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".
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Last month, I travelled to Bristol to meet 37-year-old Heather Perry, one of a very small number of people to have voluntarily undergone trepanation for non-medical reasons. As we ate a pub lunch, I asked Heather about her experience. Below is a transcript of our conversation.
M: How did you first…
Amazing video, thanks so much. How on earth did you find it?
Amazing footage. Quite hard to watch - not just the procedure but the mishapen heads of the other patients. It's hard to believe that a simple headache could lead to such an operation.
Does not necessary have to be headache. I think in this case it's for a spiritual reason. The shape of the head is for a purpose.
Pretty ethnocentric. It's hard to believe this documentary was made only ten years ago.
The producers of A Hole in the Head uploaded it to YouTube a few weeks ago; they have a YouTube channel which contains several other clips from the documentary.
The footage in this clip is actually taken from a 1964 mondo film called Kwaheri.