Good intentions with tragic consequences
So where did lobotomy come from and why did it become popular so quickly? The answer lies in historical facts and coincidences, the human qualities of individual doctors, the degree of defenselessness of patients in psychiatric clinics, and even the nuances of politics and economics in some countries.
The discoverer of lobotomy as a treatment method in psychiatry is considered to be the Portuguese Egas Moniz, who became the first who decided to use the technique on humans. Previous studies were limited to lobotomies in chimpanzees, but Egash went further, which he himself did not regret at all, which cannot be said about the relatives of his patients.
The development of brain lobotomy dates back to 1935, when Moniz suggested that uncoupling the neural pathways of the frontal lobe of the brain could be effective in a number of psychiatric diseases. Without conducting enough research and without weighing the risks, the psychiatrist decided to intervene the following year. Since gout prevented him from carrying it out on his own, he entrusted the experiment, which he personally supervised, to neurosurgeon Almeida Lima.
During the operation, the white matter pathways of the frontal lobes were separated, connecting these sections with other brain structures, but the lobes themselves were not destroyed, hence the name “leucotomy”. The manipulation was announced as a life-saving radical method for hopeless patients.
The operation, which was proposed by E. Moniz, was carried out as follows: using a special conductor, a metal loop was inserted into the substance of the brain, which was to be rotated to destroy the nervous tissue. There was no talk of any more or less adequate anesthesia.
Under the leadership of Moniz, about a hundred lobotomies were performed, and history is silent about the peculiarities of patient selection, determination of indications, and methods of previous treatment. When assessing the postoperative condition of patients, Moniz was quite subjective, and the observation itself was limited to a few days, after which the patients dropped out of the doctor’s field of vision and no one was particularly worried about their fate.
Having identified lobotomy as an effective method of treatment, Moniz immediately began to promote it among his colleagues, reporting meager observational results, limited to two dozen people operated on, but presented as reliable evidence of the effectiveness of the new technique. What motivated the doctor and why such a rush is not entirely clear. Maybe it was really a delusion with good intentions, or perhaps it was a desire to become famous and go down in history. One way or another, the name Moniz is known in narrow circles and has gone down in history.
According to data published by Moniz, seven out of 20 operated patients recovered, the same number showed improvement, and six remained without positive dynamics. The adverse consequences that inevitably awaited all patients were kept silent. Actually, the psychiatrist himself did not try to find out about them, releasing the patients on all four sides a few days after the operation.
Today, such a small observation seems somewhat unreal, unable to provide at least some basis for conclusions, but even in the last century, scientists sharply criticized the data of E. Moniz. However, the latter published many publications and even books dedicated to leucotomy.
examples of “before and after” “successfully” performed lobotomies
The further history of brain lobotomy unfolded tragically quickly, the operation became extremely popular, and the number of victims from it is estimated in tens of thousands in America alone.
Opponents of the method pointed out that the consequences of the operation are similar to those that occur with traumatic brain injury, focusing special attention on personality degradation. Calling for the abandonment of lobotomy, they explained that irreparable damage to any organ cannot make it healthier, especially when it comes to such a complex and little-studied structure as the human brain. In addition to the risk of neurological and mental disorders, lobotomy was considered dangerous due to the likelihood of meningitis and brain abscess.
The efforts of lobotomy opponents were in vain: the operation was adopted as an experimental treatment method by specialists not only from the USA and South America, but also by psychiatrists in Italy and other European countries. By the way, the indications for it were never formulated, and the experiment was literally put on hold, and not a single practicing doctor bore responsibility for its result.
In 1949, Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for the development of lobotomy as a therapeutic measure for psychiatric pathology. Somewhat later, the relatives of those patients who were subjected to barbaric treatment asked to reverse this decision, but all their requests were rejected.
