13 ms·

Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors

96 points by laurex 8y ago

blotter_paper 8y ago
"(A shocking 91% of patients survived in an additional sample of just nine skulls from the northern highlands between 1000 C.E. and 1300 C.E.)" Uhm... how? If just one had died from a sample of nine, that would be a success rate of ~89%. How do you get to 91% without jumping all the way to 100%?
- taneq 8y ago
  The ninth one was only mostly dead.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- DrScump 8y ago
  And they didn't consider that their sample was already biased in favor of survivors? Didn't the Inca and their predecessors dispose of their non-nobility dead mostly via air burial and burning?
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    What bias are you proposing? That they ennobled the survivors?
    - Y_Y 8y ago
      > A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors? You don't bury survivors, and you give better medical treatment to nobles.
      - maxerickson 8y ago
        You bury them eventually, which is the pertinent consideration if you are worried about burning the bodies destroying evidence. That people with higher status received better treatment wouldn't really impact assessing how advanced their technique was, it would just show it at its best (which is sort of the thing being assessed, what sort of outcomes did their knowledge enable).
    - DrScump 8y ago
      No, that nobles were more likely to get the best surgeons, if non-nobles got surgery at all. Remember, human sacrifice was common[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#South_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#South_America
- IncRnd 8y ago
  Yep. That casts doubt on the scientific validity of everything else claimed. For this statistic, either the percentage is wrong, or they really meant 10/11 or 11/12.
partycoder 8y ago
During the Civil War, the US Army consulted Florence Nightingale about how to manage field hospitals. Survival rates prior to those sanitary reforms were pretty bad due to infections and other sanitary related complications. Anesthetics like sulfuric ether and chloroform, while widely used in surgeries, were not as well understood as today back then. Andean peoples have a biological adaptation to high altitudes. 33% larger lung capacity, increased red blood cell count, increased hemoglobin concentration and about 0.5 gallons of additional blood in average [1]. This promotes healing. The Inca did not have powerful anesthetics. Only preparations based on coca leafs and possibly other ingredients. They were skilled in trepanations, since they often injured their heads in close combat. [1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajhb.22367 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajhb.22367
mmjaa 8y ago
If we didn't have heavily entrenched imperialist tendencies that allowed us to destroy so-called "inferior cultures" at will, we'd probably have learned a lot more from our fellow man than we have. The Australian aborigines knew about anti-septics and anti-biotic preparations hundreds of years before we, in the West, claimed the victory for ourselves. They even had a Hippocratic oath hundreds of years before Western physicians, who were still practicing blood-letting as a norm. Colonists arrived, and those injured who stayed in their camps for treatment by the blood-letters, died. Those who consulted the locals, learned bush medicines, were healed and survived. If only some rational souls had been there to observe, we could've had antibiotics a hundred years sooner. One wonders what sort of world it would've been if we'd paid more attention to the aborigines, rather than massacre them.
- cgb223 8y ago
  Do you have a source on that? I’d love to read more about it
  - mmjaa 8y ago
    From the Journal of Anthropological Society of South Australia: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4nc6Ke_QEEJ:www.friendsofglenthorne.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Clarke-Vol-33-2008.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=at&client=safari http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4nc6Ke... There are a few other studies out there on this issue .. quite revealing. EDIT: a nice quote which highlights the issue: Colonist and author Dame Mary Gilmore stated in her reminiscences of growing up in rural New South Wales that: … the white forgets the uncounted ways in which he [was] … unintelligent (and still would be unintelligent) but for what the blacks taught. As parallels to the treatment of snake-bite by sucking, take the use of eucalyptus, the application of weak wattle tan-water for burns and blisters, of clean mud as poultices, of native gums in dysentery, the eucalyptus beds and steam pits for colds and rheumatism, and ask was it a black or a white intelligence that was first to find and apply these(Gilmore 1935: 232). She stated that a whole industry in making medicines owed its existence to Aboriginal practices: It is true there is a eucalyptus extract industry now; but the knowledge that led to that was originally derived from the natives, who used eucalyptus leaves in steaming, and for wounds. For rheumatism steam pits were made, heated by fires, raked out, lined with leaves and then possum-rugs laid over the top. Another use of the leaves was as a strapping for wounds that needed closing in order to heal. These uses came to the pioneers from the blacks (Gilmore 1935: 226).
