2026 seems to be a good year for encounters with references to trepanation in literature. If you aren't familiar with the term, trepanation refers to a procedure that involves drilling a hole in the skull.
I have two previous compilations of trepanation excerpts, which can be viewed here.
I read two books that mentioned trepanation earlier this year but haven't recorded the relevant passages. One of those books is A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang. With that novel, it would be a spoiler to excerpt the passage about trepanation. I can't remember the title of the other book (only that there was trepanation in it), but by the time I encountered this procedure a third time, in Ruth Ozeki's short story collection, I decided to start a new compilation.
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The Typing Lady and Other Fictions by Ruth Ozeki
He arrived in that third-eye place, midbrow, where Botox is injected, and where, in the old,pre-psychopharmaceutical days, they drilled holes to aerate the brain. The procedure was called trepanation, the precursor to the frontal lobotomy. Archaeologists have found ventilated skulls from 3000 BC, and there are still advocacy groups who defend your right to take a drill bit to your head. They say it drains brain water, increasing blood flow to the cerebellum. Sort of the opposite of Botox.
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Glyph by Ali Smith
But tinnitus can be depressing. It can drive people insane. In the old days people trepanned the people who said they had it, to release through the holes they made in their skulls whatever creature or spirit might be living in their heads making the noise. As you might imagine, that didn't work. The Egyptians thought the ears of people who had it had been enchanted by dark magic. They used frankincense. That didn't work either.
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Compulsory Figures: Poems by John Barton
MEETING THE HANG-UP ARTIST
long after they had me and years before
we realized something might be amiss
she began to hang up whenever
anyone besides my father
answered, the black rotary phone
installed above my mother's fixed
place at the yellow Arborite table
in the kitchen alcove, tightly wound
cord, when not in use, redundantly
dangling below the receiver
in a single looped ringlet from
midway up the wall below her
aproned knee, its pendulum sway
something she might bat aside
while marmalading a burnt
slice of toast or trepanning her
soft-boiled egg, our one extension
at a remove in his study where
any of us could talk in private
should we need to and in retrospect
it is clear he must have tried to pick
up on the first ring, its uniqueness
repetitive, years, months, weeks
dialing past us, the solitary rings
explained away as wrong numbers
[...]
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The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Here is the thing about Spud: he had a hole in his head. His head was bald and the hole was up front, right above his forehead, maybe an inch deep, the skin grown over it. Years ago, he had been working on a house and a bolt had gone through his head. This was all Artie knew about the accident.
[transcribed from the audio edition]
