trepan

Most unusual were a bone lever, for putting fractures back in place, and the handle of what appears to have been a drill, for trepanning the skull and extracting impacted weaponry from bone.

Summer meant putting out our eyes with BB guns and accidentally trepanning one another with lawn darts.

Then there was trepanning, a process of drilling holes in the skull to dispel bad vapors in the brain.

She fetches down a skull from her mantelpiece and shows me its several trepanned holes.

But not all trepanned skulls show signs of head injuries, so it’s possible the surgery was also used to treat conditions that left no skeletal trace, such as chronic headaches or mental illnesses.