When Alexander the Great saw the philosopher Diogenes looking intently at a pile of bones, he asked what the philosopher was doing. Diogenes replied: “I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.”
I like Diogenes. We could use the likes of him during these pre-election times when everyone seems crippled to do straight talk, afraid to offend potential blocks of voters. But that aside, I cited Diogenes because that was the exchange that came to my mind when I was reading The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons (Backbay Books: NY, 2014) by Sam Kean.
Kean’s book is about a fallen royal head’s head revealing (probably to the surprise or objection of many who believed that the body parts of some people, like the royalty and the religious, are different from the rest), that it is, anatomically speaking, as vulnerable as anybody else’s – prince or slave alike.
Kean’s first chapter was captivating – a blow by blow account of how France’s King Henry II’s (1519-1559) misfortune made brain science the winner. It was a riveting account stalked by Kean’s witty innuendos and insights.
In it we learned that ironically, it was Henry II himself who insisted on the very joust that landed the spear of Scotsman Gabriel Montgomery in between the king’s eyebrows piercing his right eye socket. Previously, Henry II has had two other jousts with two other men, with the king having emerged triumphant. He was the one who wanted to do acts 1 and 2 of the joust with Montgomery. The second act did not kill him on the spot but the next 11 days for the king became a sort of “maker faire” for all sorts of things by the doctors of the royal court to restore the royal head.
What made the 11 days extremely interesting is, as Kean pointed out, how this was the opportunity for two “neurosurgeons”, Ambroise Paré and Vesuvius, who were not royal doctors, to make the leap from what known physicians clung with fervor at that time: Galen’s teachings written almost 1500 years before Henry II’s reign.
The two came to the door of medical science through very different paths.
Paré was known for being an innovative surgeon. Being a surgeon at that time was not as prestigious as it is now. He was a “barber-surgeon” not needing a license to practice his craft. As he became a “battlefield surgeon”, the war front was his surgical theatre, concocting potions, which sometimes worked and sometimes did not, in an attempt to heal soldiers’ wounds.
His innovative tool was a drill-and-saw tandem that could puncture a hole in the skull to relieve pressure in the brain. This was quite a departure from the commonly held opinion of physicians at that time that as long as there was no visible fracture to the skull, the brain was safe and secure. Brain traumas like concussions, sans the visible scars, only inhabited the fringes of medical thought then.
Vesuvius, on the other hand, was an anatomist who had founded his own school. While at first, he adored Galen’s works, his own probing and dissecting of humans made him realize that Galen’s ideas about the human anatomy, which Galen mostly inferred from his own dissections of animals, were erroneous.
Faced with the troubled head of the King, the two brain surgeons, did their own observations and tests. Vesuvius did a test which caused the king to writhe in pain. This made Vesuvius think that such pain could only mean terminal damage has been inflicted on the brain. Paré on the other hand, based his opinion on his warfront medical sorties where he observed that blows to the head caused grave traumas to the opposite side of the head, which could kill.
But the theories of these two men remained theories on the deathbed of Henry II as the king deteriorated in ways and stages that patients in the 21st century could have, if they had not been attended to. Swelling extended to his face, consciousness was in and out, left eye was blinded and was infected, and a booming headache heavily clapped from the back of his skull. Henry II died 11 days after his final joust.
But the clear contribution to brain science was after this death – the autopsy of the king by Paré and Vesuvius. It confirmed not only that the King was mortal and his brain was gooey just like everyone else’s. They also found “pools of blackened fluids” and “ yellow and putrefied” parts in the back part of his brain – which is the opposite side of where Henry II was struck. This confirms exactly what Pare thought had happened to the king.
From the vistas literally culled from a king’s troubled head over 400 years ago, the idea that our brains can suffer serious damage even if the bone protecting it remains intact is now a routine diagnostic precaution. This holds whether you are king, slave, boxer, soccer player or writer.
Diogenes could have been looking at dead brains and said the same thing he did about the bones. – Rappler.com
(Images 1, 2 courtesy of Shutterstock)
There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.