The history of neurosurgery

The history of neurosurgery falls naturally into the premodern era, where it is essentially the history of surgery to the skull and of head injuries, and the modern era, where it is the history of surgery to the brain itself, made possible by cerebral localization theory, antisepsis, and anaesthesia, all of which developed in the nineteenth century. The first known neurosurgical procedures were skull trephines, seemingly carried out on both the living and the dead. It is unclear whether these were performed for therapeutic or ritualistic reasons. There are many trepanned skulls dating back thousands of years to the Neolithic era, and perhaps to even earlier, from sites all over the world.