The team examined over 600 sculls from South America from 400 BCE to the mid-1500s CE. The earliest had survival rate of 40%, then it jumped to 53%, during the Inca period it was 75% to 83%, and the latest period survival rates was at 91%.

According to Civil War medical records which was from 1861 to1865 , some 46% to 56% of cranial surgery patients died.

More on this: South America's Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors | Archive link

Edit: This post's title was "South America's Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than US Civil War doctors, some 400 years later". After taking into consideration the comment section, I changed it to the current one

Some of the differences in survival rates may be due to the nature of the patients' injuries before the surgery, says Emanuela Binello, a neurosurgeon at Boston University who has studied trepanation in ancient China. "The trauma that occurs during a modern civil war is very different from the kind of trauma that would have been happening at the time of the Incas," she says. Many Civil War soldiers suffered from gunshot and cannonball wounds that were quickly treated in crowded and unsanitary battlefield hospitals, which promoted infections.

You forgot to include the last segment of this paragraph!

Still, Binello calls the survival rate of trepanations in Peru "astonishing." "It's a credit to what these ancient cultures were doing," she says.

No, I omitted that because it's unnecessary. Of course it's cool and interesting but this isn't a 1:1 comparison.

It can be astonishing without necessarily being better

I can think of a few people that I'd like to trepan incorrectly

The bar is in hell

I think the US civil war happened a little more recently but I'm pretty high

From memory the Incans used silver tools which is important as silver was naturally antimicrobial

Don't forget. Without the sweet dreams we have now

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