate. A Hole in the Head is the second collection of essays in which he illuminates the study of the brain with fascinating episodes from the past. This volume's tales range from the history of trepanation (drilling a hole in the skull) to neurosurgery as painted by Hieronymus Bosch to the discovery that bats navigate using echolocation. The emphasis is on blind alleys and errors as well as triumphs and discoveries, with ancient practices connected to recent developments and controversies. Gross first reaches back into the beginnings of neuroscience, then takes up the interaction of art and neuroscience, exploring, among other things, Rembrandt's “Anatomy Lesson” paintings, and finally, examines discoveries by scientists whose work was scorned in their own time but proven correct in later eras.

This book takes readers on a journey around the world and through time, accompanied by a modern neurosurgeon who reviews historical techniques and instruments used for cranial opening. The author draws on original medical and surgical books to provide a comprehensive history of these techniques and tools. To complement the general overview and offer readers a more ‘hands-on’ sense of context and atmosphere, extensive historical references, stories, media news and illustrative cases have been included for each historical and geographical scenario. In addition, original illustrations and plates of these archaic instruments and techniques are supplied. Neurosurgical surgeons, nurses, technicians, medical historiographers, paleo-pathologists and researchers interested in surgical techniques for cranial opening will find the volume a valuable guide, intended to increase the historical and cultural awareness of this core topic in neurological surgery.

A heavily expanded edition of Joe Mellen's legendary, long out-of-print auto-trepanation memoir. A heavily expanded edition of Joe Mellen's legendary, long out-of-print auto-trepanation memoir, Bore Hole takes us deep into the dawning of the UK's psychedelic counter culture, and into a mind breaking free from the confines of a traditional English upbringing. Travelling to Morocco and Ibiza, then back to the first spring of swinging London, Joe Mellen discovers the pleasures of hashish, is captivated by the visionary intensity of LSD and, after meeting the Dutch psychedelic guru Bart Huges, attempts the ultimate head trip, the bore hole. As well as a selection of unseen archive photographs, this edition includes a new postscript, essays, appendices and a 1967 interview with Bart Huges.

This volume will look at the history of trepanation, the identification of skulls, the tools used to make the cranial openings, and theories as to why trepanation might have been performed many thousands of years ago.

Sergey Gandlevsky is widely recognized as one of the leading living Russian poets and prose writers. His autobiographical novella Trepanation of the Skull is a portrait of the artist as a young late-Soviet man. At the center of the narrative are Gandlevsky's brain tumor, surgery, and recovery in the early 1990s. The story radiates out, relaying the poet's personal history through 1994, including his unique perspective on the 1991 coup by Communist hardliners resisted by Boris Yeltsin. Gandlevsky tells wonderfully strange but true episodes from the bohemian life he and his literary companions led. He also frankly describes his epic alcoholism and his ambivalent adjustment to marriage and fatherhood. Aside from its documentary interest, the book's appeal derives from its self-critical and shockingly honest narrator, who expresses himself in the densely stylized version of Moscow slang that was characteristic of the nonconformist intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s. Gandlevsky is a true artist of language who incorporates into his style the cadences of Pushkin and Tiutchev, the folk wisdom of proverbs, and slang in all its varieties. Susanne Fusso's excellent translation marks the first volume in English of Sergey Gandlevsky's prose, and it will interest scholars, students, and general readers of Russian literature and culture of the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods.