Now on ScienceBlogs: The Galaxy's Biggest Valentine
Category: Anthropology
Here's a nice follow-up to my article about prion diseases. It's an excerpt from Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health, by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Rhodes. The book documents the work of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the American...
Posted by Mo at 11:21 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anthropology
The procedure known as trepanation, in which a hole is scraped or drilled in the skull, is an ancient form of neurosurgery that has been performed since the late Stone Age. Exactly why ancient peoples performed trepanation has remained...
Posted by Mo at 7:31 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anthropology
The 3-minute film clip below is definitely not for the squeamish. It comes from a documentary called A Hole in the Head, made in 1998, and shows a Kisi medicine man performing the "operation of the skulls"....
Posted by Mo at 5:41 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anthropology
The operation of Trepan, from Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism and Lithotomy, by Charles Bell, 1815. (John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa's Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.)Trepanation, or trephination...
Posted by Mo at 9:53 AM • 32 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anthropology
The 2007 Annual Review of Anthropology has just been published, and is freely available online. It includes reviews called The Archaeology of Religious Ritual, The Archaeology of Sudan and Nubia, Genomic Comparisons of Humans and Chimpanzees and Anthropology and Militarism. ...
Posted by Mo at 12:31 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Black peoples' brains are, of course, no more or less peculiar than those of any other people. The human brain is an extraordinarily complex organ, and there are just as many differences between the brains of people from the same...
Posted by Mo at 7:56 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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