The peak use of lobotomy occurred in the early forties of the twentieth century, when it became very popular in the United States. One of the reasons is quite banal: the high costs of maintaining patients and staff in psychiatric departments, which became overcrowded against the backdrop of World War II with former soldiers who experienced extreme stress and could not cope with it on their own. Such patients often turned out to be aggressive or too agitated, it was quite difficult to control them, there were no special medications, and the clinics were forced to maintain a large staff of orderlies and nurses.
Lobotomy was a cheap and relatively simple way to deal with aggressive and uncontrollable patients, so the authorities even organized special training programs for surgeons. It is estimated that using the operation would reduce costs by $1 million daily. In addition, there were no effective methods of conservative treatment for mental illness at that time, so lobotomy quickly gained popularity.
Lobotomy. The History of Brain Evisceration, or the Most Shameful Nobel Prize
Cutting through the white matter
The culprit in this whole story can be considered the American railroad worker Phineas Gage, who in 1848 received a steel rod in the head as a result of an accident.
The rod entered the cheek, rotated the brain matter and exited at the front of the skull. Gage, surprisingly, survived and became the object of close study by American psychiatrists. Scientists were interested not in the fact that the railway worker survived, but in what changes happened to the unfortunate man. Before his injury, Phineas was an exemplary God-fearing person who did not violate social norms. After a 1-inch diameter rod destroyed part of his frontal lobes, Gage became aggressive, blasphemous, and sexually incontinent. It was at this time that psychiatrists around the world realized that brain surgery could significantly change a patient’s mental health.
40 years later, Gottlieb Burckhardt from Switzerland removed parts of the cerebral cortex from six seriously ill patients in a psychiatric hospital in the hope of alleviating their suffering. After the procedures, one patient died five days later in epileptic seizures, the second later committed suicide, the operation had no effect on two violently insane people, but the remaining two actually became calmer and caused less trouble to others. Burckhardt's contemporaries say that the psychiatrist was pleased with the results of his experiment.
Phineas Grage
The idea of psychosurgery was returned to in 1935, when encouraging results appeared in the treatment of violent chimpanzees by excision and removal of the frontal lobes of the brain. In the laboratory of primate neurophysiology, John Fulton and Carlisle Jacobson performed operations on the frontal cortex of the brain. The animals became calmer, but lost all ability to learn.
The Portuguese neuropsychiatrist Egas Moniz, impressed by such results from his overseas colleagues, in 1936 decided to try leucotomy (the predecessor of lobotomy) on hopelessly ill violent patients. According to one version, the operations themselves to destroy the white matter connecting the frontal lobes with other areas of the brain were carried out by colleague Monica Almeida Lima. 62-year-old Egash himself could not do this due to gout. And leucotomy turned out to be effective: most of the patients became calm and manageable. Of the first twenty patients, fourteen showed improvement, while in the rest everything remained the same.
What was such a miraculous procedure? Everything was very simple: the doctors drilled a hole in the skull with a hammer and inserted a loop that cut through the white matter. In one of these procedures, Egas Moniz was seriously injured - after cutting the frontal lobe of the brain, the patient went berserk, grabbed a gun and shot at the doctor. The bullet hit the spine and caused partial unilateral paralysis of the body. That, however, did not stop the scientist from promoting a wide advertising campaign for a new method of brain surgery.
Everything was fine at first glance: calm and manageable patients were discharged from the hospital, whose condition was hardly monitored in the future. This became a fatal mistake.
Egas Moniz and his leucotomy method
But for Moniz, everything turned out to be very positive in the future - in 1949, the 74-year-old Portuguese received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for the discovery of the therapeutic effects of leucotomy in certain mental illnesses.” The psychiatrist shared half of the prize with the Swiss Walter Rudolf Hess, who conducted similar studies on cats. This prize is still considered one of the most shameful in scientific history.
