A surgical instrument designed to cut into or dissect brain tissue during medical procedures.
From Greek enkephalos (brain) + -tome (cutting instrument, from temnein meaning to cut). This surgical term emerged in the 1800s when brain surgery became more feasible with better instruments.
Encephalotomes are part of medical history's darker chapters—they were used before anesthesia and imaging made brain surgery safer, and surgeons had to develop these specialized tools just to understand what they were working with inside a living skull.
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