显著案例
See also: Categoryobotomised people.
Rosemary Kennedy, sister of President John F. Kennedy, underwent a lobotomy in 1941 that left her incapacitated and institutionalized for the rest of her life.[156]
Howard Dully wrote a memoir of his late-life discovery that he had been lobotomized in 1960 at age 12.[157]
New Zealand author and poet Janet Frame received a literary award in 1951 the day before a scheduled lobotomy was to take place, and it was never performed.[158]
Josef Hassid, a Polish violinist and composer, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and died at the age of 26 following a lobotomy.[159]
Swedish modernist painter Sigrid Hjertén died following a lobotomy in 1948.[160]
American playwright Tennessee Williams' older sister Rose received a lobotomy that left her incapacitated for life; the episode is said to have inspired characters and motifs in certain works of his.[161]
It is often said that when an iron rod was accidentally driven through the head of Phineas Gage in 1848, this constituted an "accidental lobotomy", or that this event somehow inspired the development of surgical lobotomy a century later. According to the only book-length study of Gage, careful inquiry turns up no such link.[162]
In 2011, Daniel Nijensohn, an Argentine-born neurosurgeon at Yale, examined X-rays of Eva Peron and concluded that she underwent a lobotomy for the treatment of pain and anxiety in the last months of her life.[163]
Literary and cinematic portrayals
Lobotomies have been featured in several literary and cinematic presentations that both reflected society's attitude towards the procedure and, at times, changed it. Writers and film-makers have played a pivotal role in forming a negative public sentiment towards the procedure.[5]
Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel All the King's Men describes a lobotomy as making "a Comanche brave look like a tyro with a scalping knife," and portrays the surgeon as a repressed man who cannot change others with love, so he instead resorts to "high-grade carpentry work".[164]
Tennessee Williams criticized lobotomy in his play Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) because it was sometimes inflicted on homosexuals—to render them "morally sane".[5] In the play a wealthy matriarch offers the local mental hospital a substantial donation if the hospital will give her niece a lobotomy, which she hopes will stop the niece's shocking revelations about the matriarch's son.[165] Warned that a lobotomy might not stop her niece's "babbling," she responds, "That may be, maybe not, but after the operation who would believe her, Doctor?"[166]
In Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its 1975 film adaptation, lobotomy is described as "frontal-lobe castration", a form of punishment and control after which "There's nothin' in the face. Just like one of those store dummies." In one patient, "You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; his eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside."[164]
In Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel The Bell Jar, the protagonist reacts with horror to the "perpetual marble calm" of a lobotomized young woman.[164]
Elliott Baker's 1964 novel and 1966 film version, A Fine Madness, portrays the dehumanizing lobotomy of a womanizing, quarrelsome poet who, afterwards, is just as aggressive as ever. The surgeon is depicted as an inhumane crackpot.[167]
The 1982 biopic film Frances depicts actress Frances Farmer (the subject of the film) undergoing transorbital lobotomy (though the idea[168] that a lobotomy was performed on Farmer, and that Freeman performed it, has been criticized as having little or no factual foundation).[169]
See also
icon Psychiatry portal
Bilateral cingulotomy destruction of a part of the brain
Bioethics and Medical ethics
Frontal lobe disorder
Frontal lobe injury
Psychosurgery
History of psychosurgery in the United Kingdom
Notes
Walter Rudolf Hess, who was the joint winner with Moniz of the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his work on the function of the midbrain, had no involvement with leucotomy.[4]
A pseudonym
A 1937 report detailed that in the United States there were then 477 psychiatric institutions with a total population of approximately 451,672 patients, almost half of whom had been resident for a period of five years or more.[22] The report also observed that psychiatric patients occupied 55 per cent of all hospital beds in America.[22] Conditions within US mental hospitals became the subject of public debate as a series of exposes were published in the 1940s.[23] A 1946 Life magazine article remarked that the nation's system of mental hospitals resembled "little more than concentration camps on the Belsen pattern";[24] a point the piece emphasized with documentary photography that depicted patient neglect and dilapidated material conditions within psychiatric institutions.[25]
