What's on Your MindLists about the squishy ball of noodles inside your skull, how it works, things we think it does, and ways it affects your life all day, every day.
The history of the lobotomy, a medical procedure that involved entering a patient's brain and severing the connections between the front lobe and the remaining sections, is quite disturbing. How did lobotomies start? What were the differences before and after lobotomies? Doctors were influenced by the ancient practice of trepanation, in which holes were drilled into the skull for a number of ritualistic and medical reasons.
The first lobotomies were performed on animals in the 1890s and within 50 years, doctors were conducting early lobotomy procedures on mentally ill humans. In the 21st century, lobotomies are viewed as archaic and barbaric because history has seen the horrific aftermath. Oftentimes, patients were left as little more than drooling toddlers who struggled with daily tasks. Although the procedure did help some people, for the most part, lobotomy history shows that it did more harm than good.
Gottlieb Burkhardt Removed Parts Of Schizophrenic Patient's Brains In The 1890s
Gottlieb Burkhardt, a doctor at a mental asylum in Switzerland, was inspired by the work of Friederich Golz, who removed parts of the brains of dogs to make them calmer. In 1892, Burkhardt decided to conduct a similar procedure on six patients in his asylum. All suffered from agitation and hallucinations. Burkhardt removed sections of their cerebral cortex in the hopes of curing them.
Although the complete results of his procedure (which didn't yet have a name) are unknown, the four who survived the operation were reportedly calmer. However, Burkhardt's experiments were viewed negatively in the medical community, so for 40 years, research into this new field of surgery was heavily frowned upon.
Moniz, An Argentinean Neurologist, Was Awarded A Nobel Prize For Inventing The Procedure, Which Was Then Known As A "Leucotomy"
In the 1920s and '30s, a Portuguese neurologist named Antonio Egas Moniz fine-tuned a procedure that he called a leucotomy. It involved drilling holes in the front sections of the skull, then inserting a metal implement with a wire attached to demolish segments of the tissue in the frontal lobe of the brain. After this was completed, he poured a small amount of absolute alcohol into that part of the brain to kill any remaining live tissue.
His procedure was reportedly so successful (or so people believed at the time) that Moniz was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949.
Psychologist Walter Freeman Renamed And Simplified The Procedure, Turning It Into The Ice Pick Lobotomy
American psychologist Walter Freeman took Moniz's ideas to a different level. Freeman simplified the procedure and renamed it the lobotomy. Instead of drilling holes into a patient's brain, he simply inserted an implement that resembled an ice pick into their eye sockets. This made recovery time faster, since there were no incisions. Also, rather than using Moniz's two-pronged approach of a leucotomy tool and alcohol, Freeman simply severed the connections between the front lobe and the rest of the brain.
This became known as a transorbital lobotomy, the procedure that most people associate with the word, "lobotomy."
The Procedure Was Used To Treat Schizophrenia, Compulsive Disorders, And Depression
Prior to the beginning of the WWII, there were over 400,000 people in mental institutions. During the early 20th century, most people with a mental illness were put into institutions. The lobotomy was designed to help the patients, specifically those with schizophrenia, depression, and compulsive disorders.
Once they were treated, they would either be able to function in regular society, be cared for by family, or be less of a hassle for the nurses and orderlies in the asylums.
In The 1940s, Over 40,000 Americans Underwent The Procedure - Including A Four-Year-Old Child
Over the course of the 1940s, a whopping 40,000 people were lobotomized throughout the United States. In 1949 alone, 5,000 underwent the procedure. The people who received it weren't all adults either - one was a four-year-old child. Another was also a 12-year-old boy named Howard Dully who suffered from a "reluctance to go to bed on time" and had the bad habit of daydreaming.
Dully received his lobotomy in 1960, proof that it took some time for the procedure to fade out as a treatment option.
Joe Kennedy Had A Lobotomy Performed On His Daughter Rosemary, Because She Was A Potential Embarrassment To The Family
Rosemary Kennedy was the third child born to Joseph Sr. and Rose Kennedy. She was the younger sister of former President John F. Kennedy, and, due to a possible brain injury that she received at birth (a nurse reportedly held her in the birth canal for two hours while waiting for a doctor to arrive), Rosemary was the mentally slowest person in the entire family. This seemed fine when she was a child, but once she became an adult, her outbursts led her father to seek treatments.
Rosemary's sister, Kathleen, looked into the newest treatment at the time - the lobotomy. She rejected it as an option, but Joseph Sr. secretly took Rosemary to have it performed. It had drastic consequences, leaving her unable to walk properly or speak properly. As a result, she spent the rest of her life hidden away in a residential care facility and her plight inspired one of her sisters, Eunice, to create the Special Olympics.
