Five bloodcurdling medical procedures that are no longer performed … thankfully

It’s hard to believe that a procedure more brutal than trepanation was widely performed in the 20th century. Lobotomy involved severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal lobe with an implement resembling an icepick (a leucotome).

'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey

'My Lobotomy' Hear a 1968 Diary Entry from Dr. Walter Freeman Listen Queue On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country... Howard Dully has embarked on a quest to discover the story behind the procedure he received as a 12-year-old boy.

10 Awful Realities Behind The Lobotomy Craze

We’ve all heard of the lobotomy through popular culture. Today, it is considered a ridiculous way to fix someone’s mental health problems. Sometimes it is part of a joke, and other times it is used as an expression to describe someone who is basically brain-dead or incapable of caring for themselves.

FYI: Do Lobotomies Work?

Surprisingly, yes.

Growing up, I didn’t know my mother had a lobotomy

Growing up, I didn’t know what was wrong with my mother. I was 25, maybe 26, when I learned she had a lobotomy. I am still trying to make sense of it.

Inside Rosemary Kennedy's Disastrous Lobotomy – And How Her Father Chose Her Doctor

When she was just 23, Rosemary Kennedy underwent a relatively new procedure – a prefrontal lobotomy – that was ordered by her father in an attempt to ease her emotional outbursts. Instead, the surgery left her mentally and physically incapacitated for the rest of her life.

Lobotomy: Definition, Procedure & History

Lobotomies have always been controversial, but were widely performed for more than two decades as treatment for schizophrenia, manic depression and bipolar disorder, among other mental illnesses.

Study shows direct manipulation of brain can reverse effects of depression

Manipulating the brain has been a tool used in the treatment of mental illness for centuries, and treatments have often been controversial. From psychosurgery, including lobotomy and leucotomy, to electro-convulsive therapy, which is still used to treat depression and psychotic illness today, more modern methods include deep brain stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation.

The American Lobotomy

The blog attempts to look at the development of the lobotomy from its beginnings in the 1930s to its decline in the 1960s. The US utilization of the lobotomy can primarily be attributed to Dr. Walter Freeman and his partner, Dr. James Watts.

The Lobotomist

It was hailed by the New York Times as "surgery of the soul," a groundbreaking medical procedure that promised hope to the most distressed mentally ill patients and their families. But what began as an operation of last resort was soon being performed at some fifty state asylums, often to devastating results. Little more than a decade after his rise to fame, Walter Freeman, the neurologist who championed the procedure, was decried as a moral monster, and lobotomy one of the most barbaric mistakes of modern medicine.

The Lobotomy Files

A cache of musty documents lost to memory exposes a time when the U.S. lobotomized some 2,000 veterans.

The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotomy

The lobotomy was first performed on humans in the 1890s. About half a century later, it was being touted by some as a miracle cure for mental illness, and its use became widespread; during its heyday in the 1940s and ’50s...

The strange and curious history of lobotomy

From the early 1940s, it began to be seen as a miracle cure here in the UK, where surgeons performed proportionately more lobotomies than even in the US.

The Strange Past and Promising Future of the Lobotomy

If you thought that scene in Sucker Punch where the doctor gave lobotomies with an ice pick was artistic exaggeration — well, it wasn’t. That’s exactly how Walter Freeman, a popularizer of lobotomies in the 1940s, performed thousands of operations.

The Surprising History of the Lobotomy

Today, the word “lobotomy” is rarely mentioned. If it is, it’s usually the butt of a joke. But in the 20th century, a lobotomy became a legitimate alternative treatment for serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia and severe depression.

The Worst Nobel Prize

Who is the least deserving Nobel laureate of all time?

Walter Freeman: Ice Pick Lobotomist

By severing connections in the frontal lobe, many believed they could also sever the connections between a mentally ill person’s thoughts, and the intense negative emotions associated with them. And what’s even weirder is it sometimes worked.

What Are Science's Ugliest Experiments?

Until his death in 1972, Freeman insisted that lobotomies had helped most of his patients. But as the medical historian Edward Shorter has noted: "Freeman's definition of success is that the patients are no longer agitated. That doesn't mean that you're cured, that means they could be discharged from the asylum, but they were incapable of carrying on normal social life. They were usually demobilized and lacking in energy. And they were that on a permanent basis."