Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 1.djvu/83



THEORY

BY E. MILLIGAN, M.D., F.S.A.

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T is not easy to say at what date or period of science, the eminences and various inequalities on the surface of the human skull first became particular objects of attention among medical men. They could not have escaped notice after the operation of trepan, or perforation of the cranium, when its fracture, or other diseases occasioning compression of the brain, had once been introduced; for, in that operation, such inequalities greatly increase its hazard, and call for the strictest attention from the most reckless practitioners. But the trepan, and these inequalities, were familiar to Hippocrates and to Aristotle, who wrote not very long after him, and beyond this period the history of medicine is obscured with fable. In the time of Celsus the attention to these inequalities of the cranial surface had not diminished. He warns us earnestly to attend to them, while delivering his minute precepts for the management of the trepan; he suggests that the prominence of the mastoid process is probably the reason why no hair grows on the scalp immediately behind the ears; and informs us expressly that the