Lobotomy scheme
Lobotomized patient
Ice pick
Advertising of a new method of psychosurgery especially affected two American doctors, Walter Freeman and James Watt Watts, who in 1936 lobotomized housewife Alice Hammett as an experiment. Among the high-profile patients was Rosemary Kennedy, JFK's sister, who was lobotomized in 1941 at her father's request. Before the operation, the unfortunate woman suffered from mood swings - sometimes excessive joy, sometimes anger, sometimes depression, and after that she turned into a disabled person, unable to even take care of herself. It is noteworthy that most of the patients were women, whom fathers, husbands or other close relatives sent to psychiatric institutions for treatment of violent temperament. Most often, there were no special indications even for treatment, let alone surgical intervention. But at the end of the day, caring relatives received a manageable and flexible woman, of course, if she survived the procedure.
Freeman at work. Simple tools
By the early 40s, Freeman had so perfected his lobotomy, which involved separating the frontal lobes of the brain, that he learned to do without drilling the skull. To do this, he inserted a thin steel instrument into the prefrontal lobes of the brain through a hole, which he had previously punched above the eye. The doctor could only “rummage” a little with the instrument in the patient’s brain, destroy the frontal lobes, remove the bloody steel, wipe it with a napkin and begin a new lobotomy. With the beginning of the war, thousands of mentally broken combat veterans arrived in the United States, for whom there was nothing to treat. Classical psychoanalysis was not particularly helpful, and chemical treatments had not yet appeared. It was much more economical to lobotomize most of the front-line soldiers, turning them into obedient and meek citizens. Freeman himself admitted that lobotomy “proved ideal in the conditions of overcrowded psychiatric hospitals, where there was a shortage of everything except patients.” The Veterans Administration even launched a program to train lobotomists, which had a very negative impact on further psychiatric practice. Freeman also unexpectedly adapted an ice pick (“ice pick”) as a lobotomy instrument - this greatly simplified the barbaric operation. Now it was possible to destroy the frontal lobes of the human brain almost in a barn, and Freeman himself adapted a small van for this purpose, nicknamed the Lobomobile.
[center]Patients who have undergone psychosurgical intervention
Doctors often performed up to 50 lobotomies per day, which significantly relieved the burden on psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Former patients were simply transferred to a silent, calm, humble state and sent home. In the vast majority of cases, no one monitored people after operations - there were too many of them. In the United States alone, more than 40 thousand frontal lobotomy operations were performed, a tenth of which were performed personally by Freeman. However, the doctor should be given credit for monitoring some of his patients.
Catastrophic consequences
On average, 30 out of 100 lobotomized patients exhibited some degree of epilepsy.
Moreover, in some people the disease manifested itself immediately after the destruction of the frontal lobe of the brain, and in some people several years later. Up to 3% of patients died during a lobotomy from a cerebral hemorrhage... Freeman called the consequences of such a surgical intervention frontal lobotomy syndrome, the manifestations of which were often polar. Many became incontinent in food and became severely obese. Irritability, cynicism, rudeness, promiscuity in sexual and social relationships became almost the calling card of the “cured” patient. The person lost all ability for creative activity and critical thinking. Freeman wrote in his writings on this subject:
“A patient who has undergone extensive psychosurgery, at first reacts to the outside world infantilely, dresses carelessly, commits hasty and sometimes tactless actions, does not know any sense of moderation in food, in drinking alcoholic beverages, in love pleasures, in entertainment; wastes money without thinking about the convenience or well-being of others; loses the ability to perceive criticism; may suddenly become angry with someone, but this anger quickly passes. The task of his loved ones is to help him quickly overcome this immaturity caused by surgery.”
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The advertising of lobotomy founder Egas Moniz and his follower Freeman, as well as the subsequent Nobel Prize, made such a crude and barbaric intervention in the human brain almost a panacea for all mental illnesses. But by the early 50s, a huge amount of data began to accumulate, exposing the vicious essence of lobotomy. The fashion for such psychosurgery quickly passed, doctors unanimously repented of their sins, but almost 100 thousand lobotomized unfortunates were left alone with their acquired ailments.
