Smooth Pebbles

Removing the Stone of Madness: Biophemera considers a Renaissance psychosurgical mystery

Surgeon, attributed to Jan Sanders van Hemessen, c. 1550. Museo del Prado, Madrid

Over at Biophemera, a ScienceBlog I've somehow overlooked to date, biologist and artist Jessica Palmer ponders a question raised by a number of Renaissance paintings depicting surgeons removing "stones of madness" from patients's skulls: Did surgeons (or quacks) sham these operations?

It's a juicy and provocative consideration, well worth a look both for the article and the several paintings shown there.

Hemessen, Huys, and Bruegel all depict the same procedure: the removal of stones from the heads of restrained patients, in the presence of nurses or assistants and other onlookers. In many ways, they appear similar to other pieces of the realistic medical genre. Yet these operations, if they were actually performed, clearly had to be shams - playacting in which the surgeon pretended to remove a pebble from the skull, in deference to the "stone of madness" superstition.Could charlatan "surgeons" have fleeced desperate families by purporting to remove a palmed stone from an impressively bloody scalp wound? Could well-intentioned practitioners have done this as a placebo, to convince despairing patients that they had been "cured"? The scenarios seem plausible. Medical quackery was common in the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries, as doucmented in paintings, books, and edicts of the time. However, there is no historical evidence to suggest that stone extractions were actually conducted in late-medieval or Renaissance Europe, much less a widespread medical scam.  Schupbach (1978) suggests that extractions were theatrical performances, farces or tableaux associated with processions and celebrations, and that these paintings were never meant as documentation of real procedures. In any case, medical historians and art historians have disputed whether the sham operations depicted in the "stone of madness" paintings reflect real events, or are allegorical.

Link to Bioephemera post 'The Stone of Madness'.
Link to TINS article 'Psychosurgery in Renaissance art'.

Hat tip (yet another!) to Vaughn at Mind Hacks.

Tags: psychiatry, psychosurgery, Renaissance, art, madness, psychosis

NYT Scientist at Work: A Young Surgeon-Pianist Who Performs with a Scalpel

For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

IN TUNE Dr. Conrad, a pianist and surgeon, says that he works better when he listens to music and that music is helpful to patients.

“If I don’t play for a couple of days,” said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, “I cannot feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tissue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you.”

Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well — bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.

But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an underlying mechanism has moved slowly.

Now Dr. Conrad is trying to change that.
Technorati Tags: music, surgery, Mozart, Dobbs, Claudius Conrad