The Treatment That Caused Suffering
Imagine yourself in this scenario: confronting mental health issues. In the case that you struggle with anxiety, depression, or any other ailments, you seek medical help, but when you awaken after treatment, you seem to be trapped in a body that doesn’t feel like yours.
Words fail to explain and echoing in your mind are mixed emotions of self-identity and confusion which has consumed you. It sounds like a bad dream, doesn’t it? This is what so many people of the mid 20th century struggled with. It shocked them. These people who became the primary candidates for suffering from a severe medical condition known as a Lobotomy, where deep tears of hope were at once brought and immense pain, metaphorically speaking, implemented.
Lobotomy is considered today one of the most significant blunders in medical history. The fact remains true that the horrors of such practices did exist. It does beg the question however, why did society posses such naivety? Why was society so late in understanding the perils this medical excursion came with? Let’s try to shed some light on this and try to answer the endless questions swirling around this dark tale.
What Is Lobotomy?
Lobotomy was a surgical procedure where doctors would cut the connections between the frontal lobe (the part of the brain responsible for emotions, decision-making, and personality) and the rest of the brain. The idea was simple: by disrupting these connections, they could “fix” mental illnesses like schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety.
But here’s the catch: while some patients seemed calmer after the surgery, many were left emotionally numb, mentally impaired, and completely dependent on others. What started as a treatment for severe mental illnesses soon became a quick fix for all sorts of “problems”—misbehaving kids, “difficult” women, and even soldiers suffering from PTSD. It was less about healing and more about control.
Before Lobotomy: The Violence of Early Psychiatry
To trace how lobotomy became an option in psychiatry, it is important to explore its predecessors. Starting from the early 1900s, treating mental health was in shambles. Medical practitioners had no clue what mental illnesses were, and it was nothing short of watching a dangerous “therapeutic” circus. Here are some of the most shocking “therapies:”
Trepanation: Guy’s literally drilling the skull to let “evil spirits” out by opening some holes onto them.
Insulin Coma Therapy: Infusing patients with insulin hoping it would “restart” their brain and put them into a coma.
Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT): Putting shocks into patients and hoping to trigger seizures (surprisingly used today, but in a better version).
Cold Water Therapy: Prisons treating patients who behaved in ways shockingly to their ice cold dunking waters.
Mental Asylums: These were institutions that were primarily overcrowded and under funded, where patients were simply neglected and abused.
With all of these considered, lobotomy seemed like the less stupid alternative. One thing positive is that lobotomy portrayed itself as a scientific breakthrough when in reality it was simply another form of cruelty disguised as surgery.
The Birth of Lobotomy: A Deadly Concept
What we know now as lobotomy was pioneered by António Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist, in the 1930s. According to Moniz, mental illness was brought on by overactive neural linkages within the brain. His remedy? Cut those links. His initial experiments were a matter of injecting alcohol into the brain to damage tissue, but he eventually designed a surgical process to actually sever or scrape off brain tissue.
Moniz’s work caught on, and in 1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. That’s right—you read it here—a procedure as barbaric as lobotomy was once hailed as a medical miracle. This approval lent a patina of respectability to lobotomy, and physicians worldwide started using it.
The Ice Pick Lobotomy: A New Level of Horror
Although Moniz began the lobotomy phenomenon, it was
Walter Freeman, an American doctor, who escalated it to an entire new realm of terror. Freeman created the transorbital lobotomy, a process that could be performed in a matter of minutes using minimal machinery. Here’s how it was done: Freeman would place a sharp object (usually looking like an ice pick) through the patient’s eye socket, hammer it to shatter the bone, and then move it around to cut brain wires.
Freeman received no professional training in surgery, but that did not deter him. He toured the U.S. in his “Lobotomobile,” operating on thousands of patients in hospitals, clinics, and even temporary facilities. By the 1950s, more than 50,000 lobotomies had been done in America alone.
Who Were the Victims?
