The surgical approach to the posterior cranial fossa according to Galen.

Abstract

The surgical approach to the posterior cranial fossa through a straight midline incision was adopted in the 1920s. This approach had its forerunner in the procedure that Claude Galen adopted and performed on living animals some 1700 years earlier. Although the mortality rate of those animals cannot be assessed on the basis of available information, it was possibly not far off from the mortality rates associated with operations performed on the posterior cranial fossa in humans at the beginning of the modern surgical era.