Lobotomy

A guard at Vacaville State Prison prepares a prisoner for a lobotomy in 1961. The warden of Vacaville at that time was Dr. William Keating, a psychiatrist who was convinced that "criminality" was lodged in certain areas of the brain, and so lobotomies at Vacaville became routine. © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images View Gallery The procedure was simple. The doctor would first administer a local anesthetic, leaving the patient conscious and alert for what was to come (if the patient didn't respond to anesthesia, doctors would use electroshock). Next, the doctor would position a sharp steel pick of seven or so inches with its point underneath the eyelid and against the bone atop the eye socket. Then, with a swing of a mallet to the butt of the pick, the doctor would drive the point through the bone, past the bridge of the nose, and into the brain. Once the point was about two inches deep into the frontal lobe, the doctor would rotate it, severing the connective white matter between the prefrontal cortex — the executive center that makes decisions, informs personality, and makes you who you are — and the rest of the brain. The entire procedure took the doctor less than ten minutes, and the patient would never be quite the same again. The doctor, much of the time, was Walter Freeman and the procedure was the transorbital lobotomy. And just as Freeman — known for singing the gospel of his procedure and demonstrating it publicly with a showman's flair — has long bee...

Today The first lobotomies were performed in the late 1880s by Swiss physicianGottlieb Burkhardt, a supervisor of an asylum looking for ways to subdue overactive patients. Burkhardt removed parts of the brain cortex of a few patients suffering from auditory hallucinations and other symptoms of what would later be identified as Still, Burkhardt’s work didn’t immediately inspire imitation. Lobotomy truly gained traction starting in 1935, when two American scientists removed the frontal lobes of chimpanzees and, in the same year, Portuguese neurophysician By the 1940s most American neurosurgeons loudly resisted lobotomy, criticizing its lack of research and low success rate. But the procedure’s negative feedback did nothing to stop StoryCorps, “He wanted to prove that he was right, he was convinced that he was right. I thought, ‘How can a man be relaxed just going blindly into a brain?!’” A fierce advocate for lobotomies, especially when they were performed by him, Freeman became a traveling lobotomist. He was in a state of perpetual road trip, visiting psychiatric hospitals across the United States to perform and teach lobotomies. By 1945 he had streamlined the procedure so that it would take only 10 minutes: a pick was forced through the back of the eye sockets and into the frontal lobe of the brain. After an operation, Freeman would stay in the operating room while one patient would be sent out and another ushered in. By the end of his career, Freeman had performed or supe...

1924: Freeman arrives in Washington, D.C., to direct labs at St. Elizabeth's Hospital. Nov. 12, 1935: Neurologist Egas Moniz performs first brain surgery to treat mental illness in Portugal. He calls the procedure, "leucotomy." Sept. 14, 1936: Freeman modifies Moniz's procedure, renames it the "lobotomy," and with his neurosurgeon partner, James Watts, performs the first ever prefrontal lobotomy in the United States. His patient is Alice Hood Hammatt, a housewife from Topeka, Kan. 1939: While working in his office, Egas Moniz is shot multiple times by a patient. He survives but is left partly paralyzed. 1945: Freeman begins experimenting with a new way of doing the lobotomy, after hearing about a doctor in Italy who accessed the brain through the eye-sockets. Jan. 17, 1946: Walter Freeman performs the first transorbital lobotomy in the United States on a 29-year-old housewife named Sallie Ellen Ionesco in his Washington, D.C., office. 1949: Egas Moniz wins the Nobel Prize for lobotomy. He's nominated by Walter Freeman. 1950: Watts expresses disapproval of the transorbital lobotomy procedure, and the two eventually break their long-time partnership. Freeman barnstorms the nation's state hospitals performing and teaching the transorbital lobotomy. July 1952: Freeman performs 228 transorbital lobotomies in a two-week period in West Virginia for a state-sponsored lobotomy project, dubbed "Operation Ice Pick" by newspapers. 1954: Era of widespread hospital psychosurgery fades a...

