The operation was done for epilepsy, infantile convulsions, headache, and various cerebral diseases believed to be caused by confined demons, to whom the hole gave a ready method of escape.
(2) Lucas-Championniere: Trepanation neolithique, Paris, 1912.
The practice is still extant.

Lucas-Championniere saw a Kabyle thoubib who told him that it was quite common among his tribe; he was the son of a family of trephiners, and had undergone the operation four times, his father twelve times; he had three brothers also experts; he did not consider it a dangerous operation.

He did it most frequently for pain in the head, and occasionally for fracture.
The operation was sometimes performed upon animals.

Shepherds trephined sheep for the staggers.

We may say that the modern decompression operation, so much in vogue, is the oldest known surgical procedure.
EGYPTIAN MEDICINE OUT of the ocean of oblivion, man emerges in history in a highly civilized state on the banks of the Nile, some sixty centuries ago.
After millenniums of a gradual upward progress, which can be traced in the records of the stone age, civilization springs forth Minerva-like, complete, and highly developed, in the Nile Valley.