In the Dark Ages if you felt mad, or someone else felt you were mad, a healer was summoned to drill a hole in your skull to remove the stone of folly.
Easy-peasy lemon-squeezey.
No fighting with the medical aid for more than ten therapy sessions. No goodbye-sex-cos-the-drugs-have-kicked-in.
There’s a painting by Hieronymous Bosch showing how relaxed the whole extraction process was.
The doctor is wearing a tin funnel on his head. The patient looks like he’s just arrived home after a trying day at the office. He’s kicked off his shoes and is slumped in a chair. So exhausting was work that the operation to extract a bloom from his brain elicits nothing more than an expression of extreme tolerance. Beside him, a holy man is commentating and gesticulating, and beside him is either the long-suffering wife of flowers-in-the-head guy, or a bored nun.
She’s got a book on her head. Oppressed, no doubt, by the ‘knowledge’ of men.
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