Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors | Hacker News Reader

Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors

sciencemag.org

96 pointslaurex53 comments

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.

Do you have a source on that?

I’d love to read more about it

From the Journal of Anthropological Society of South Australia:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4nc6Ke...

There are a few other studies out there on this issue .. quite revealing.

EDIT: a nice quote which highlights the issue:

Colonist and author Dame Mary Gilmore stated in her reminiscences of growing up in rural New South Wales that:

… the white forgets the uncounted ways in which he [was] … unintelligent (and still would be unintelligent) but for what the blacks taught. As parallels to the treatment of snake-bite by sucking, take the use of eucalyptus, the application of weak wattle tan-water for burns and blisters, of clean mud as poultices, of native gums in dysentery, the eucalyptus beds and steam pits for colds and rheumatism, and ask was it a black or a white intelligence that was first to find and apply these(Gilmore 1935: 232).

She stated that a whole industry in making medicines owed its existence to Aboriginal practices:

It is true there is a eucalyptus extract industry now; but the knowledge that led to that was originally derived from the natives, who used eucalyptus leaves in steaming, and for wounds. For rheumatism steam pits were made, heated by fires, raked out, lined with leaves and then possum-rugs laid over the top. Another use of the leaves was as a strapping for wounds that needed closing in order to heal. These uses came to the pioneers from the blacks (Gilmore 1935: 226).

Strictly speaking, the Sumerians had a higher degree of technological advance than the Inca. They reached that level of sophistication in great part due to the availability of high yield crops and valuable agricultural animals (horse, goat, sheep) of the fertile crescent.

Europe benefited significantly from fertile crescent innovations: irrigation, writing, metallurgy, the wheel, animal-powered transport, horseback riding, etc.

By the time of the conquest of the Americas they also benefited from additional foreign innovations: steel metallurgy, gunpowder, the precursor to the sextant, the compass, mapmaking...

However, in the end what inflicted the most damage were the diseases and plagues that emerged by bad sanitary practices like living in proximity to animals: smallpox, cholera, typhus, etc. Those plagues practically emptied the American continent and the Caribbean. Meanwhile the only American disease passed to Europeans was possibly syphilis.

Andean cultures did not develop such level of technological advance in great part because their lifestyle and survival did not require it. Potato, quinoa and corn agriculture, combined with llama and guinea pig farming effectively supported their large populations to the extent they had no famines. Then, Andean geography is not a good use case for wheeled transport.

Even chemotherapy came after a group of researchers decided to try random plants. Western greatness is quite often mitm hiding very simple stuff. Some say that we made it large scale .. but still

I thought chemotherapy was discovered as a side effect of chemical warfare during World War II?

My source is “The Emperor of all Maladies”

Sorry, i didn't mean the principle, the yew tree extract used for paclitaxel

Wait, chemotherapy drugs were originally extracted from yews? Like, the little conifers with cup-shaped berries?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paclitaxel

History section explains NCI screening in the 60s

> chemical warfare during World War II

Aside from Italy's campaign of Ethiopia and Germany's campaign against a variety of civilian groups, I'm not familiar with chemical warfare being used in WWII. Was it discovered as a result of one of these?

Wikipedia has decent coverage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer_chemotherapy

Use of mustard gas in WW1 led to post-war research into its effects. By 1942 the US was conducting human trials of nitrogen mustard for treating lymphoma. Separately, a German air raid on US ships occupying a port in Italy during WW2 resulted in the release of mustard gas that was aboard one of the US ships. Autopsies and tissue samples from that incident also pointed to the potential medical uses.

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.

I doubt the world would be a better place. Different languages often go hand in hand with different cultures, trying to unify everything may not be a good idea to make the world better.

I believe the answer is that we must teach our children to be multi-lingual, at all costs, and eschew any and all cultures which, on the basis of the value they place on their own language, render other cultures words 'inferior'.

The spirit of the desire to render a world language is a good one. There are many ways this can be accomplished; at a personal level, it is made through the decision to honour every word, every symbol, every sign on Earth, with equality.

Guess French is out :/

You'd better start learning Chinese then!

Which 'Chinese'?