sorokod 8y ago
The findings are interesting and indicates just how much you can improve a "low tech" process by persisting and refining it over hundreds of years. Comparison to American civil war success rates looks arbitrary and odd though.
- booleandilemma 8y ago
  It makes for an eye-catching headline. Also, the author has posted other articles with the theme of “native peoples did it first/better than westerners”: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/did-early-easter-islanders-sail-south-america-europeans http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/did-early-easter-isla... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-archaeologists-find-early-democratic-societies-americas http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-... Unearthing democracy's roots: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6330/1114 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6330/1114
- sorokod 8y ago
  Link to the paper: https://www.worldneurosurgery.org/article/S1878-8750(18)30625-9/fulltext https://www.worldneurosurgery.org/article/S1878-8750(18)3062...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dalbasal 8y ago
This is pretty interesting about the Inca doctors, showing that they had an advanced medical tradition. The fact reasearches can determine success rates in early periods compared to later periods,... That's quite an amazing discovery. But civil war doctors are not a good comparison standard.... If you go back 150 years, scientific/western medicine really sucked. They didn't do antiseptic surgery, and lots of patients died of infections from dirty doctor hands. When the patients did have infections, there were no antibiotics. They didn't know about germs. Etc. Meanwhile, they had thrown out all the non-scientific stuff. Witches brews containing antibiotics. Old time herbal medicines like willow bark (aspirin).. traditional healing existed alongside formal medicine for many generations, and the healers were probably more successful for a lot of it. It's only really after/during WW2, that the basics of modern medicine were really solid: antiseptic surgery, penecilin, vaccinations,.. it went from crappy beta version to the best medicine ever invented pretty quickly. For the first few hundred years, scientific medicine was the world leader in anatomy, dissection, making detailed drawings of bodies. Fundamental to the evidence but for curing people... I think the doctors were average and below, until some point in the 20th century, after centuries.
- partycoder 8y ago
  By the time of the American Civil War there were already sanitary reforms taking place. Most of them motivated by the work of Florence Nightingale. Through statistical analysis she concluded that bad sanitary conditions led to higher death rates.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    Sure. Modern medicine didn't emerge in a day, and practices in one field hospital would have been better or worse than elsewhere. My point is that scientific medicine as a gold standard, that came 3-4 generations later. In the post war period, that's when modern medicine was an indisputable leader in the field of healing. Also, I think you make an important point on Florence Nightingale. Maybe we should call hygienic meducine practices, "modern scientific nursing" rather than medicine. Incidentally, I wonder if that brief period where female nurses where celebrated might be a period when some traditional practices may have crept back into the modern practices.
tranchms 8y ago
Why is she comparing the “worst surgery conditions” to the peak talents of Inca civilization? Like, seems to me that this culture is highly intelligent. No less than we are. Why compare them to civil war surgeries? Compare the finest surgeons to the finest surgeons.
pipio21 8y ago
You could not compare apples and oranges. In particular you could not compare injuries created by explosives in a war with advanced use on gunpowder with injuries made by stones, arrows and spears. Gunpoder and canon shrapnel was extremely deadly because x-rays were not invented and doctors could not see were those fragments were in the body. They were blind until Madame Curie started using X-rays in WWI and suddenly people started surviving. It took the Curies getting too much radiation though.
roywiggins 8y ago
There's evidence of Stone Age trepanation in Europe on cows, which could plausibly be the earliest evidence of people practicing surgery on animals. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/19/health/stone-age-cow-cranial-surgery/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/19/health/stone-age-cow-cranial-...
eggy 8y ago
Interesting, but I would think Civil War battlefield surgery is not an apples-to-apples comparison, since the article states that trepanation might have been practiced for headaches and other more mundane symptoms. Trauma surgery from blunt force or bullet wounds would put the starting conditions a bit at the high-risk side, no? Didn't the Inca conduct a substantial amount of sacrifices including child sacrifice? This could be like studying anatomy with a plethora of corpses from the guillotine during the French revolution like Lavoisier(?) where you learn by cutting up and practicing on cadavers.
PuercoPop 8y ago
The Paracas have nothing to do with the Inca Civilization!

