Trepanning is one of the oldest forms of surgery and, frankly, one of the most bizarre. It’s essentially the boring of a hole into a person’s skull. The hows and whys differ depending on time and culture, but the fact remains that people have been drilling holes into their skulls for thousands and thousands of years.Trepanning is one of the oldest forms of surgery and, frankly, one of the most bizarre. It’s essentially the boring of a hole into a person’s skull. The hows and whys differ depending on time and culture, but the fact remains that people have been drilling holes into their skulls for thousands and thousands of years.
One’s degree and state of consciousness is controlled by the volume of blood in the brain.
The founder of modern trepanation is a Dutch man by the name of Dr. Bart Huges (April 23, 1934 – August 30, 2004). In 1962 he became convinced that one’s degree and state of consciousness is controlled by the volume of blood in the brain. Humans have been robbed of a high range of consciousness because we began to walk upright, putting the heart below the brain. This state of affairs could be corrected by standing on one’s head, jumping from hot water into cold water, or taking various drugs. He noted that when we are born, our heads are unsealed. We have all heard of the “soft spot” on top of a baby’s head. He became convinced that the way to gain back the state of imagination and perception that one experiences as a child was to open a hole in the now-sealed adult skull.
Bart Huges trepanned himself in 1965. He did this to himself with an electric drill. The operation took forty-five minutes, he later reported, but it took four hours to clean the blood off the walls and ceiling. Ten days later, at a public happening in Amsterdam’s Dam Square, he removed his bandages, which consisted of thirty-two meters of gauze that he’d painted with the words “HA HA HA HA” in psychedelic colors. When he visited a local hospital to obtain X-ray proof of his act, he was interrogated by psychiatrists, who suspected he was schizophrenic. He was held against his will whilst doctors performed three weeks’ worth of psychological tests. They were forced to release him when these tests indicated he was completely sane.
Huges’s foremost disciple was a friend of Amanda Feilding named Joseph Mellen. Mellen, who had been educated at Eton and Oxford before he “tuned in and dropped out,” met Huges in the hedonistic party scene of 1960s Ibiza, where Huges introduced him to LSD. He became a convert to his teachings of trepanation and also his doctrine of “BrainBloodVolume”, that, in order to avoid a bad LSD trip, one should take sugar with your dose. Or drill a hole in the skull.
Mellen decided to take the trepanation plunge. Huges had lent Mellen the money to buy an antique hand trepan, kind of like a big corkscrew, designed to be worked by hand even though he had used an electric drill on himself, in the hope that Mellen would be able to prove that anyone, even those who lived in the Third World without access to electricity, would be able to enjoy the advantages of expanded consciousness. However, the centerpiece of the drill was so blunt that Mellen struggled for two hours to get it into the bone, a failure that was not perhaps helped by the fact that he’d steeled his nerves for the operation with LSD. He described his efforts in his unpublished memoir, Bore Hole, as “like trying to uncork a bottle from the inside.” The book reads something like an unintentional comedy of errors.
Mellen phoned Huges, who was in Amsterdam with Feilding, and he agreed to return to England to help. However, Huges was refused entry into the country (an interview he’d done before he left London had resulted in the unhelpful headline, “This Dangerous Idiot Should be Thrown Out”), and Feilding aided Mellen in his place, using all her might to get the point of the trepan to hold so that the teeth of the drill could find a grip. Mellen, again high on acid, took over the drilling until he blacked out. Feilding phoned for an ambulance and he was rushed to hospital.
Feilding and Mellen began seeing each other after she separated from Huges—they would go on to marry and have two children together. Yet Huges’s influence continued to dominate their lives. The following year, after Mellen had spent a week in jail for possession of cannabis, Feilding assisted him with another attempted self-trepanation. “I found the groove from the previous operation and got going,” Mellen wrote in his memoir: “After some time there was an ominous-sounding slurp and the sound of bubbling … It sounded like air bubbles running under the skull as they were pressed out.” However, when he examined the trepan it held an irregular sliver of bone, and when he didn’t feel the expected difference in mood, he attributed this to his having drilled through at an angle. The hole he had managed was evidently too small.
Three years later, in the spring of 1970, to make sure the hole was of sufficient size, Mellen decided to make another one, this time with an electric drill. Amanda was not in town, so he did it alone. He selected a spot above the hairline and applied the drill. After half an hour, the drill burned out. He had it repaired, and tried again the next day. “This time there was no doubt. The drill went at least an inch deep through the hole. A great gush of blood followed my withdrawal of the drill. In the mirror I could see the blood in the hole rising and falling with the pulsation of the brain.” He claimed that the operation had produced the desired effects. He claimed that he had achieved the permanent high that he had sought for so long.
