oh my gosh coming from gallus that’s saying something, I’m flattered
OKAY SO ABOUT THE MEDIEVAL HEAD TRAUMA
This post contains Thor’s migraines, Arthurian knights spinning in circles, and the medicinal use of egg whites on your brain. CW for mentions of medical gore and aggressive head bonks, obvs. Also, this is the result of undergraduate research, and should not be considered comprehensive. If you know more, throw it at me. If you have a correction, I will happily take it! And if you can remember the title of that one book I found once in my university library called something like “Head Trauma in World Myths and Legends”, TELL ME. I can’t fucking find the thing, but I swear it exists.
Also heck my life, Tumblr ate the first attempt at this post. Always write your long drafts on a more stable platform, guys
So. Depending on where and when you lived in western medieval Europe, you might have a very different relationship with the constellation of injuries falling under the category of head trauma. These injuries were either mysterious and beyond the realm of healing, a weird side effect of people not dying so often, or a comprehensible problem that sometimes could be treated by medical and surgical intervention.
A great example of head trauma as mysterious scourge comes from Norse mythology. To cruelly TL;DR a surprisingly hilarious little myth, Thor’s giant-smacking escapades result in a piece of flint getting stuck in his skull. Neither he, nor Sif, nor a witch they call up can remove it. The witch almost manages it, but Thor distracts her at a critical moment, so her magic fails. The myth ends with a moral to the audience: don’t throw your flint tools around, or you’ll give Thor a migraine. Yes, really.
(personal side note- somebody must be throwing hella flint around today, fuck)
In this story, head trauma is just something you have to live with. Magic might be able to help you, but it failed even Thor, so don’t expect better results yourself. And we do have skulls throughout European history that show evidence of lots of people living for years with untreated skull fractures, though with a higher risk of premature death. (One source here, from Denmark, which mixes in some early modern skeletons as well.)
Now, that myth fits the time and place it originated, which is true of stories in general. But one thing you can do in comparative literary analysis is look at the variations between tellings of common stories. And one great mine for this is Arthurian legend. King Arthur and His Circle Bros were popular subjects throughout the British Isles and France for centuries, which one can use to analyze the values, morals and world views of their storytellers.
And also, what happened when you got bonked on the head. See, each storyteller might have their own first-hand experiences with battle, or they’d have patrons who they wanted to flatter or entertain by incorporating Based-On-A-Shocking-True-Story details into the stories, or they were just paying attention to other storytellers at the time and seeing which action tropes were popular.
So, the early Arthurian treatment of head trauma can be summed up in three words: bonk means death.
But after the late 12th century (which admittedly is where we get a lot of our stories from), head trauma starts to become survivable. And sometimes, it’s weird.
Men’s brains swim like water, and they might fall off their horses. If they’re not mounted, they might run around in circles and then fall down. What changed?
The bonk protectors changed! the heaume or great helm style was developed, which is more likely to stay on and protect the head from any angle, though it’s vulnerable to transferring the force of downward blows into the head, neck and shoulders. With more people surviving blows to the head, that means more concussions and traumatic brain injury, and that’s reflected in the stories.
But what about medical textbooks? Well, it probably won’t surprise many to know that western European medical manuals sucked SO MUCH ASS for centuries. The reason why is a rant for another time (and I CAN AND I WILL RANT ABOUT IT), but there was light at the end of the tunnel.
While Western Europe lost almost all Greek medical scholarship and condensed the Latin texts down to near-gibberish, the Eastern Roman Empire had preserved those texts, and the Islamic world had expanded greatly upon that scholarship with their own research and experimentation. During the Islamic Golden Age, traders from Italy brought some Greek and Arabic texts back from the Muslim world, and translations were made into Latin. This gave Italian academics access to a more vibrant and systemic tradition of medical science.
Enter Rogerius, AKA Rogerius Salernitanus, AKA Roger Frugard, AKA Roger Frugardi, AKA Roggerio Frugardo, AKA Rüdiger Frutgard and AKA Roggerio dei Frugardi (jfc dude), a surgeon from Salerno (unknown-1195). While surgery would remain a low status profession for centuries, Rogerius produced a well-organized and clearly written surgical manual, the Practica Chirurgiae. This book, I want to stress, is not flawless, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Digging into the German Commission E Monographs (started in the 1970s, which systematized scientifically proven effects of traditional herbal medicines), Rogerius’ poultices for wounds do fuck-all for healing, but would probably be fantastic for an upset stomach if you ate them.
HOWEVER, the surgical contents of the manual show that either he was working with fantastic written texts at the University of Salerno, and probably had some good first-hand experience with treating head trauma.
The text provides some practical information on diagnosing the kinds of head injuries a surgeon could actually treat–while concussion was still something you’d just have to deal with, a bonk on the head can have lots of other bad effects. You can develop a build-up of fluid within the skull (cerebral edema), or skull fracture that can press pieces of bone down onto the brain. Or you could have tears in the scalp, or worse, the protective layer of tissue around the brain itself (the dura mater).
Rogerius lists ways to diagnose edema and closed skull fractures (where the scalp isn’t broken but the skull is). He describes surgical techniques that are still the basis of many in use today, for incisions and suturing of the scalp, removal of bone fragments and foreign objects, and relieving pressure on the brain from edema. Yes, that last one involves trepanning, AKA drilling a hole in the skull, and yes, it can actually be life-saving in this particular case.
And there’s one bit he talks about which I find outrageously cool. See, wound healing has always been one of the biggest problems in medicine, and it was an absolute matter of life and death before the advent of sterile medical technique. Sure, you might be able to clean a wound with some alcohol-based mixture, but that would be disastrous for wounds that pierce through the skull. This probably goes without saying, but pouring alcohol on your brain is very, very bad.
So, what the fuck do you do when you have a patient with a gnarly head wound that exposes the dura mater, or the brain itself? Water isn’t clean, alcohol is potentially deadly. How do you wash the wound clean?
Fresh eggs straight from the chicken are sterile capsules that protect the developing embryo. They’re full of liquid-y stuff you can use as a wash! BUT. Rogerius specifically lists egg whites for cleaning head injuries, not yolks. I don’t have any scholarship on why, beyond some interviews with a doctor in my family, but our best guess was that the cholesterol in the yolks could be harmful to the brain and dura mater. But the egg whites by themselves? They’re almost pure protein, including some anti-microbial factors that help defend the embryo in case germs sneak in.
Overall, it’s a brilliant solution to a thorny aspect of wound care, in a time before germ theory, and centuries before Europe would collectively remember you need to sterilize your medical tools. Fucking! Fresh egg whites! It’s fantastic.
So that’s the tl;dr on medieval understanding and treatment of head trauma. A mixture of mystery, medieval pop culture, and medical science. This is the kind of practical history that I found most engaging to study–not lists of kings, not court politics, not wars, but a small, strange little corner of medical history that tells you more about the life and times of people through the ages.
And that’s what a lot of modern historical research is actually like! Find a tiny little subject that sparks joy catches your interest, and dive in. I ended up jumping over entirely to biological sciences in my post-grad research, but I don’t regret a minute of my undergrad. History in all its crumbly little details is awesome.
