Or to treat battle wounds.
Alternate spelling is trephining. Plenty of info on Google on that, too.
I can contribute that pancreatitis hurts like hell. The pain may or may not originate from the pancreas itself, though. Although, isn’t that kind of irrelevant? If I feel pain in my pancreas, I don’t really care which particular nerves are sending the signals. For that matter, we could say that the entire body, outside of the nervous system, is impervious to pain…