
Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors - laurex
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/south-america-s-inca-civilization-was-better-skull-surgery-civil-war-doctors
======
mmjaa
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.

~~~
eveningcoffee
I have many times wondered if the world would be a better place if we could
unify our world to use a common language.

What horrifies me would be the horrendous loss of cultures that we will loose
access to.

~~~
fallingfrog
You'd better start learning Chinese then!

~~~
paidleaf
There is no such thing as a "chinese" language. Your statement is akin to
saying "You'd better start learning european then".

China is a region with a far greater linguistic diversity than europe.

~~~
laretluval
Plain "Chinese" commonly refers to Mandarin in English usage.

The CCP is trying to wipe out the other dialects as soon as possible, anyway.

~~~
paidleaf
> Plain "Chinese" commonly refers to Mandarin in English usage.

What we call "chinese language" has historically been cantonese as that's what
we are mostly familiar with ( mostly via immigration ).

Most of us don't even know there are different chinese languages. I know I
didn't until someone corrected me on social media.

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blotter_paper
"(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%?

~~~
DrScump
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
What bias are you proposing? That they ennobled the survivors?

~~~
Y_Y
> 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
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).

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partycoder
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)

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pipio21
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.

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eggy
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.

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tranchms
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.

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sorokod
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
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-
isla...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/did-early-easter-islanders-
sail-south-america-europeans)

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-
greece-...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-
archaeologists-find-early-democratic-societies-americas)

Unearthing democracy's roots:

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6330/1114](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6330/1114)

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roywiggins
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-...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/19/health/stone-age-cow-cranial-
surgery/index.html)

------
dalbasal
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
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
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.

~~~
partycoder
What you present is a false dichotomy since nursing and medicine overlap, and
those sanitary practices apply not only to nurses but to most healthcare
professionals.

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PuercoPop
The Paracas have nothing to do with the Inca Civilization!

