Friday 19 October 2012

Rocks On The Brain


This edition, we look at a work by another 16th century Flemish painter, Jan Sanders van Hemessen.


The art book I first found this in called it “Removing Rocks from the Head.”  Although subsequent Google searches reveal it to be called either “The Stonecutter” or “The Surgeon,” I think that the first version of the title is the best.  Because that is what it is showing.

Apparently there was a belief that epilepsy was caused by rocks lodged in the brain, which had to be surgically removed.  So here we have a guy with minimal teeth and possibly poor eyesight performing brain surgery on a conscious patient with a knife at a fair.  A middle-aged lady holds the victi—I mean, patient’s head still, because that’s all you need for a procedure where you have a man getting his skull delicately split open with an animal horn.  Meanwhile, the old man on the right does calisthenics to pass the time.  Maybe he was the anesthesiologist, until he remembered that those didn’t exist yet.

If you’re interested, apparently there are a large number of items with this image on Zazzle.  Now you can drink your coffee from a mug depicting the height of rock-based neurosurgical treatment!

10 comments:

  1. It is indeed fortunate that this pre-dates the invention of pain on the seventeenth of July nineteen-sixty-six. Otherwise that chap would be in some little discomfort.

    I had my own brain replaced with pumice in a similar procedure last winter. I am now much more abrasive when dealing with thick-skinned people.

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    1. I always wondered what the inventor of pain was thinking. Bloody sadist.

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  2. Well, at least the surgeon is using his reading glasses so he can tell the difference between the rock and the musket ball that was put there for safe-keeing. 50 years later they were using a non-invasive technique that involved pulling the rock out through the nasal passage.

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    1. Yes, I heard they borrowed that technique from the Egyptians, although early attempts involved pulling out the whole brain, removing the rock, and then trying to figure out how to put the rest back.

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  3. The guy on the right kind of looks like he's doing yoga, I'm expecting him to do a downward facing dog any moment now.

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    1. Indeed, I hear that 53% of brain surgery patients use yoga to prepare themselves for the experience. Perhaps because they would prefer a downward-facing dog to undergo the procedure instead of themselves...

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  4. The guy seems uncomfortable, but not against whatever they were doing to his head. Probably "curing" his stutter or something.

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    1. He's just thinking, "Man, I KNOW they're going to put this unflattering picture of me on Face-scroll..."

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  5. The surgeon looks to be enjoying himself a little too much. Soon everyone is going to "have epilepsy".

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    1. He sneaks up to people's windows and flashes a spotlight repeatedly to drum up business.

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