Lobotomy

File:Leucotomy.jpg

A human brain that had undergone lobotomy.

A lobotomy is a form of psychosurgery, also known as a leukotomy (Greek: lobos: Lobe of brain, tomy: cutting). 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. Two of the patients died, 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 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 revulsed 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.

In popular culture

Literature

• In Invisible Man, a novel by Ralph Ellison, the unnamed narrator undergoes a lobotomy after the boilers explode at the paint factory he is working in.
• In the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Randle McMurphy receives a lobotomy after he explodes into a violent rage towards the head nurse. The book was based on Ken Kesey's experience in a mental hospital in Northern Oregon. A film version was also made in 1975.
• In the novel "FutureTrack 5", a future world with three distinct castes, Lobotomy is the treatment for most crimes. Lobotomised criminals would then serve as menial labourers on, or be hired out by, a "Lobo-Farm".
• In the 1958 Tennessee Williams play (and 1959 movie) Suddenly, Last Summer, which is set in 1937, Catherine (played in the movie by Elizabeth Taylor) is supposed to undergo a lobotomy to silence her, because she witnessed the violent murder of her cousin Sebastian and knows about his homosexuality.
• In The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Esther Greenwood meets a girl in one of the mental hospitals who had a lobotomy scar on her forehead.

Film and television

• In A Fine Madness (1966), a double frontal lobotomy is performed on the eccentric New York poet Samson Shillitoe (Sean Connery).
• In the movie Planet of the Apes, the astronaut Landon is given a lobotomy after his ability to speak is discovered.
• In Hannibal (2001), Hannibal Lecter gives a victim (Ray Liotta) a live lobotomy, cooks the salvaged parts of the brain, and feeds them to the victim.
• In an episode of Justice League, an alternative version of Superman uses his heat vision to lobotomize Doomsday, the Joker, and other villains.
• In the crime drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a German doctor who is later found to be a Nazi who illegally experiments with human subjects performs a lobotomy on one of his victims. (Episode 132: "Pirates of the Third Reich")
• In the movie From Hell, Annie Crook, a prostitute played by Joanna Page, received a lobotomy so that she would keep quiet about her marriage to Albert Sickert/Prince Edward Albert Victor and their child.
• In the movie X2, William Stryker's son Jason has had a lobotomy.
• In the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched has the rebel patient Randall McMurphy lobotomized.
• In the movie Population 436, people wanting to leave "The most perfect place on Earth" are lobotomized.

See also

• For an example of the personality changes associated with damage to the frontal lobe not related to a surgical leukotomy, see the famous case of Phineas Gage.
• Elliot Valenstein, author of Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness

External links

• The History of Lobotomy
• University of North Carolina Asheville: Lobotomy
• My Lobotomy Radio story