Lobotomy was not restricted to the severely mentally ill. It was performed on anyone who was “difficult” or “hard to handle. This is who was most vulnerable:
Women: Many women with depression, anxiety, or postpartum psychosis were lobotomized in order to make them more “compliant” and “easy to manage.”
Children: Children who acted poorly or had emotional problems were likely to undergo this surgery, likely because their parents or guardians were frustrated.
Soldiers: World War II veterans diagnosed with PTSD on their return received lobotomies instead of appropriate treatment by mental professionals.
Marginalized Groups: Individuals who had defied social norms—namely women, minorities, and the poor—were more frequently targeted.
Perhaps the saddest story was Rosemary Kennedy President John F. Kennedy’s sister. Rosemary was 23 when she underwent a lobotomy in the hope of “curing” her mood swings and learning disabilities. The procedure left her speechless and incapable of caring for herself, and she spent the remainder of her life in an institution.
How Lobotomy Destroyed Lives
Lobotomy often had awful repercussions.
Emotional Numbness: Many people completely lost their capacity to experience happiness, grief, or thrill.
Memory loss, disorientation, and problems with daily activities were prevalent in people with cognitive impairment.
Deficient of Character: Patients grown to be passive, indifferent, and lacking their prior selves.
Physical complications: Some patients died, developed infections, or had seizures as a result of the surgery.
Lobotomy for many deprived them of their humanity as well as failed to heal their disease.
Case Study: Howard Dully: A Child Victim
Howard Dully was just 12 years old when Walter Freeman performed a lobotomy on him. He had been tagged by his stepmother as “difficult” and “unruly,” and Freeman believed a lobotomy would correct him. The procedure left Howard with emotional damage and learning disabilities for many years. In his book, My Lobotomy, Dully recounts his process of learning about what had been done to him and reclaiming control of his life.
Case Study: Rosemary Kennedy: A Silenced Life
Rosemary Kennedy’s life demonstrates how lobotomy was employed to manage individuals. She was a lively young woman before her lobotomy, but she was disabled for life afterward. Her disability was concealed by her family, and she lived the rest of her life in seclusion.
Fall of Lobotomy
1960s saw lobotomy going out of style. Its downfall was caused by several things:
Psychiatric drugs such Thorazine provided a safer, more efficient solution for mental illness treatment.
Media Exposure: Journalists and activists began to expose the horrors of lobotomy, sparking public outrage. A viewing of media.
Ethical Concerns: Increasingly under fire was the medical sector for the ethical consequences of lobotomy.
Legal reforms: Acts and rules were enacted to shield patients from invasive treatment.
Lobotomy had by the 1970s mostly been discarded and consigned as a warning from the annals of medical history. Popular culture bears an enduring legacy from lobotomy. The terrible consequences of the therapy have been investigated in works like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Lobotomist.
Ethical Lessons: Might It Reappear?
Lobotomy’s story raises significant ethical issues regarding the part of science and medicine in society. Some techniques under discussion include: rare medication that may one day be seen as abhorrent or cruel.
Still used in some cases, not withstanding the risks and controversies, electroshock therapy.
Overmedication: The pervasive use of psychiatric drugs—especially in youngsters—has raised questions about overprescription and long term repercussions.
Neurosurgery for Mental Disorders: Radical operations like deep brain stimulation have disquieting parallels with lobotomy.
Upcoming Technologies: In the future, brain implants and AIdriven therapy could present fresh ethical issues.
Final Thoughts: Knowledge from the past.
Lobotomy serves as a sharp reminder of what can result when science is followed without consideration of ethics or humanity. It highlights the need of thorough investigation, informed permission, and a will to protect the autonomy and dignity of patients.
Advancing constantly in the medical field demands we stay alert so our search of perfection never damages our humankind. More than just a historical curiosity, the history of lobotomy is a warning story that calls us to consider the ideals driving our behavior and the heritage we aspire to leave behind.