A paradoxical situation has developed in the Soviet Union. The monopoly of Ivan Pavlov’s teaching, which developed in physiology and psychiatry in the 40-50s, largely limited the development of medical sciences, but here the effect was the opposite. Having carried out 400 lobotomies, the medical community abandoned the fashionable technique with the wording “to refrain from using prefrontal leucotomy for neuropsychiatric diseases as a method that contradicts the basic principles of surgical treatment of I. P. Pavlov.”
Based on materials from the book by Samuel Chavkin “The Thieves of the Mind. A Brief History of Lobotomy."
Dr. Freeman and the ice pick
Meanwhile, the war ended, and there were fewer and fewer former military personnel admitted to psychiatry. It would seem that there was no longer such a need for a lobotomy. However, not only were operations not suspended. According to some reports, their popularity only began to grow, and surgeons could already demonstrate new instruments and methods of destroying nervous tissue, without being embarrassed at all if the patient was a child.
In many ways, the widespread use of lobotomy after 1945 was due to the American psychiatrist Walter Freeman, who proposed the so-called transorbital lobotomy. Its difference from previously used techniques is in the approach through the orbit. Freeman actively promoted leucotomy and performed more than one thousand such operations himself.
By the way, not only the lobotomy looks barbaric, but also the methods of pain relief. In a number of cases they were absent altogether, and the same Freeman, during the first operation he performed, provided analgesia to the poor fellow with electroconvulsive effects. After strong electrical discharges, the patient loses consciousness for a short time, but this is enough to perform a lobotomy.
Freeman's technique consisted of inserting a sharp instrument resembling an ice pick into the eye socket and then into the brain. Using a hammer and such a knife, Freeman got through the puncture of the bone directly to the brain, in which he cut the nerve fibers. According to the doctor, such treatment was supposed to relieve a patient suffering from mental illness from aggression, strong emotionality and uncontrollability.
There is information according to which it was the ice pick that became the tool that seemed most suitable for transorbital lobotomy. According to Freeman's relatives, during one of the operations, which, by the way, was not always carried out not only in the operating room, but also in the clinic in general, a surgical instrument broke. The action took place at home, and the surgeon had an ice knife at hand, which he hastened to point at the patient’s brain. The knife seemed convenient, and thus Freeman, having slightly modified it and provided it with divisions indicating length, became the inventor of the leukotome and orbitoclast.
Freeman lobotomy technique
Let us remember that the operation was done blindly, that is, neither before nor after, no one conducted any studies of the brain, and in those years they did not know about MRI at all. The surgeon or psychiatrist would destroy those areas of the brain that were in the path of the cutting instrument, without worrying one bit about the extent of the damage that could be done.
In fairness, it should be noted that the first results of lobotomies were indeed positive, because aggressive patients almost immediately became calm and even indifferent to what was happening. However, this does not justify the operation itself, since it was performed in completely different ways for patients with different diagnoses.
In addition, there was no clear system for analyzing the results, and the factor of controllability of the operated patient after the intervention acted as a criterion for cure. The “calmed down” mentally ill people left the clinic and no one was interested in their further well-being and fate.
Mochi
(Japanese) - a Japanese flatbread made from glutinous rice crushed into a paste and cast into a mold. The traditional process of creating such flatbreads is called mochitsuki. Mochi is eaten throughout the year, but the greatest demand for it occurs on New Year's Eve. Mochi is also known in Hawaii, South Korea, Taiwan, Cambodia and Thailand.
Making Mochi
Traditionally, mochi is made from rice by hand processing. The traditional ceremony for making mochi in Japan, mochitsuki, consists of the following steps:
- Polished glutinous rice is soaked overnight and boiled.
- Boiled rice is pounded with a wooden hammer in a traditional mortar (usu). This process involves two people, alternately replacing each other. One of them crushes the mochi, and the second stirs and wets it (they are forced to work at a very fast pace, otherwise one of them may injure the other with a heavy hammer).
- After this, the sticky mass is given a certain shape (usually spherical or cubic
). - Mochi can also be made from flour and sweet rice ( mochiko
). Flour is mixed with water until a sticky, opaque white mass is obtained. Next, this mass is cooked in a conventional or microwave oven until it becomes elastic and translucent.
