Lobotomy

A lobotomy (Greek: lobos: Lobe of brain, tomy: cutting) is a form of psychosurgery, also known as a leukotomy (from Greek leukos: clear or white). It consists of cutting the connections to and from, or simply destroying, the prefrontal cortex. These procedures often result in major personality changes. Lobotomies have been used in the past to treat a wide range of mental illnesses including schizophrenia, clinical depression, and various anxiety disorders.

History
In 1890, Dr. Gottlieb Burckhardt performed partial lobotomies on six schizophrenic patients of a psychiatric hospital in Switzerland. He drilled holes into their heads and extracted sections of their frontal lobes. One patient died after the operation, and another was found dead in a river 10 days after release (whether by accident, suicide, or crime is unknown), but the others exhibited altered behavior.

The first controlled human lobotomy was performed by the Portuguese physician and neurologist António Egas Moniz in 1936. His method involved drilling holes in patients' heads and destroying the tissue connecting the frontal lobes by injecting alcohol into them. Moniz won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949 for this work. The procedure was brought to the United States by Drs. Walter Freeman and James W. Watts, who refined Moniz's procedures, and changed the name from leukotomy to lobotomy.

Freeman, without the support of Watts, later developed a version that reached frontal lobe tissue through the tear ducts. In his transorbital lobotomy, a mallet is used to force a surgical instrument akin to an ice pick through the thin layer of skull at the top of the eye socket. The pick is then wiggled to damage the frontal lobe. This technique could be performed in a doctor's office rather than in an operating room, and required only a few minutes to perform. Freeman advocated this procedure for patients with even fairly mild symptoms, and as a result, performed the operation on thousands of people.

Lobotomy had long been criticized by the medical profession, as many were repulsed at the idea of destroying healthy tissue. With the advent of Thorazine in the 1950s, the procedure began to seem barbaric, and rapidly declined.

In 1977, the U.S. Congress created a National Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to investigate allegations that psychosurgery, including lobotomy techniques, was used to control minorities and restrain individual rights, and that it had unethical aftereffects. It concluded that, in general, psychosurgery had positive effects. However, concerns about leukotomy steadily grew, as numerous countries such as Germany and Japan, along with several U.S. states, prohibited it. Lobotomy was legally practiced in controlled and regulated U.S. centers and in Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Spain, India, Belgium and the Netherlands. The practice had generally ceased by the early 1970s, but some countries continued small-scale operations through the late 1980s. In France, 32 lobotomies were performed between 1980 and 1986 according to an IGAS report; about 15 each year in the UK, 70 in Belgium, and about 15 for the Massachusetts General Hospital of Boston.