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The Museum of Medical History , ul. Paraskeva Nikolau 7 (officially Mon-Fri 10am-4pm; US$1), is sheltered within the sandy-coloured nineteenth-century building that once housed Varna's first public hospital. Inside, a words-and-pictures display adopts a patriotic tone, attempting to show how the medieval Bulgarian state inherited the medical wisdom of the ancients and transmitted it to the rest of Europe - only to have their standards of public hygiene ruined by the Turks, who made everybody live in smelly, unsanitary cities. However, the early Bulgarians were not without their forays into perversity. An array of tenth-century skulls on the ground floor reveal that one in three of the local population had been subjected to a symbolic form of trepanation (the practice of drilling holes in the skull) - in which the bone had been scratched and dented but not actually pierced. Archeologists presume that this had some kind of ritual purpose - but quite what, no one knows. Less macabre but equally disconcerting are the ferocious-looking early twentieth-century surgical instruments on display upstairs, along with a reconstructed turn-of-the-century dentist's consulting room and antiquated x-ray machines
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