History of the Lobotomy

The early signs of the lobotomy started around the year 1890 when a man by the name of Friederich Golz was doing experiments on dogs. These tests were on surgical ablation. After removing parts of the temporal lobe he noticed that the dogs were more tame and easy to deal with. In 1892 a man by the name of Gottlieb Burkhardt decided to see if this proceedure would work on human subjects. He proceeded to remove part of the cortex from six patients that had been suffering from schizophrenia. The agitation insome of the patients became less substancial. Two of the patients died because of the proceedure and Burkhardt was criticized for his actions because they appeared to be rash.

In 1935 a man by the name Carlyle Jacobsen observed that damage in the frontal and prefrontal lobes of chimpanzies made them calmer and more managagble.This inspired Dr. John Fulton (Pictured to the right) who was also at Yale to some experimental work with two chimpanzies. In this work he made surgical cuts in the frontal and prefrontal cortex. This proceedure was termed a lobotomy. The calming effect appeared in one of the subjects and appeared to have no effect on memory or intelligence. Fulton is known as the father of the lobotomy.

After a striking conference on the subject by Fulton in London Dr. Antônio Egas Moniz (Pictured to the left) decided to take this technique back to Brazil. The idea that he had in bringing the technique back with him is that it might alleviate the symptoms of people with certain types of psychosis. Moniz believed that by severing the nerve fivers between the frontal and prefrontal cortex and the thalamus that he could cure psychoses having to do with obsessive-compulsive behaviors. This was grounded by the fact that the thought patterns in those individuals is recurrent and therefore if the connection is cut the throughts will be brought out of the loop.

Dr. Moniz and Dr. Almeida Lima worked together perfectivng a technique called the Leukotomy (Pictue to left). The Leukotomy is a simple proceedure where the scientists used trepanning to open up small holes in the head and used a small surgical knife (called a leukotome) to sever the nerve endings. This was a relativly quick procedure taking only a few sideways movements of the leukotome. There was a moderate sucess rate with this type of operation and Moniz stated that is should only be used as a last resort. The study was announced widely in the year 1936.

Also in 1936 a man by the name of Walter Freedman (Pictured to the right) and James Watts did their first leukotomy in the Untited States. This operation was met with a great deal of resistance at first but was later grudgingly accepted. After working on several patients the two perfected the operation and named it "The Freeman-Watts Procedure".

Freeman gave the leukotomy (re-named pre-frontal lobotomy) much of the publication that it had at the time. Thanks to numerous demonstrations the lobotomy became a standard procedure in the USA. In 1945, frustrated by the length of thime that the operation took Freeman used an italian approach to produce the "ice-pick lobotomy". The "ice-pick lobotomy" (Pictured to the right) was done by taking an ice-pick and using a hammer just below the eye to easily break through the skull to the brian. The ice-pick would then be swished around to disconnect the nerves and then would be removed.

This operation was quick and easy (pictured to left) but left many people feeling sick afterwards. Trained surgeons would be stricken ill by watching the procedure. Between 1939 and 1951 over 18,000 lobotomies were carried out in the United States and tens of thousands more were carried out in Europe. In Japan the procedure was used to calm down troublesome children. People that were not wanted would be sent in for a lobotomy till it was a common operation for troublemakers and rebels. Dr. Moniz recieved the Nobel Prize for his work on the lobotomy in 1949 insuring a few more years of sucess.

Around 1950 protests to the lobotomy crystalized. It turned out that only 1/3 of the lobotomies worked. This fraction is equal to the number of patients that would get better on their own. Emotional and other effects of the operation were also raised by protestors as well as new drug developments made offered more chances at cureing the patient without causing irreversible brain damage. In the 1970s laws were passed in many countries protecting the rights of patients against psychoseurgery. This procedure was looked at as experimental and to be used only if there is no other way to do it. Though the lobotomy is illegal in some countries (Russia being one of them) it is still in practice today, just on a smaller scale.