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Hi All [boschmadness2.jpg] The Cure of Folly (The Extraction of the Stone of Madness) attributed to Hieronymus Bosch. 1475 - 1490 Like this picture do you? What’s with the funnel on the surgeons head? It does say on the title that this is a space where Art can meet the social sciences so I am guessing it is OK to post this here , because I just wanted to share this picture with you. Please delete me if not appropriate. There’s been a really fascinating series on Radio 4 (still available on podcasts) called The History of the Brain. One of the episodes touched on the history of art and its depiction of Trepanation (drilling a hole in the skull, preferably without disturbing the brain). I have long been fascinated by the depiction of mental illness in art and how much information can be conveyed in historical paintings. Bosch is one of my favourites as he is quite bizarre. Anyway this is one of his earlier pieces depicting a surgeon performing trepanation on a man with a flower (tulip) sprouting out of his head. Apparently the Dutch referred to mad people as ‘tulip heads’. Bosch’s patient appeals to the surgeon to extract a stone from his head. The stone in question is the "stone of folly" or "stone of madness" which, according to popular superstition, was a cause of mental illness, depression, or stupidity. Such stones could be located anywhere in the body, such as the bowels or back, but were most commonly assigned to the head, where a surgeon would have to cut into the skull to remove them. About this time trepanning or trepanation was an established medical procedure. Archaeological evidence indicates that trepanning was practiced across Europe (indeed, worldwide, even in early Peruvian cultures) in prehistoric times; in medieval Europe, various medical experts recommended it for a variety of illnesses ranging from skull fracture to epilepsy, insanity, and melancholia. Fascinating stuff ! Here endeth my art history lesson of the day on trepanation. Flurry crinolines off the stage C ___________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by MessageLabs' Email Security System on behalf of the University of Brighton. For more information see http://www.brighton.ac.uk/is/spam/ ___________________________________________________________