"...This patient must be now trephined,
   Let all the others go;
To-morrow when the sun is up
   My magic I'll them show.'

Two men the epileptic bore
   And laid him on a trunk,
And when the wretch was coming round
   He showed some signs of funk.

No questions put they to the man;
   The doctor cleared his throat,
Then, bringing flints from out his hut,
   Took off his hairy coat.

A crowd had gathered all around,
   To watch the bloody deed;
Their curiosity was stirred
   To see his devil freed.

With sharp flint flake the surgeon made
   A cruciform incision;
The blood did spurt, the wound did hurt,
   The crowd laughed in derision.

The two assistants pressed the flaps
   To stop the blood from running;
The Medicine-Man did scheme and plan,
   He was so full of cunning.

He scraped the pericranium,
   Until the skull was bare;
Then scratched the bone with a sharp stone,
   it did not matter where.

He scraped that bone and scratched and scraped--
   The scratches made a groove,
The groove a basin-like ellipse.
   The patient did not move.

The fact was this, when he came round
   So rotten did he feel,
He fainted when he found himself
   The centre of such zeal.

The hollow soon became a hole,
   'Twas all but through the bone,
His diploë, you well might see,
   But still he made no moan.

The inner table only now
   Protected his soft brain,
One final scrape and he did make
   That hole a window-pane.

The devil stirred within his skull
   And, with a fearful yell,
Escaped from out its prison-house
   To seek its own in hell."

--Thomas Wilson Parry (1918), in: Richard Rudgl*y, Lost Civilizations of the Ston* Ag* (1998)



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