A lobotomy, or leucotomy, is a neurosurgical treatment of a mental disorder. Most of the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain, are severed. The use of the operation increased dramatically from the early 1940s and into the 1950s.
About Lobotomy in brief
A lobotomy, or leucotomy, is a neurosurgical treatment of a mental disorder that involves severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Most of the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain, are severed. It was used for mental disorders and occasionally other conditions as a mainstream procedure in some Western countries for more than two decades. Today, lobotomy has become a disparaged procedure, a byword for medical barbarism and an exemplary instance of the medical trampling of patients’ rights. The originator of the procedure, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomies in certain psychoses. The use of the operation increased dramatically from the early 1940s and into the 1950s; by 1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies had been performed in the United States and proportionally more in the U.K. Lobotomies began to be abandoned, first in the Soviet Union and Europe, in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 20th century, the number of patients residing in mental hospitals increased significantly while little in the way of effective medical treatment was available. Lobotomy was one of a series of radical and invasive therapies that developed in Europe at this time that signaled a break with a therapeutic culture that had prevailed with nihilism and nihilism had prevailed in Europe since the 19th century.
The procedure was controversial from its initial use in part due to the balance between benefits and risks. The purpose was to reduce the symptoms of mental disorders, and it was recognized that this was accomplished at the expense of a person’s personality and intellect. Some people fell into an intermediate group, left with some improvement of their symptoms but also with emotional and intellectual deficits to which they made a better or worse adjustment. The operation left people with an infantile personality; a period of maturation would then, according to Freeman, lead to recovery. In an unpublished memoir, he described a 29-year-old woman as being, “smiling, lazy, lazy and an oyster who could not remember her name and poured coffee endlessly from an empty pot. I am supposed to exist to the social pressures of the social system under which he is supposed to be. I’m supposed to live in the social pressure of social pressures that are supposed to existed to the one and only time I’m alive. That’s what I’m here to do. I don’t want to be a part of it. I want to live my life to the full and to the fullest. I just want to have a good life. And I’m not going to die. I’ve got a lot of other things to do in my life that I need to do, and I’m going to do them in a way that makes me feel good about myself and my family and my friends and my community.”
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This page is based on the article Lobotomy published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 09, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
