What Is A Lobotomy And For What Purpose Was It Performed?
In 1935, the Portuguese neurosurgeon and psychiatrist António Egas Moniz He performed a surgical intervention called leucotomy.
It consisted of making two holes in the front of the skull, and injecting alcohol directly into the frontal lobe of the brain through them. Years later, this practice had become known as lobotomy and his popularity in the world of psychiatry led Egas Moniz to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949. What had happened?
The etymology of the term leucotomy serves to give us an idea about the objective with which lobotomies were performed; leuko means white, and take means cut. Egas Moniz believed that certain mental disorders could be cured by breaking down some areas of the brain in which the frontal lobe communicates with other areas of the brain. That is, damaging parts of the white matter of the brain, so called because it is dominated by axons (the parts of the neuron that elongate to communicate with distant nerve cells).
This neurosurgeon started from the idea that it was possible to considerably reduce the intensity and frequency of the symptoms of psychiatric disorders by causing all psychological functions in general to decline. A part of each patient’s intellectual capacity and personality was sacrificed to try to bring him closer to healing.
Walter Freeman’s lobotomy
Egas Moniz’s proposal may seem brutal today, but in its historical context it was well received in the field of non-Freudian psychiatry. In fact, in 1936, Neurosurgeon Walter Freeman imported this type of intervention to the United States and, after giving it the name lobotomy, it became popular throughout the world.
Freeman also made some changes to the procedure. After stunning patients with electroshock, instead of drilling two points in the skull and inserting spikes through them, he used ice pick-like instruments that he inserted through the eye socket, between the eye and the part of bone on which it is located. the eyebrow, and removed trying to “sweep” parts of the frontal lobes of each cerebral hemisphere.
Since the wounds did not reach the deepest part of the brain, vital structures were not damaged and, in some cases, patients hardly noticed any changes during the first hours. In any case, the nervous system of these people was forever marked, and their way of behaving and experiencing life, too.
Why did lobotomy become popular?
It is hard to believe that the practice of lobotomies enjoyed a good reputation for a period, but the truth is that it did.
After making his method known, Freeman performed more than 2,000 lobotomies throughout his career The practice of lobotomy quickly spread throughout Western countries, and came to be considered one of the most useful tools that medicine could have.
People who underwent lobotomy voluntarily or involuntarily were not only patients with serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia or severe depression; On many occasions this operation was used to solve cases of behavioral problems, disobedient adolescents, etc. Freeman’s method may have been brutal, but a good portion of society was willing to embrace that brutality.
The idea of ending deeply rooted behavioral problems in just a few sessions was very tempting. Furthermore, if lobotomized people were more “calm”, conflicts and relational problems could be put to an end simply by focusing on an individual who had to “change.”
The logic behind this good reception by a large part of the health institutions has to do with the hygienist mentality they maintained. At that time people with psychiatric disorders were packed into crowded hospitals and many times they were subjected to physical or psychological violence.
Lobotomy provided the opportunity to make these types of problems less obvious, easier to ignore. The patients were still sick, but after the operation it was less noticeable that they were there. The problem was solved in fiction and, in any case, the alternative to this practice was also terrible.
The appearance of psychotropic drugs and the end of the ice pick
The popularity of lobotomies began to plummet not due to a spontaneous awareness on the part of the population, but due to a much less romantic event: the appearance of the first generations of psychotropic drugs for serious mental disorders, in the mid-1990s. fifty.
Lobotomy promised an apparent quick solution to behavioral problems in just a few sessions, a commercial exchange that, taking into account the many problems it could solve (in the family, at work, etc.), paid off. However, Psychotropic drugs were not only much more effective but also its application was much simpler.
Similarly, when one of Freeman’s patients died from hemorrhage caused by the neurosurgeon, it became clear that the risks of lobotomy were high. In the 1950s and 1960s, many countries banned these types of interventions and the USSR came to consider it “contrary to human rights.”
In any case, lobotomy had enjoyed such a good image that it still took a couple of decades to appear. The simplicity of the procedure (which could be carried out in less than 10 minutes) continued to make this measure an attractive option for when there was no surveillance from family members or public entities.