Using mochi
Confectionery
- Mochi is used to make many types of traditional Japanese sweets (wagashi and mochigashi). For example, daifuku
is a soft, round mochi with a sweet filling such as red (an) or white (shiro an) bean paste. Ichigo daifuku has strawberry filling. - Kusa mochi
is a type of green mochi with tansy (yomogi) flavor. Daifuku made from kusa mochi is called yomogi daifuku.
Ice cream
Small scoops of ice cream are wrapped in mochi to become yukimi daifuku (snow daifuku)
; The product is manufactured by Lotte Corporation. In the US, mochi ice cream is also sold in chocolate, mango, coconut, green tea, coffee, vanilla and strawberry flavors.
Soups
- Oshiruko, or ozenzai, is a sweet soup made from azuki beans and mochi pieces. The Japanese often eat it in winter to keep warm.
- Chikara udon (meaning "udon power") is a soup made with udon noodles (thick wheat flour noodles popular in Japan) and toasted mochi.
New Year's dishes
- Kagami mochi
is a New Year's decoration that is traditionally broken and eaten as part of the Kagami Biraki (mirror opening) ritual. - Zoni soup contains mochi, a variety of vegetables such as taro, carrots, waxwort, and red and white kamaboko. This soup is also popular on New Year's Day.
- Eating kinako mochi
on New Year's Day is believed to bring good luck. This type of mochi is prepared by roasting the mochi over a fire or oven and then immersing it in water. After this, the pieces are coated with a thin layer of soy flour (kinako) and sugar.
Different dishes
- Dango
is a ball of rice flour (mochiko) served with sauce. - Warabimochi
is a jelly-like sweet made from fern starch and coated in soy flour (
kinako
) and sugar. This delicacy is popular in the summer and is often sold from food trucks. - Recently, a new sweet was invented - “moffles”
(wafers made from fried mochi). This sweet can be prepared both in special units and in regular waffle irons. - The Filipino flatbread , palitau,
is derived from the Japanese mochi. It differs from the latter by the addition of sesame seeds. - Every year during the New Year holidays in Japan, several elderly people and children die from choking on mochi cakes.
Information sources:
- Mochi - Wikipedia.
- Six Japanese choked on New Year's cupcakes - Lenta.ru.
but on the other hand
Almost a decade after the start of the experimental use of lobotomies, more scrupulous studies of its feasibility and even danger began. Thus, it turned out that mortality after surgery reaches 6%, and side effects include convulsive syndrome in a third of patients, obesity, impaired motor function up to paralysis, dysfunction of the pelvic organs, speech, and much more.
But the influence of lobotomy on a person’s personality, intelligence and behavior was much more disastrous. In almost all those operated on, the intelligence decreased to the level of infancy, control over behavior and actions was lost, emotional lability, indifference, lack of initiative and the ability to take purposeful, meaningful actions were observed. I lost self-criticism about the world around me, the ability to make plans, work and live more or less fully in society.
By the way, Freeman himself did not regard such changes in personality, which practically ceased to exist, as a negative result of treatment. According to his observations, a quarter of those operated on regressed intellectually to the level of a domestic animal, but became manageable and quiet.
Longer observations have shown that 10-15 years after a lobotomy, the connection between the frontal lobes and other brain structures is partially restored, returning hallucinations, delusional disorders, and aggression to mentally ill people, but not intelligence. Repeated operations further aggravated the intellectual and personality changes.
Origins of lobotomy
The founder of lobotomy was a doctor with Portuguese roots named Egas Moniz .
We can say that he borrowed and developed the idea of his neurologist colleagues, who in 1934 presented a bold experiment at the congress.
The essence of the experiment was that a group of specialists performed an operation to remove the frontal lobe of the brain of a primate named Becky.
If before the intervention the monkey was extremely aggressive and uncontrollable, then after the operation it became calm or even passive. Inspired by this example, Egas decided to perform a similar operation on humans.