96 points by laurex 8y ago

"(A shocking 91% of patients survived in an additional sample of just nine skulls from the northern highlands between 1000 C.E. and 1300 C.E.)" Uhm... how? If just one had died from a sample of nine, that would be a success rate of ~89%. How do you get to 91% without jumping all the way to 100%?

taneq 8y ago
The ninth one was only mostly dead.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
DrScump 8y ago
And they didn't consider that their sample was already biased in favor of survivors? Didn't the Inca and their predecessors dispose of their non-nobility dead mostly via air burial and burning?
- maxerickson 8y ago
  What bias are you proposing? That they ennobled the survivors?
  - Y_Y 8y ago
    > A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors? You don't bury survivors, and you give better medical treatment to nobles.
    - maxerickson 8y ago
      You bury them eventually, which is the pertinent consideration if you are worried about burning the bodies destroying evidence. That people with higher status received better treatment wouldn't really impact assessing how advanced their technique was, it would just show it at its best (which is sort of the thing being assessed, what sort of outcomes did their knowledge enable).
  - DrScump 8y ago
    No, that nobles were more likely to get the best surgeons, if non-nobles got surgery at all. Remember, human sacrifice was common[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#South_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#South_America
IncRnd 8y ago
Yep. That casts doubt on the scientific validity of everything else claimed. For this statistic, either the percentage is wrong, or they really meant 10/11 or 11/12.

partycoder 8y ago

During the Civil War, the US Army consulted Florence Nightingale about how to manage field hospitals. Survival rates prior to those sanitary reforms were pretty bad due to infections and other sanitary related complications. Anesthetics like sulfuric ether and chloroform, while widely used in surgeries, were not as well understood as today back then. Andean peoples have a biological adaptation to high altitudes. 33% larger lung capacity, increased red blood cell count, increased hemoglobin concentration and about 0.5 gallons of additional blood in average [1]. This promotes healing. The Inca did not have powerful anesthetics. Only preparations based on coca leafs and possibly other ingredients. They were skilled in trepanations, since they often injured their heads in close combat. [1]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajhb.22367 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajhb.22367

mmjaa 8y ago

If we didn't have heavily entrenched imperialist tendencies that allowed us to destroy so-called "inferior cultures" at will, we'd probably have learned a lot more from our fellow man than we have. The Australian aborigines knew about anti-septics and anti-biotic preparations hundreds of years before we, in the West, claimed the victory for ourselves. They even had a Hippocratic oath hundreds of years before Western physicians, who were still practicing blood-letting as a norm. Colonists arrived, and those injured who stayed in their camps for treatment by the blood-letters, died. Those who consulted the locals, learned bush medicines, were healed and survived. If only some rational souls had been there to observe, we could've had antibiotics a hundred years sooner. One wonders what sort of world it would've been if we'd paid more attention to the aborigines, rather than massacre them.

cgb223 8y ago
Do you have a source on that? I’d love to read more about it
- mmjaa 8y ago
  From the Journal of Anthropological Society of South Australia: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4nc6Ke_QEEJ:www.friendsofglenthorne.org.au/wp-content/uploads/Clarke-Vol-33-2008.pdf+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=at&client=safari http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4nc6Ke... There are a few other studies out there on this issue .. quite revealing. EDIT: a nice quote which highlights the issue: Colonist and author Dame Mary Gilmore stated in her reminiscences of growing up in rural New South Wales that: … the white forgets the uncounted ways in which he [was] … unintelligent (and still would be unintelligent) but for what the blacks taught. As parallels to the treatment of snake-bite by sucking, take the use of eucalyptus, the application of weak wattle tan-water for burns and blisters, of clean mud as poultices, of native gums in dysentery, the eucalyptus beds and steam pits for colds and rheumatism, and ask was it a black or a white intelligence that was first to find and apply these(Gilmore 1935: 232). She stated that a whole industry in making medicines owed its existence to Aboriginal practices: It is true there is a eucalyptus extract industry now; but the knowledge that led to that was originally derived from the natives, who used eucalyptus leaves in steaming, and for wounds. For rheumatism steam pits were made, heated by fires, raked out, lined with leaves and then possum-rugs laid over the top. Another use of the leaves was as a strapping for wounds that needed closing in order to heal. These uses came to the pioneers from the blacks (Gilmore 1935: 226).

