The Dark History Of The Lobotomy, Which Is Technically Still Legal In America
It has been a long time since the first lobotomy was performed in the United States in 1936. The last recorded lobotomy was in 1967.
By then, the dangerous and controversial surgical procedure was largely abandoned. It might be history’s most infamous psychiatric treatment.
The lobotomy was developed to treat severe mental health conditions like schizophrenia, treatment-resistant depression, and certain personality disorders.
It consists of removing a portion of a patient’s frontal lobes and severing neural connections to cure psychological conditions.
Some patients seemed to show improvements after the procedure, but others suffered severe cognitive and emotional impairments.
The dark history of the lobotomy began in the early 20th century. The earliest version of the procedure involved drilling a hole into a person’s skull and injecting ethanol into the brain to destroy nerve connections.
Later, it evolved into the prefrontal and transorbital lobotomy, which involved using an instrument resembling an ice pick to sever the nerves manually. The surgical tool was called a leucotome.
During a prefrontal lobotomy, holes would be drilled into a patient’s skull to reach the nerves. But for a transorbital lobotomy, the patient’s brain would be accessed through their eye sockets instead.
The lobotomy was invented in 1935 by a Portuguese neurologist named Egas Moniz. He was inspired by the Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt, who performed similar psychosurgeries in the 1880s.
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Moniz performed the procedure for the first time in November 1935 in a Lisbon hospital. He drilled holes into his patient’s skull and injected pure alcohol into the frontal lobe to destroy the nerves and tissue. He received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for his invention.
A year later, an American professor of neurology at George Washington University named Walter Jackson Freeman adopted the procedure.
He modified the surgery by introducing a new technique using a surgical tool instead of alcohol. The process took only a matter of minutes to complete.
In September 1936, Freeman performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the U.S. From 1936 onward, tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed.
Freeman would continue operating for decades. In 1945, he refined the procedure again, creating the transorbital lobotomy, which resulted in a scar-free surgery.
Major U.S. medical centers like Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania all performed variations of the operation regularly well into the 1950s. Lobotomies then became obsolete following the development of antipsychotic medications.
The aftermath of a lobotomy could range from vast improvements to devastating effects. Its purpose was to reduce anxiety, agitation, and excess emotion.
But many people ended up losing their ability to feel emotions. They became apathetic and could not concentrate very well.
One high-profile incident helped turn the public away from lobotomies. For example, after Freeman gave President John F. Kennedy’s sister Rosemary a lobotomy, she was left permanently incapacitated.
Another case involved a young boy named Henry Molaison. Freeman also performed his lobotomy, which left the boy with severe short-term memory loss. Henry couldn’t even remember the names of his relatives or the way to the bathroom.
In 1967, Freeman was prohibited from performing lobotomies after one of his patients died from a brain hemorrhage. Today, lobotomies are almost never performed, but they are technically still legal in the U.S.
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