Trust Me, I'm a Doctor!

So for today, we are going to talk about lobotomies, I’m sure pretty much everyone has heard about lobotomies, and even some of you might be able to tell someone what a lobotomy is. For those of you who don’t, a lobotomy is a surgical disconnection of the prefrontal cortex to the brain, when the doctors performed this surgery, they’d damage the prefrontal cortex or cut of its connections from the rest of the brain. First a little history on lobotomies, they were first officially introduced into the world by Antonio Egas Moniz in 1935, at that time they were called leucotomy. The process of performing lobotomies was created with good intentions, doctors noticed that when laboratory primates had damage done to their prefrontal cortex, they became tamer without having impaired coordination or sensations. So doctors thought, if it worked on a monkey, it should work on a human. So they started off by preforming these lobotomies on people with severe psychological disorders, people who at the time didn’t have much in the way of treatment for what was wrong with them.  Then as the process of doing a lobotomy grew more notice and doctors/physicians started doing it more often, lobotomies started being used for other, less severe disorders, like depression and by the late 1940’s and early 1950’s about 40,000 surgeries were performed. One doctor who gained much recognition in performing these procedures was Walter Freeman, who created the transorbital lobotomy. For a lobotomy to work, holes would have to be drilled into a patients scalp in an operating room by trained neurosurgeons, but Freeman felt that these types of surgeries couldn’t be performed on the people who needed them most, people in state mental hospitals, where there were no operating rooms, surgeons or anesthesia. So he came up with a new method were, instead of drilling holes in the scalp, they would approach the frontal lobe through the eyes. So the new “transorbital” lobotomy was born, where the surgeons would take a thing surgical instrument and place it under the eyelid and against the top of the eye socket, and then with a mallet they would drive the instrument into the brain to severe the connections (its all much more technical than this).  Common consequences of this surgery were, apathy, a loss of the ability to plan and take initiative, memory disorders, distractibility, and a loss of emotional expressions. They also lost their social inhibitions and ignored the rules of polite civilized conduct. So tell me what you think, do you think the idea of lobotomies was a good thing? Why not?

 P.S I saw a video once about this hospital where lobotomies where performed, and one lady talked about her experience getting one, and how after the surgery happened she forgot, I believe half her life.

 

(A little video on Walter Freeman, a well known "Lobotomist")