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 pr

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.