Since there were no drugs that could control nervous excitation in patients with mental disorders, a lobotomy seemed the only way out.
Egas Monitz offered practically a panacea in a world where sick people were simply hidden in psychiatric hospitals, without the right to return to normal public life.
And already in 1936, neurosurgeon Almeida Lima performed an innovative operation under the strict supervision of Moniz.
Initially, 20 patients underwent the intervention. Seven of them, according to doctors, were completely cured of “head ailments.”
Another seven showed positive dynamics and only six patients did not change their behavior in a positive way. The doctors considered this result successful and decided to put the lobotomy on stream.
Some Terrifying Facts About Lobotomy
The scale of the ongoing lobotomy campaign is impressive: by the middle of the last century, up to 5,000 of them were performed annually in America alone. In total, during the period from the first experiment, about fifty thousand American patients were treated, and not only severe schizophrenia, but also neuroses, anxiety disorders, and depression could be the reason for the operation.
Other truly strange circumstances for surgical treatment include the conditions of the operation - in Dr. Freeman's special van, in the ward, and even at home. Without observing asepsis and antisepsis, using unsterile instruments, in the presence of a large number of observers.
Lobotomies were widely practiced by psychiatrists who had a vague understanding of surgery, the peculiarities of brain operations and its anatomy. Dr. Freeman himself did not have a surgical education, but managed to perform approximately 3.5 thousand lobotomies.
There is also an abuse of lobotomy under plausible pretexts: it began to be performed on poorly controlled and hyperactive children, grumpy wives, and emotionally unstable young women. By the way, there were much more women among those operated on than men.
Since the second half of the twentieth century, it was no longer possible to hide the most serious negative consequences of lobotomy. The operation was finally recognized as dangerous and was banned at the legislative level. Tens and thousands of victims of the inhumane treatment method, broken lives, as well as relatives who actually lost loved ones during their lifetime - confirmation of not a therapeutic, but a crippling result of the effect on the brain.
What happens to a person after a lobotomy?
To begin with, it is worth talking about the side effects of this operation. Due to disruption of connections in the brain, serious negative consequences are almost always observed. Thinking, logic, memory are disrupted, a person degrades and loses his personality. Often patients completely lost contact with the outside world, turning into a “vegetable”, or even died. The reason for this is both the destructiveness of the operation itself and the unqualifiedness of the doctors who performed it. The condition of approximately a third of the patients improved, aggression passed, and schizophrenia receded. Some even regained their capacity and could once again be part of society. But the positive effect is mainly due to human degradation. An aggressive and uncontrollable patient became like a child with unformed thinking.
Soviet scientists are against it?
In the USSR, psychiatrists and neurosurgeons approached the issue of lobotomy quite carefully, without rushing to massively destroy the brains of Soviet people with a knife. The first to doubt the appropriateness of the method was the outstanding surgeon N. N. Burdenko, who instructed his doctoral student Yu. B. Rozinsky to carefully analyze the essence and prospects of lobotomy for severe psychiatric pathology.
However, there were also like-minded people in the Soviet Union of Freeman and Moniz, in particular, Professor A. S. Shmaryan, who actively promoted prefrontal lobotomy and even found a supporter of the method among neurosurgeons - not just someone, but an outstanding neurosurgeon scientist, the future director of the Institute of Neurosurgery.
Professor Egorov, who performed lobotomies “at the suggestion” of Shmaryan, approached the issue of surgical technique more carefully, using his own modification - osteoplastic trepanation for good revision and orientation at the site of destruction of brain tissue. The “Soviet” version of leucotomy was much more gentle, since it involved only unilateral intersection of the nerve tracts while preserving the integrity of the ventricular system, pyramidal tracts and basal ganglia.
Patients who were sent for a lobotomy were selected extremely strictly. The operation was considered advisable only when none of the known conservative methods with long-term use gave positive dynamics, including insulin comas and electric shock.
