Psychosurgery

1935

Egas Moniz (1874–1955)

Becky and Lucy fought a lot. Becky would throw her food, have tantrums, and bite Lucy when she was frustrated. She was more than a handful—until she had a new kind of surgery that separated her frontal lobes. Afterward, her behavior changed so much that her surgeon remarked that it was as though Becky had joined a “happiness cult.” Becky and Lucy were chimpanzees.

Yale psychologist Carlyle Jacobsen reported the case of Becky at the 1935 meeting of the International Neurological Congress in London. In the audience was the notable Portuguese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz. Moniz left the meeting convinced that this surgery held great promise. He conducted the first operation of what he was now calling psychosurgery on November 12, 1935, and within three months he had performed twenty psychosurgeries on patients with a variety of serious psychiatric disorders. He claimed that fourteen of the twenty patients either recovered or improved.

Reports of Moniz’s new intervention spread rapidly around the world. By 1949, about 5,000 such surgeries, now commonly called lobotomies, were being performed annually in the United States. Neurologist Walter Freeman was by far the most prolific, conducting 3,500 lobotomies from 1936 to 1970. With neurosurgeon James Watts, Freeman pioneered the use of the transorbital lobotomy, in which a surgical spatula was inserted and swept through the frontal lobes. Freeman then developed an in-office procedure in which an actual ice pick was inserted into the frontal lobes through the eye socket. The ice-pick lobotomy was performed on a number of children, including a four-year-old.

Despite Freeman’s advocacy of psychosurgery, its popularity declined in the 1950s and 1960s because of doubts about its efficacy and the introduction of new drugs that promised more effective treatment. However, as late as the early 1970s, figures within the Nixon administration promoted the use of lobotomies as a means to control dissident figures.

SEE ALSO Bedlam (1357), Electroshock Therapy (1938)

The Surgeon by Flemish painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen, 1555.