monkey brains repost

Everybody’s favorite psychiatric treatment, the modern lobotomy was the brainchild of Egas Moniz, a Portuguese doctor. Moniz believed that mental illnesses were generally caused by problems in the neurons of the frontal lobe, the part of the brain just behind the forehead. So when he heard about a monkey whose violent, feces-throwing urges had been curbed by cuts to the frontal lobe, Moniz was moved to try out the same thing with some of his patients. (The lobe-cutting, not the feces-throwing.) He believed the technique could cure insanity while leaving the rest of the patient’s mental function relatively normal, and his (admittedly fuzzy) research seemed to support that. The accolades flooded in, and (in one of the lower points in the Karolinska Institute’s history) Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949.

After the lobotomy rage hit American shores, Dr. Walter Freeman took to traveling the country in his “lobotomobile” (no, really), performing the technique on everyone from catatonic schizophrenics to disaffected housewives. His road-ready procedure involved inserting a small ice pick into the brain through the eye socket and wiggling it around a bit. While some doctors thought he’d found a way to save hopeless cases from the horrors of life-long institutionalization, others noted that Freeman didn’t bother with sterile techniques, had no surgical training whatsoever, and tended to be a bit imprecise when describing his patients’ recovery. As the number of lobotomies increased, a major problem became apparent. The patients weren’t just calm; they were virtual zombies who scarcely responded to the world around them. Between that and the bad press lobotomies received in films and novels such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the treatment soon fell out of favor.

This article was written by Dan Greenberg, mental floss mag