Before the operation, the patients were carefully examined by therapists, neurologists, and psychiatrists. After the lobotomy, the observation continued, and the doctors clearly recorded absolutely all changes in the psyche, social adaptation, and behavior of those operated on. Both positive and negative consequences, including death, were objectively analyzed. Thus, Russian doctors were able to formulate the reasons and obstacles to prefrontal lobotomy.
By 1948, based on the accumulated observational data of patients after lobotomies, the operation was recognized in principle as permissible, but only if carried out by a highly qualified neurosurgeon, in a hospital, in case of irreversible brain damage and the ineffectiveness of all possible treatment methods.
In parallel, neurophysiology begins to develop, new approaches to neurosurgical techniques for lobotomy are substantiated, and new instruments and approaches appear. The results seemed satisfactory: more than half of the patients with paranoid schizophrenia experienced improvement, and a fifth experienced restoration of normal mental status, ability to work, and intelligence.
However, it was not possible to avoid consequences in the form of “frontal” and intellectual disorders even with the most gentle approaches. The debate between opponents and supporters of psychosurgery did not subside. And if in 1949 lobotomy was considered a relatively safe and even effective intervention, then a year later, in 1950, it was banned at the government level.
The ban on lobotomy in the USSR was dictated more by scientific ideas and the results of clinical trials than by political reasons. Severe psychoneurological changes in the postoperative period did not allow lobotomy to be included in the list of officially approved operations.
Lobotomy was banned thanks to the efforts of Professor Gilyarovsky, who repeatedly raised discussions of this problem among scientists. The checks he initiated showed that the intervention was carried out not only by surgeons, but also by psychiatrists, and all patients were left with organic disorders of brain activity expressed to varying degrees.
The history of lobotomies in Russia was marked by a devastating article by Gilyarovsky in the journal “Medical Worker”, where both the treatment method itself and its justification by American psychiatrists were criticized, and then by a publication in Pravda, in which lobotomy was called a pseudoscientific method of bourgeois medicine, which has no place among Soviet doctors raised in the spirit of humanism. On December 9, 1950, lobotomy was officially banned in the USSR.
Fortunately, today lobotomy is a horrifying past, one of the unsightly examples of a scientific search that turned into a tragedy for many thousands of patients and their families. I would like to believe that modern medicine will not come up with a new treatment method that will become such a large-scale experiment on people, conducted with the support of the governments of fully developed countries.
Panacea for schizophrenia?
The lobotomy method itself (originally called leucotomy) was developed in 1935 by the Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz as an effective treatment for mental disorders. The first operation was performed in 1936 by Professor Almeida Lima. The essence of the procedure was as follows: the doctor, using a guide, inserted a loop into the patient’s brain and damaged the tissue with rotational movements. After this, some of the patients actually allegedly experienced improvement, and Moniz began to advertise his method in every possible way.
Moniz's experience began to be adopted in many countries in Europe, Japan, and the USA. In 1949, Egas Moniz was even awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for the discovery of the therapeutic effect of leucotomy in certain mental diseases.”
Unfortunately, the outcome of operations was assessed primarily by such a criterion as increasing the patient's controllability. Most of those who were subjected to the lobotomy procedure suffered from increased emotional excitability. After the operation, many actually became calmer. Meanwhile, studies conducted in the 50s revealed that in 1.5-6% the operation led to death; in other cases, its consequences were epileptic seizures, speech disorders, significant weight gain, loss of motor coordination, partial paralysis, urinary incontinence... Many of those operated on had intellectual impairment, weakened control over their own behavior, apathy, signs of emotional instability, emotional dullness, lack of initiative and inability to carry out purposeful activities. The operation turned about a quarter of the patients into “vegetables.”
As for the positive effects, in some cases it was actually possible to save the patient from problems such as increased aggressiveness, delusions, hallucinations or depression. But after a few years, the nerve fibers from the excised lobes grew back into the medulla and the problems returned. Some patients had the lobotomy repeated, but this only worsened the negative side effects.
