A Medieval Surgeon Tried to Save a Pregnant Woman. The Grave Tells Her Story.

At some point in the 7th or 8th century, a pregnant woman died and was buried in the medieval Italian town of Imola. What the ground gave back, 1,300 years later, was a grave that requires two separate explanations — and neither one is simple.

When the brick coffin was opened after its 2010 discovery, two peculiar things stood out: a perfect hole in the frontal bone of the woman's skull, and between her pelvis and legs, a series of smaller bones belonging to a baby. Researchers determined the woman was between 25 and 35 years old; the fetus, based on the length of its femur, was around 38 weeks, essentially full term.

The study authors suggest the burial offers a rare example of "post-mortem fetal extrusion," or "coffin birth," which occurs when gases build up inside the body of a deceased pregnant woman and force the fetus out of the birth canal. The hole in the skull is a separate matter entirely. According to the study authors, it was most likely drilled as part of a surgical procedure known as trepanation, practiced as far back as the Neolithic era and used to relieve conditions ranging from high fever to convulsions to intracranial pressure. In this case, researchers speculate the procedure was intended to treat preeclampsia or eclampsia.

Signs of healing on the woman's skull suggest she survived about a week after the procedure. Medieval surgeons kept her alive long enough for the bone to begin knitting. That is either a testament to their skill or a very dark definition of success.

This is the first time trepanation and coffin birth have been documented together in the same burial. The paper was published in World Neurosurgery.

The record doesn't preserve her name. What it preserves is evidence that someone tried.

Read the full story at Smithsonian Magazine, April 5, 2018

Hot Take: Medieval medicine gets written off as pure superstition, but a surgeon who could drill a precise 4.6 mm hole into the skull of a seizing pregnant woman — without anesthesia, without antisepsis, without losing her immediately — was doing something that deserves a more careful word than "primitive."