It's been a while since my last post about trepanations encountered in my reading. (You can find it here.) Do you need these like a hole in the head? Perhaps, but here they are, anyway.
The Animals in the Country by Laura Jean McKay
"You're registered, all official. Here's a couple of armbands. Not compulsory, just a handy reminder that you've been diagnosed correctly. Okay? Next, thanks."
"Wait up. I'm sick. I need medical support."
"The doctors are busy with the psychotic," the nurse says quietly. "Those who are displaying psychotic tendencies, in danger of trepanning, talking to insects et cetera." We glance down the line to where the little girl is pawing at the ground. "Are you talking to insects?" The nurse is up in my face now, filling the world.
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One of the people outside runs her mouth along the windshield of the flat front of the van, leaving a trail. The dust we've collected on all the roads browns her teeth like she's been chowing down on chocolate cake. She wanders off. Ange is always telling Kimberly not to stare at different people, but I'm staring.
"What's wrong with her?"
The man makes a rat-a-tat motion on his noggin. "Bless them. Our do-it-yourselfers can get excited, turn nasty."
"Do-it-yourself what?"
"Do-it-yourself trepanning. Hand drill to the skull, relieve the pressure caused by the flu. Stops all the critters talking to you. You must have seen the video. I can do it for you, if you want."
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The Golden Compass: The Graphic Novel by Philip Pullman, adapted by Stephane Melchoir and Clement Oubrerie, translated by Annie Eaton
Fight Night by Miriam Toews
Grandma is trying to find someone who will drill a hole in her head because she's heard that's the most effective way of getting rid of trigeminal neuralgia, which is nicknamed the suicide disease because it's the most painful physical experience a human being can have and you just want to kill yourself. But nobody wants to drill a hole into Grandma's head because of her age. They stop drilling holes into people at around age sixty. Remember that, Swiv! Grandma said.
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Matrix by Lauren Groff
But there is a disease in the grain, or perhaps it is cursed by the devil, and after eating it, some dance uncontrollably and sing naked in the streets. Others scream with terrified visions. Others go stiff and barely breathe.
Nothing can drive out the disease. Not praying, not bathing them in holy water, not tying them to their beds, not leaping out from the night to frighten them, not holding them by the ankle in the cold river, not beating them around the head with a yew branch, not burying them crown to toe in warm manure, not hanging them upside down from a high tree and spinning them until they vomit, not drilling a tiny hole through their skulls to let the bad humours out of the brains.
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The Air Year by Caroline Bird
It's like being a windmill in a vacuum
packed village. Weekends are the worst.
The taste of nothing is like licking dew off plastic.
Floppy soul, they call it. Slack spirit. Neurological
pins and needles. Someone has drilled a hole in the crown
of my head, inserted a funnel, emptied
molten margarine into my plumbing. [...]
-from the poem 'The Deadness'
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Haven by Emma Donoghue
Cormac's fingers go up to the little crater above his left ear. "A slingstone stove my head in."
"In battle?"
That seems too grand a word for it. "Well, we were disputing with another clan. The blow sent me out of my senses.
But my brother's wife had heard the Christians had strong medicine" -- he almost said magic -- "so my people brought me to Cluain Mhic Nois. A monk called Fiach, he saved me."
"How?" Artt asks.
"Cut the scalp and peeled me like an apple. With a hand drill he bored holes until the smashed piece came right off. Then he sewed the skin back over the hole, and poulticed me with herbs, and prayed till my fever broke."
"You were quite well again?"
"Better than before, in fact, Deo gratias." Cormac makes a cross on his forehead. "Wits a bit sharper and memory roomier."
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Mad Honey by Katie Welch
He leaned over and kissed her neck. She swung around, hair delicately brushing his face, kissed him full on the lips, and returned her attention to the front of the hall. Beck stared at the back of her head, wishing he could burrow through her soft brown hair, trepan her skull and examine her thoughts.
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Be serious, Jean. You have just looked into the woman's brain. What did you see?
Just meat. Red and yellow and white meat, like you'd see in a butcher's window.
We used a medical auger. It's like a drill. We put a three-quarter-inch hollow bit on it. The bone popped right out.
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Black Wine by Candas Jane Dorsey
"Here's the imaging of your head," says the medsar. "See where the dark patches are? That's scar tissue. Then these places here are the recent surgery."
"Trepanned," says Essa.
"That's the old name," says the medsar. "But we don't do it with an auger anymore. Brace and bit. Barbaric." She doesn't look at Essa, only at the image she holds up against the sunny window. "Then, here's the area of healing. Your brain has established these alternate pathways here, see? We didn't disturb that area much."
Essa is too polite to say she can't see why those yellow areas are any different from the other yellow areas which are, it seems, healthy tissue.
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The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou
After Judith's death, Cassandra started getting headaches. And every time her sister tells her to shut up, there's a stab of pain, like a heart beating against bone. Finally understanding why trepanation exists, she dreams of piercing her skull. If only the bone in her forehead could be perforated to free the hurt like air from a balloon, pus from an abscess.
[updated February 2024]
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