There are more English speakers globally than there are Mandarin speakers. The number of people that can comprehend some reasonable amount of English is even higher. The Mandarin number is going to contract as China's population declines, the English speaking population will continue to expand perpetually. By comparison, half of the EU can speak English, and that figure is climbing. Less than 1% of the EU can speak Mandarin. The same premise holds for Africa and Latin America. In Latin America, Mandarin is such a rarely known language it's difficult to even measure its use against Spanish, Portuguese and English.

Few people in the rest of the world are attempting to learn Mandarin, because it's a very difficult language to learn and it has a limited cultural projection. The use case to learn Mandarin is primarily restricted to a subset of a subset of business. More people speak English in Asia outside of China, than speak Mandarin.

I'd highly encourage you to listen to this lexicon valley podcast, I am a bit skeptical on mandarin or cantonese or one of the other dialects of chinese taking over globally.

http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/0...

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.

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

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

> 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.

I was more trying to make the op think about the fact that their language might not be the universal one, and to think about how it might feel to be forced to learn some other culture's language, than to make a statement about mandarin Chinese specifically. It just seemed like a tone deaf statement to casually suggest that perhaps everyone else in the world could be forced to abandon their mother tongue.

Reminds me of a quip from Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw: "The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language."

I like the idea of everyone using Esperanto as their second language. But there is a problem with incentives. Even the argument of political neutrality has its problems: someone has to be the first to seriously support the language, but at that moment the language would stop being perceived as neutral. (For example, if tomorrow EU would decide to use Esperanto as a neutral common language, and if the plan would actually work well, then people outside EU would see it as the language of EU, not as a neutral one.)

Also, sometimes people don't want to cooperate, but rather to out-compete their neighbors. Learning English or Chinese is more difficult than learning an artificial language -- but if you have already paid the costs of learning them, you have an advantage over your neighbors who got worse education. Making international communication too simple would take away the relative advantage of those who have already invested in the current one.

Visiting Australia from Europe is very expensive, especially in the Age of Exploration. Who would bother to do it just to "observe"? Almost tautologically the only people who will do such a thing are those with the morality to try to extract vast wealth. Those who wouldn't let themselves do that stay at home doing something else.

Well, perhaps there is a chance for us to learn from history, still, and quit assuming that there is One Way™ for human civilisation to proceed/progress.

Those who have the technical skill to go to Mars, are probably among the first examples of colonists/empire-builders who won't be trampling on the natives; a truly revolutionary moment for the human species in that regard. At least, one can hope ..

If there are any Martian natives we'll probably trample on them quite literally.

Thanks for sharing that! To me it also speaks to that it seems the general perception is that we as society especially in the West are always moving up, and that it's perceived to be impossible that earlier times had technology or awareness greater than what existed after that, or now. I think it could help to explain a lot of unresolved or not well understood artifacts from ancient civilizations.

Consider the epistemology blob.

A bunch of axioms. A bunch of backstories justifying the axioms. A system for deriving good ideas (from axioms, observed phenomena and other ideas). A mountain of ideas derived from the axioms and observed phenomena, ideas derived from those ideas, and so on.

We call these epistemology blobs things like "scientific culture", "western culture", "Christian culture", "Inca culture" and so on.

Epistemology blobs appear to be invariably mutually antagonistic. They can't suffer each other to exist. They compete and self-preserve with a nigh biological zeal.

It's weird.

Charles Fort discusses it a bit in his "Book of the Damned".

Around here on the American continent I don't think the choice was available. Native cultures were destroyed much before most of the colonizers got here, because the continent was experience a downcycle, and because of diseases that came with the first Europeans.

The other fact most people don't know is that the first agriculture appeared not in the middle east or even Africa but in New Guinea. People we write off as "savages" invented the cultivation of plants for food.

"(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%?

The ninth one was only mostly dead.

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?

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

> 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.

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).

No, that nobles were more likely to get the best surgeons, if non-nobles got surgery at all. Remember, human sacrifice was common[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#South_America

Yep. That casts doubt on the scientific validity of everything else claimed. For this statistic, either the percentage is wrong, or they really meant 10/11 or 11/12.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-...

Unearthing democracy's roots:

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6330/1114

Link to the paper: https://www.worldneurosurgery.org/article/S1878-8750(18)3062...

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Paracas have nothing to do with the Inca Civilization!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com