Therapy of Last Resort
Categories: Science , Horror & Supernatural , Health & Nutrition
The Lobotomist, by journalist Jack El-Hai, is a biography of Walter Freeman, the doctor who popularized a treatment that many people find very repellent today. The idea was that severing the nerves between the brain's frontal lobes would decrease anxiety and depression in patients with severe mental illness. Sometimes it worked.
Very often it didn't, of course, especially for patients with schizophrenia. Often, although not always, lobotomy made patients more docile and quiet. These patients were then able, if not always to live productive lives, at least to leave warehouse-like mental institutions and return home. Too many times, though, lobotomies were given to patients simply to make them less troublesome. Fifty-thousand people received lobotomies, mostly, according to an NPR feature, between 1949 and 1952.
We've seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and read about Tennessee Williams's sister Rose, and about Rosemary Kennedy. How anyone do such a terrible thing, especially after medications like Thorazine were introduced, which, while not without side effects, were far safer than brain surgery? That last question remains unanswered--Walter Freeman certainly could have moved on to the field of drug development, but he didn't.
Curiously, according to El-Hai, it wasn't the horror of the operation itself, or the development of medications, that effectively ended the popularity of lobotomies, but the rise of psychoanalysis as an alternative. Freeman might have had a last laugh, had he seen that diseases like schizophrenia are now seen as organic rather than the result of childhood emotional trauma.
Other books that discuss psychosurgery:
Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine
