In turn, the anthropological definition of trepanation is an intentional and planned opening of the skull, carried out with instruments designed for this purpose (Campillo 1994:41-42; Pahl 1993:20-22). This operation is distinct from cephalic surgery, which is destined to operate on the tissues inside the skull. Not included in this definition are posthumous cranial apertures, like trophy skull...

Nine children and their mother were exposed to vapors of metallic mercury. The source of the exposure appears to have been a 6-oz vial of mercury taken from a neighbor's home. The neighbor reportedly operated a business preparing mercury-filled amulets for practitioners of the Afro-Caribbean religion Santeria. At diagnosis, urinary mercury levels in the children ranged from 61 to 1,213 microg/g...

Infertility is not only a health problem, but is also a central existential intrapersonal and relational conflict. Infertility treatments are invasive, expensive, time-consuming, emotionally draining. All over the world there are numerous traditional methods used in the treatment of infertility. This investigation was carried out to determine the traditional practices of infertile women in a ru...

Sleep paralysis is a relatively new term to describe what for hundreds of years many believed to be a visitation by a malevolent creature which attacked its victims as they slept. The first clinical description of sleep paralysis was published in 1664 in a Dutch physician's case histories, where it was referred to as, 'Incubus or the Night-Mare [sic]'. In 1977, it was discovered more than 100 p...

The Atharvaveda (AV) is by all accounts a curious compendium of medicine in its various stages of evolution and contains the most primitive as well as some of the most highly developed stages of therapy. In AV the word Brahma was used in the sense of Physician. The name Atharvan is almost synonymous with Bhesaja or medicine. The AV represents the charm system of the Ayurveda of the Vedic age. T...

Sarkar and Seshadri have presented an interesting paper in this issue on the ethical approach that a physician should take when faced with requests for faith healing (1). The paper describes four approaches that the physician can take. These are rejecting the request, keeping oneself detached from the issue, endorsing the request and trying to understand the practices concerned so as to make a ...

In recent decades, computed tomography (CT) combined with suitable image processing software has become a valuable tool to enable the reading of texts written on scrolls, which are fragile, damaged, or fused together, without physically unwrapping them. X-ray based computer successfully been used scrolls made soft materials such as papyrus and parchment. Although in few cases inscriptions thin ...