Martha Bridegam wrote:
>I thought about the scar when he said that, yes, but is a lobotomized
>person capable of conversation at all?
>
>Well, the point is they've done something ugly to her. Maybe that's
>enough. Let's not be ghoulish Trekkies about knowing exactly what.
>
>/M
>
>
I agree, Martha. It's not important. Still, I found this article on
<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.epub.org.br/cm/n02/historia/lobotomy.htm." target="_blank">http://www.epub.org.br/cm/n02/historia/lobotomy.htm.</a> It doesn't go much
into the actual symptoms of a lobotomy, but it does seem implied that
the "patient" would be able to speak.
___
However, an ambitious American physician and clinical neurologist,
Walter Freeman, attended the same London conference as Moniz. Later he
read Moniz's reports in the library. He became very excited with the
idea and his results, and teamed up with a neurosurgeon James Watts, to
apply the newly invented technique in American patients. They first
operated in September 1936. After a few cases, he was convinced that
leucotomy worked, and started to propagandize it heavily. He was met
with suspicousness and resistance by the bulk of American neurosurgeons,
but he insisted, eventually winning the reluctant approval of his
colleagues. He and Watts perfectioned the technique, arriving to what he
called the "Freeman-Watts Standard Procedure", which had a precise set
of guidelines for the insertion of the leukotome.
Freeman was very good in convincing the general press about the promises
of the prefrontal lobotomy (as he called it now), and almost
singlehandedly pushed it as a valid therapeutic procedure across the
nation's insane asylums, hospitals and psychiatric clinics. He also
performed with Watts many operations around the country, but he was
dissatisfied with the messiness and length of the operation, Having
heard about an Italian who had developed a trans-orbital approach to the
frontal lobe (i.e., by inserting a leucotome after making an opening in
the roof of the eye orbits), he invented in 1945 a much quicker and
simpler way: the so-called "ice-pick lobotomy". Instead of a leucotome,
which required a surgical trepanning, he used a common tool to break
ice, which could be inserted under local anesthesia by tapping it with a
hammer. The ice pick would perforate skin, subcutaneous tissue, bone and
meninges in a single plunge; and then Freeman would swing it to severe
the prefrontal lobe. This would take no more than a few minutes, with no
need to intern the patient in the hospital. The procedure was so
ghastly, however, that even seasoned and veteran neurosurgeons and
psychiatrists would not stand the sight of it, and sometimes faint at
the "production line" of lobotomies assembled by Freeman. James Watts
became distressed with this kind of operation and broke his ties with
Freeman,
Lobotomy took America and some other countries by storm. They were
performed in a wide scale in the 40s, because the mental asylums were
brimming over with cases after the Second World War. Between 1939 and
1951, more than 18,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States,
and tens of thousands more in other countries. It was widely abused as a
method to control undesirable behavior, instead of being a last-resort
therapeutic procedure for desperate cases. In Japan, the majority of the
operated cases were children, many of whom had only problematic behavior
or a bad performance at the school. Inmates in prisons for the insane
were widely operated. Families trying to get rid of difficult relatives
would submit them to lobotomy. Rebels and political opponents were
treated as mentally deranged by authorities and operated. Amateur
surgeons would often perform hundreds of lobotomies without even doing a
systematic psychiatric evaluation.
In 1949, Dr. Antônio Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine
and Physiology, in recognition of his creation of the prefrontal
leucotomy, This had the effect of making lobotomy a respectable
procedure, and as a result, in the ensuing three years, more lobotomies
were performed than in all previous years.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
>> Stay informed about: Julia's Lobotomy 
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