When Feilding returned from New York a few days after Mellen’s successful trepanation, she was persuaded that he had undergone a change for the better. “The difference is very subtle,” she explains. “Basically, I put it that the neurotic side of the person has a little less grip—because they’re higher, they have a little more bounce. The floor has been raised a bit, the balloon has been blown up a little bit more. It doesn’t mean it cures the neurotic bag, but I do think it lessens it slightly.”
Several months later, Feilding made up her mind to trepan herself. She was 23 when she decided to drill a hole in her skull with an electric drill as well. This time the operation was recorded on film. Joey operated the camera while Amanda trepanated herself. She shaves her hair, makes an incision in the scalp with a scalpel, and drills through the skull, causing blood to flow. After breaking through, Amanda experienced a slow change of consciousness. “Over the next four hours I had a kind of feeling like the tide coming in, a soft flowing feeling. … the ego had stopped talking”. As to how it feels today Amanda has said, “It’s not an ecstatic feeling at all, but it’s very slight rise in the level of the floor of the psyche to the floor of childhood.” and “If one puts the adult norm of consciousness at zero and the LSD users at one hundred, then the childhood level and that attained by trepanation is thirty, and the level of cannabis is around fifty to sixty.”
The film was edited with together the films of Amanda’s pet pigeon (to represent peace and wisdom) and music was added. It was released under the title “HeartBeat in the Brain”, and was played in lectures that they gave around Europe and the US. Many attending these lectures were known to faint when the film was shown. Amanda has written a pamphlet on the subject, titled “Blood and Consciousness” and has run for Parliament twice on the platform of trepanation for natural health. She admits, however, that she did this in order to publicize trepanation and did not expect to win.
Feilding became a leading propagandist for the benefits of trepanation. She stood for Parliament as an independent candidate in her local constituency of Chelsea in 1979 and 1983, campaigning on the sole platform that trepanation should be freely available on the National Health Service, doubling her share of the vote from 49 to 139 in the process (one journalist at the time asked whether these were gestures of support or protest, a way of saying that the country needed Mrs. Thatcher about as much as it needed a hole in the head).
Feilding and Mellen separated after twenty-eight years together; both of them persuaded their subsequent partners to be trepanned. In 1995, Feilding married Lord Neidpath, a former professor at Oxford who taught international relations to Bill Clinton. He found that the terrible headaches he’d suffered from all his life ceased after trepanation.
Feilding is still a supporter of the procedure, and has started up the Beckley Foundation to commission research into the possible benefits of trepanation (the Foundation has also obtained permission to conduct the first study in thirty years of the effects of LSD on human subjects; it will test the neural changes brought about by the drug). She has funded the investigations of a scientist in St. Petersburg, Yuri Moskalenko, who is a pioneer in the field of cerebral circulation and has performed a battery of neurological tests on patients who have had their skulls opened in order to have cancerous brain tumors removed.
Feilding believes his findings “provide incontrovertible evidence” that trepanation does bring about real neuro-physiological changes. Whether those changes are beneficial or not remains an open question. Even within the tight knit circle of Huges’s disciples, not everyone has been so convinced: Huges’s own sister reported that trepanation had no effect on her at all.
In 2000, Feilding traveled to Mexico City to have a second hole drilled in her head because she felt the one she’d made in 1970 with a dentist’s drill had closed up. The surgeon, who she found after many closer to home refused, once again, to help her, performed the operation with a hand-cranked trepan. “I would choose my self-trepanation any day,” Feilding says of his clumsy job, “but I felt incredibly well after having it, pleased to be me. But obviously a subjective difference is not enough to convince anyone.”
That is the story of the modern pioneers of trepanation. Is it still going on today? According to Amanda there are others, but not many. They have a hard time having doctors giving them any public support, for the obvious reason that it might endanger their practice. But I can see a day, not far away, where all the kids at the rave, high on LSD and sugary SmartDrinks, will have inserted candles in their trepanation holes just like that one guy you always see at the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum.
References:
Amanda Feilding (Wiki)
Bart Huges (Wiki)
International Trepanation Advocacy Group
The People with Holes in Their Heads
Surgical Instruments
Like a Hole in The Head
The Hole Story on Trepanation
Bart Huges
Leave a Reply