![]() Within months, he reported improvement in many patients and was rewarded with a Nobel Prize in 1949, affirming the pressing need for psychiatric treatment, which he called “psychosurgery.”įreeman immediately took up the procedure. After that meeting, Lima interrupted frontal connections with injections of alcohol and later by surgical sections. According to El-Hai, however, Lima brushed off that claim, stating he had been thinking of that kind of surgery for years Lima never gave credit to Fulton. He lectured about the chimpanzees, Becky and Lucy, who were said to have become docile after frontal lobe resections in Fulton's report to an international Neurology Congress in 1935, which was delivered by his associate, psychologist Carlyle Jacobsen.įulton was there and he later wrote that the descriptions of Becky and Lucy impressed and influenced Almeida Lima, a Portuguese neurologist already famous for devising cerebral angiography in 1927. ![]() That was the promise of lobotomy.Īs a student at Yale Medical School, I was exposed to John Fulton's attempt to discern the role of the frontal lobes by making lesions in primate brains and evaluating changes in behavior. There was a serious need for a treatment that would improve patients enough to return them to the community. In 1936, according to El-Hai, the state hospital population numbered 432,000. “Warehousing” was the term and “snake pit” was a common analogy. The operation rapidly found widespread use because state mental hospitals were deplorably unable to do anything more for psychotic people than keeping them off the streets. “A side from the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, Walter Freeman ranks as the most scorned physician of the twentieth century.” So begins Jack El-Hai's laudable attempt to balance the pros and cons of Freeman's contributions – “The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness” – not “to vindicate the doctor but to understand him.”įreeman was the foremost promoter of frontal lobotomy. The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness By Jack El-Hai
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