Ugo Cerletti, the Italian psychiatrist and joint inventor with Lucio Bini of electroconvulsive therapy, described psychiatry during the interwar period as a "funereal science".[26] Likewise Egas Moniz, the inventor of leucotomy, referred to the "impotência terapeutica" (therapeutic impotence) of existing therapeutic remedies during the 1930s.[27]
The patient he thought improved subsequently committed suicide.[43]
According to Puusepp, the three patients were suffering from manic depression or considered "epileptic equivalents".[50]
Puusepp admitted to his 1910 experimentation with psychosurgery in a 1937 publication.[53] At that point he had completed a series of 14 leucotomies to relieve aggressive symptoms in patients. Convinced that the results had been positive in these cases, he felt that further research into psychosurgery was warranted.[52]
Professor of neurology at the University of Lisbon from 1911 to 1944, Moniz was also for several decades a prominent parliamentarian and diplomat. He was Portugal's ambassador to Spain during World War I and represented Portugal at the postwar Versailles Treaty negotiations,[56] but after the Portuguese coup d'état of 1926, which ushered in the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship), the Republican Moniz, then 51 years old, devoted his considerable talents and energies to neurological research entirely. Throughout his career he published on topics as diverse as neurology, sexology, historical biography, and the history of card games.[57] For his 1927 development of cerebral angiography, which allowed routine visualisation of the brain's peripheral blood vessels for the first time, he was twice nominated, unsuccessfully, for a Nobel Prize. Some have attributed his development of leucotomy to a determination on his part to win the Nobel after these disappointments.[58]
The American neuropsychiatrist Walter Freman also attended the Congress where he presented his research findings on cerebral ventriculography. Freeman, who would later play a central role in the popularisation and practice of leucotomy in America, also had an interest in personality changes following frontal lobe surgery.[52]
The patient suffered from meningioma, a rare form of brain tumour arising in the meninges.[75]
Brickner and Davidoff had planned, before Moniz's first leucotomies, to operate on the frontal lobes to relieve depression.[83]
Moniz wrote in 1948: 'sufferers from melancholia, for instance, are distressed by fixed and obsessive ideas ... and live in a permanent state of anxiety caused by a fixed idea which predominates over all their lives ... in contrast to automatic actions, these morbid ideas are deeply rooted in the synaptic complex which regulates the functioning of consciousness, stimulating it and keeping it in constant activity ... all these considerations led me to the following conclusion: it is necessary to alter these synaptic adjustments and change the paths chosen by the impulses in their constant passage so as to modify the corresponding ideas and force thoughts along different paths ...'[90]
Lima described his role as that of an "instrument handled by the Master".[99]
Before operating on live subjects, they practised the procedure on a cadaver head.[84]
It was estimated by William Sargant and Eliot Slater that 15,000 leucotomies had been performed in the UK by 1962.[118]
The 14 leucotomies reported by Puusepp in his 1937 paper were performed at the Racconigi Hospital.[120]
Walter Freeman had originally used ice picks for his modified form of the leucotomy operation that he termed transorbital lobotomy. However, because the ice picks would occasionally break inside the patient's head and have to be retrieved, he had the very durable orbitoclast specially commissioned in 1948.[134]
Frank Freeman, Walter Freeman's son, stated in an interview with Howard Dully that: "He had several ice-picks that just cluttered the back of the kitchen drawer. The first ice-pick came right out of our drawer. A humble ice-pick to go right into the frontal lobes. It was, from a cosmetic standpoint, diabolical. Just observing this thing was horrible, gruesome." When Dully asked Frank Freeman, then a 79-year-old security guard, whether he was proud of his father, he replied: "Oh yes, yes, yeah. He was terrific. He was really quite a remarkable pioneer lobotomist. I wish he could have gotten further."[136]
Rodney Dully, whose son Howard Dully had had a transorbital lobotomy performed on him by Walter Freeman when he was twelve years old, stated in an interview with his son that: "I only met him [Freeman] I think the one time. He described how accurate it [transorbital lobotomy] was and that he had practised the cutting on, literally, a carload of grapefruit, getting the right move and the right turn. That's what he told me."[136]
obotomised people.