5 'Modern' Medical Procedures (Are Thousands of Years Old)

And then there were things like cataracts. Even if you were born with spectacular vision, and were perfect in every physical and mental way, chances are you'd get rewarded for your superiority by living into old age and getting cataracts. For those of you without grandparents, cataracts are when the lenses of your eyes kind of cloud over, like a fog made of eyeball. Everything turns into a soft-focus glamour shot, minus the feather boas and piercing stares. Great if you're a porn director, not so great if you're just a person trying to get around in the world.

Of course, these days they can actually correct cataracts with surgery using state of the art technology, including "a thin ultrasound probe" that "uses ultrasonic vibrations to dissolve (phacoemulsify) the clouded lens." But eyeball surgery seems like the kind of thing that you couldn't even get in 1950, let alone centuries ago.

The Brilliance:

Actually, as far back as 1000 B.C., the Indian doctor Sushruta developed a procedure for declouding the lenses of the eye. Warning: surgical eye-poking ahead.

The operation was simple, really. Sushruta and his minions would hold you down, then use a curved needle to loosen the lens and shove the cataract out of the field of vision, presumably back into the brain -- because hey, why not? Recovery was just a matter of having your eye soaked in warm butter and bandaged with some naan bread.

Apparently, Dr. Sush's little eye-gouging was so successful and kickass that famous Greeks like Pythagorus and Democritus traveled all the way to India to see it performed. And yet cataract-removal fever didn't spread over to Europe. Either the Western world preferred seeing the world through fog-colored lenses, or else they assumed the whole thing was too insane to be anything but a big, gruesome hoax.

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They also didn't believe in germs, or vaccinations, or even soap. What the Greek and Roman physicians believed in instead was the idea of humors: That the body had four fluids in equilibrium, and if any of those fluids got out of whack -- BOOM! SMALLPOX! (Which was followed by a bigger boom, which was the boom of death.) Not like today, when you get a shot in the arm when you're a kid and just shrug off the killer diseases for the rest of your life.

Because they were so ignorant on the subject, smallpox, the Black Death, measles and mumps could have just been named "Grim Reaper #1," "Grim Reaper #2" and so forth. Oh, except in one corner of the world, where someone figured out exactly how to prevent the devastation of smallpox.

The Brilliance:

In 1000 B.C., Hindu physician Dhanwantari demonstrated the basic principles of inoculation against disease by intentionally infecting patients with lesser versions of the disease. Specifically, smallpox. The same sickness that would put a dent in every population on every continent in the world. That smallpox. Dhanwantari had it under control. Kind of.

"Take the fluid of a pock on the udder of a cow ... upon the point of a lancet, and lance with it the arms between the shoulders and the elbows until the blood appears; then, mixing the fluid with the blood, the fever of the small-pox will be produced."

Gross. Just so we're clear, Dr. Dhan was mixing pus from a cow with cowpox with a person's blood, then putting that blood right back into the person. On purpose. And apparently, it worked. True, the newly cow-ified patients would get a little smallpox in the process, but their chances of dying went from 30 percent to 1 percent.

And here's the worst part: It took over 2,000 years for anyone from the West to notice that the Indian upper crust had smallpox beat. We're going to go with the same reasoning as the cataract surgery: because, lifesaving or not, the process was just too gross to consider.

Clearly, brain surgery back then was another term for "Instant death. By drill."

The Brilliance:

Recently, archaeologists in Turkey discovered a trepanned skull that was 4,000 years old, and not only did these ancient surgeons crack through the brain bone with 1-inch-by-2-inch incisions, their patients survived the ordeal. We know, because the skulls showed evidence of tissue regrowth. And the funny thing about corpses is that they don't regrow skull tissue. At all.

And that's despite the fact that they were using an obsidian rock as an incision tool. This wasn't just some caveman-style skull cracking -- the holes were precise and uniform. Think about that for a second. Imagine trying to carve through, oh, say, a piece of wood with a sharp rock, and how hard it would be. Now imagine getting through bone with the same tool, but the bone keeps shifting. Because it's on a person. A person who is getting drilled through the skull.

So the question is: Why would anyone drill holes in the brain? To relieve pressure, duh. Like when someone has brain trauma and fluid builds up in the head, surgeons will drill a quick hole before the brain gets compressed. As in, they'll do that today, because sometimes that's what a patient needs.

So when someone says they need something like they "need a hole in the head," just assume they haven't just experienced a major brain trauma. And when we hear about ancient surgeons doing it, we have to remember that in some cases, it worked.

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The Brilliance:

Not only did ancient civilizations understand, practice and perfect the art of the tracheotomy, it was actually one of the first surgical procedures invented. An Egyptian clay tablet portrayed a version of the tracheotomy in 3600 B.C. It wasn't even a medical description, it was just a picture, because 3600 B.C. was before the invention of writing. That's how long ago doctors figured out that you could cut the neck to reach the trachea to save a life.

India had a version of the procedure documented by 2000 B.C., and the surgery was so well known by Hippocrates' time that he condemned it, thanks to the likelihood that you could cut open an artery while performing it. Instead, he recommended a tracheal intubation, which is the one where you stick a tube in the neck of the poor sucker you're trying to save. In 160 A.D. a Greek doctor made intubation, or the tracheostomy, sound as much fun as a trip to the carnival:

"If you take a dead animal and blow air through its larynx (through a reed), you will fill its bronchi and watch its lungs attain the greatest dimension."

But even with thousands of years of practice, by 1800 the medical community had fewer than 50 lifesaving tracheotomies on record. Hey, we didn't say it was easy.

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Enlisting friends to hold you down and/or beat you with sticks while a barber (yes, a barber, not a dentist -- see the scissors in the background) twists out the rotten tooth with sheer muscle power. If you were lucky, your friends had some alcohol on them and the kid holding a lit candle to your face didn't trip. If you were unlucky, well, your gaping gum hole probably got infected and you died. But the barber could trim up your beard before your family identified the body, so that was good.

Which was why sporting even half a mouth of teeth by age 30 wasn't just a major accomplishment, it would have been a miracle. After all, the smartest people in the world believed tooth decay was caused by a "tooth worm" squirming around and beating the shit out of your tooth nerves for the fun of it.

The sophisticated techniques they have today like root canals (where they can use precision instruments to carefully extract the nerve from inside the tooth) would have seemed like goddamned magic to these savages.

The Brilliance:

Actually, despite thinking there were literal worms jacking up their tooth holes, someone in 200 B.C. figured out how to perform root canals. We know that because archaeologists found the remnants of the procedure in the jaw of a Jordanian soldier.

Keep in mind, in order to perform this procedure, the dentist has to understand what the inside of the tooth looks like, whether it's worth hollowing out and preserving, or if it would just be better to pull the bastard out. So when an Israeli archaeologist noticed a green stain on a tooth of the skull of a soldier buried in a mass grave from 200 B.C., he probably thought he was just looking at some particularly stubborn plaque.

It was not.

He was looking at the stain from a copper wire one-tenth of an inch long, which had been inserted into the soldier's tooth, probably in order to deaden the pain of the three apparent abscesses and probable cyst later found by a dental anthropologist (which is totally not a made-up career, by the way). In all likelihood, when the ancient dentist pulled out the nerve from the tooth, he thought he was pulling out the "worm." Either way, in the process he performed a full on modern day root canal.

We can only hope the afflicted soldier appreciated him for it.

For more ways modern society is behind on the learning curve, check out 6 Amazingly High-Tech Ancient Weapons and 6 Modern Technologies Animals Invented Millions of Years Ago.