If personality’s a problem, why not turn it off? That’s what neurosurgeons did in the United States, Great Britain, and throughout Scandinavia, mostly from the 1930s to 1950s. And it was pretty simple: once personality was (correctly) blamed on the prefrontal cortex, all neurosurgeons had to do was to snip all the wires into and out of it.
In the United States, the prefrontal lobotomy was pioneered by Walter Freeman, who hoped it could be used on a shoestring budget and without anesthesia in state mental hospitals (using existing electroshock facilities to render patients unconscious during the surgery). Because by licensure only neurosurgeons were allowed to drill holes in the skull and because state mental hospitals were unlikely to have access to a neurosurgeon, Freeman hit on the bright idea of accessing the brain through the eye sockets. Basically, he slid a long metal object along the path of the upper eyelid and then gave it a solid smack with a hammer to drive it through the thin layer of bone covering the brain.
His tool of choice was an ice pick.
Once inside, he waggled the pick back and forth to cut the connection between the prefrontal lobe and the thalamus. He then repeated the procedure on the other side.
About 40,000 people in the United States had their prefrontal cortexes nixed from the system, including Rosemary Kennedy (JFK’s sister), who was lobotomized as a twenty-three-year-old due to “moodiness.” The procedure left her incontinent and unable to speak.
Luckily, lobotomies went out of vogue with the advent of thorazine and then other antipsychotic drugs.
