Nick Pell
speaker
6,773 appearances
18 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard yesterday
Nick Pell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
But that's the high water mark and only available in a specific region at a specific time.
It's also on par with surgery survival rates across early modern Europe, so someone really knew what they were doing pretty early on.
It's comparable to very complex cancer surgeries.
The difference being that you actually need those.
Right.
Yeah.
And also they're extremely complex, whereas this is just drilling a hole into your head.
We know because there's new bone growth around the hole.
Like the hole's never gonna close, but there's new bone growth if the person survives.
If they didn't survive, there's just a hole.
So, in ancient times the tools aren't terribly sophisticated, but it's worth noting that there are flint tools from the Stone Age sitting in the British Museum that if you touched them, you would cut yourself pretty badly.
Stone Age tools are a lot more precise than you'd probably think.
That said, they're nothing like a modern scalpel or probably even a box cutter.
In any event,
Cultures are using the dominant material they have around at the time.
That could be stone, it could be bronze, it could be copper.
There's some island tribes who made knives from shells.
Yeah, the Greeks and Romans were the first to invent specialized tools for trapanning.
And to be clear, Europe is still trapanning into the Renaissance, so if you have any notion that this is savages or the ancients, that's most definitely wrong.
By the Renaissance they have drills dedicated for the purpose.
Showing 1701–1720 of 6,773 · page 86 of 339
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