Joe and wife Rose refused the popular alternative of the time – putting their daughter away in a mental institution, never to be seen again. Instead, they enrolled her in a series of schools and asked her siblings to look out for her. "They fought it up until she was a young woman," says Koehler-Pentacoff, "and suddenly things changed." As Rosemary entered her late teens, her parents saw less of the affectionate, dutiful and eager to please young woman they knew and loved, and more of her violent outbursts. She began "screaming and yelling and throwing things. She was violent and throwing vases across the room. She was out of control," Koehler-Pentacoff says. "When you do any kind of operation, there is swelling around the tissue that has been damaged, and the swelling impedes the function of the nerve cells and wires that come from those nearby nerve cells," he explains in The Missing Kennedy. "When the swelling recedes, those cells and structures can start working again." "The frontal lobe is the pilot of your brain," says Holtz. "It controls your executive function, which directs everything. The theory behind it is essentially preventing the direction of impulses that were adherent. When one emerges from a lobotomy, one becomes docile, placid, apathetic, and devoid of affect." Despite widespread criticism of his work following Rosemary's surgery, Freeman went on to perform thousands more lobotomies, and to create and popularize the transorbital lobotomy, in which he use...

In 1935 Portuguese doctor Egas Moniz learned of an experiment where removing the frontal lobes of two chimpanzees resulted in reduced violent behavior, making them more compliant. The doctor decided to repeat this experiment with humans. Shortly after performing this procedure on unsuspecting patients suffering from mental illnesses, he published a paper demonstrating a method he believed to be an innovative way to treat such illnesses as schizophrenia and psychosis. Today, Moniz is remembered for discovering lobotomy, one of the most shameful and tragic procedures in medicine. From the year 1945 to 1947, there were around 2,000 lobotomies performed. However, the numbers skyrocketed to 18,000 after Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery in 1949. There were many factors why this surgery was deemed acceptable by mental institutions back in the day, mainly because there was no medication or therapy effective enough to treat people who suffered from various mental illnesses. And with electroshock therapy being already in use, this invasive operation didnx5ct shock people. However, the misinformation and active campaigning for the effectiveness of lobotomy had a significant impact too. A physician, Walter Freeman, helped popularize this procedure in the US. With no surgical training, Freeman decided to change the operation, and instead of drilling holes in the skull, he stabbed patientsx5c brains with an icepick through the eye socket. Freeman perfecte...

A lobotomy is a type of brain surgery that became popular in the 1930s as a treatment for mental health conditions such as schizophrenia. It involves severing the connection between the frontal lobe and other parts of the brain. Doctors performed this procedure on people with conditions such as However, lobotomies are dangerous. They carry several Keep reading to learn more about the history, procedure, and uses of lobotomies, as well as the effects and risks. Share on Pinterest A surgeon using a brace and bit to drill into a patient’s skull before performing a lobotomy, at a mental hospital in England, November 1946. Kurt Hutton/Getty Images The word “lobotomy” refers to several brain surgeries that break connections between the frontal lobe and different parts of the brain. The frontal lobe is involved in many brain processes, including language, voluntary motion, and many cognitive abilities. The different types of lobotomy • topectomy, in which a surgeon removes parts of the • leucotomy or leukotomy, in which a surgeon severs connections between the frontal lobe and the thalamus • neuro-injection of sclerosing agents, in which a surgeon injects drugs that harden the fibers connecting the frontal lobe to the thalamus Doctors developed the lobotomy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time when there were no drug therapies for As there were no standardized or effective treatments, people with severe symptoms often lived in psychiatric hospitals and asylums. In...

Frontal Lobotomy: Zombies Created by One of Medicine’s Greatest Mistakes Frontal lobotomies have a dramatic, thankfully rather brief, history in the treatment of mental illness. Janet Sternburg has written an illuminating, and humanizing, book on the history of lobotomies, both personal and societal. It’s not clear who first quipped “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” but it’s not just a joke. Almost anything would be preferable to a frontal lobotomy. It was a barbarous procedure with catastrophic consequences, and yet it was once widely accepted and even earned a Portuguese doctor a Nobel Prize. In the annals of medical history, it stands out as one of medicine’s biggest mistakes and an example of how disastrously things can go wrong when a treatment is put into widespread use before it has been adequately tested. A new book by Janet Sternburg, She says “even as a child I had a slight awareness, compounded from fear and pity, that something wrong had been done, that it couldn’t be right for people to be this way, expressionless and indifferent to anything around them.” As an adult, she questioned how good, kind people like her aunts could have done this to their siblings, and how they could have authorized a lobotomy on a second family member after they had seen its effects on the first. She did extensive research, interviewed family members, and tried to understand what had happened. She was shocked when her one surviving aunt denied that S...