sorokod 8y ago

The findings are interesting and indicates just how much you can improve a "low tech" process by persisting and refining it over hundreds of years. Comparison to American civil war success rates looks arbitrary and odd though.

booleandilemma 8y ago
It makes for an eye-catching headline. Also, the author has posted other articles with the theme of “native peoples did it first/better than westerners”: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/did-early-easter-islanders-sail-south-america-europeans http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/did-early-easter-isla... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-archaeologists-find-early-democratic-societies-americas http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-... Unearthing democracy's roots: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6330/1114 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6330/1114
sorokod 8y ago
Link to the paper: https://www.worldneurosurgery.org/article/S1878-8750(18)30625-9/fulltext https://www.worldneurosurgery.org/article/S1878-8750(18)3062...

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

dalbasal 8y ago

This is pretty interesting about the Inca doctors, showing that they had an advanced medical tradition. The fact reasearches can determine success rates in early periods compared to later periods,... That's quite an amazing discovery. But civil war doctors are not a good comparison standard.... If you go back 150 years, scientific/western medicine really sucked. They didn't do antiseptic surgery, and lots of patients died of infections from dirty doctor hands. When the patients did have infections, there were no antibiotics. They didn't know about germs. Etc. Meanwhile, they had thrown out all the non-scientific stuff. Witches brews containing antibiotics. Old time herbal medicines like willow bark (aspirin).. traditional healing existed alongside formal medicine for many generations, and the healers were probably more successful for a lot of it. It's only really after/during WW2, that the basics of modern medicine were really solid: antiseptic surgery, penecilin, vaccinations,.. it went from crappy beta version to the best medicine ever invented pretty quickly. For the first few hundred years, scientific medicine was the world leader in anatomy, dissection, making detailed drawings of bodies. Fundamental to the evidence but for curing people... I think the doctors were average and below, until some point in the 20th century, after centuries.

partycoder 8y ago
By the time of the American Civil War there were already sanitary reforms taking place. Most of them motivated by the work of Florence Nightingale. Through statistical analysis she concluded that bad sanitary conditions led to higher death rates.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  Sure. Modern medicine didn't emerge in a day, and practices in one field hospital would have been better or worse than elsewhere. My point is that scientific medicine as a gold standard, that came 3-4 generations later. In the post war period, that's when modern medicine was an indisputable leader in the field of healing. Also, I think you make an important point on Florence Nightingale. Maybe we should call hygienic meducine practices, "modern scientific nursing" rather than medicine. Incidentally, I wonder if that brief period where female nurses where celebrated might be a period when some traditional practices may have crept back into the modern practices.

tranchms 8y ago

Why is she comparing the “worst surgery conditions” to the peak talents of Inca civilization? Like, seems to me that this culture is highly intelligent. No less than we are. Why compare them to civil war surgeries? Compare the finest surgeons to the finest surgeons.

pipio21 8y ago

You could not compare apples and oranges. In particular you could not compare injuries created by explosives in a war with advanced use on gunpowder with injuries made by stones, arrows and spears. Gunpoder and canon shrapnel was extremely deadly because x-rays were not invented and doctors could not see were those fragments were in the body. They were blind until Madame Curie started using X-rays in WWI and suddenly people started surviving. It took the Curies getting too much radiation though.

roywiggins 8y ago

There's evidence of Stone Age trepanation in Europe on cows, which could plausibly be the earliest evidence of people practicing surgery on animals. https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/19/health/stone-age-cow-cranial-surgery/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/19/health/stone-age-cow-cranial-...

eggy 8y ago

Interesting, but I would think Civil War battlefield surgery is not an apples-to-apples comparison, since the article states that trepanation might have been practiced for headaches and other more mundane symptoms. Trauma surgery from blunt force or bullet wounds would put the starting conditions a bit at the high-risk side, no? Didn't the Inca conduct a substantial amount of sacrifices including child sacrifice? This could be like studying anatomy with a plethora of corpses from the guillotine during the French revolution like Lavoisier(?) where you learn by cutting up and practicing on cadavers.

PuercoPop 8y ago

The Paracas have nothing to do with the Inca Civilization!