What is a lobotomy and for what purpose was it performed?

In 1935, the Portuguese neurosurgeon and psychiatrist António Egas Moniz he performed a surgical procedure that he called a leucotomy.

It consisted of making two holes in the front of the skull, and injecting alcohol directly into the frontal lobe of the brain through them. Years later, this practice had been renamed lobotomy, and his popularity in the world of psychiatry led Egas Moniz to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949. What had happened?

The birth of the lobotomy

The etymology of the term leucotomy serves to give us an idea about the objective with which the lobotomies were performed; leuko means white, and take means cut. Egas Moniz believed that certain mental disorders could be cured by breaking some areas of the brain in which the frontal lobe communicates with others in the brain. That is, damaging parts of the brain's white matter, so called because it is dominated by axons (the parts of the brain). neuron that lengthen to communicate with distant nerve cells).

This neurosurgeon started from the idea that it was possible to considerably reduce the intensity and frequency of the symptoms of psychiatric disorders causing all their psychological functions in general decayed.

 A part of the intellectual capacity and personality of each patient was sacrificed to try to bring it closer to healing.

Walter Freeman's lobotomy

Egas Moniz's proposal may seem brutal today, but in its historical context it was well received in the field of non-Freudian psychiatry. In fact, in 1936, neurosurgeon Walter Freeman imported this type of intervention to the United States and, after giving it the name of lobotomy, it became popular all over the world.

Freeman also made some changes to the procedure. After stunning patients by electroshock, instead of piercing two points in the skull and inserting skewers through them, he used similar instruments an ice pick that was introduced through the eye socket, between the eye and the part of bone on which the eyebrow is, and removed trying to "sweep" parts of the frontal lobes from each brain hemisphere.

As the wounds did not reach the deepest part of the brain, vital structures were not damaged and, in some cases, patients hardly noticed any changes during the first hours. In any case, the nervous system of these people was forever marked, and their way of behaving and experiencing life, too.

Why was the lobotomy popular?

It is hard to believe that the practice of lobotomies enjoyed a good reputation for a period, but the truth is that it did.

After revealing his method, Freeman performed more than 2,000 lobotomies throughout his career. The practice of lobotomy spread rapidly throughout all Western countries, and it came to be considered one of the most useful tools that medicine could count on.

People who underwent voluntary or involuntary lobotomy were not only patients with severe mental disorders as the schizophrenia wave severe depression; On many occasions this operation was used to solve cases of behavior problems, disobedient adolescents, etc. Freeman's method may have been brutal, but a good portion of society was willing to embrace that brutality.

The idea of ​​ending deeply rooted behavior problems with just a few sessions was very tempting. Furthermore, if lobotomized people were more "calm", conflicts and relational problems could be put to an end, simply by focusing on an individual who had to "change."

The logic behind this good reception by a large part of the health institutions has to do with the hygienist mentality they held. At that time people with psychiatric disorders were herded into crowded hospitals, and many times they were subjected to physical or psychological violence.

The lobotomy provided the opportunity to make these kinds of problems less obvious, easier to ignore. The patients were still sick, but after the operation it was less noticeable that they were there. The problem was solved in fiction and, in any case, the alternative to this practice was also terrible.

The appearance of psychotropic drugs and the end of the ice pick

The popularity of lobotomies began to plummet not due to a spontaneous awareness on the part of the population, but because of a much less romantic event: the appearance of the first generations of psychotropic drugs for severe mental disorders, in the mid-1950s.

The lobotomy promised an apparent quick solution to behavior problems from a few sessions, an exchange that, taking into account the many problems that it could solve (in the family, at work, etc.), went out to account. However, psychotropic drugs were not only much more effective, but also its application was much simpler.

Similarly, when one of Freeman's patients died from bleeding from the neurosurgeon, it became clear that the risks of lobotomy were high. In the 50s and 60s, many countries banned these kinds of interventions, and the USSR came to consider it "contrary to human rights."

In any case, the lobotomy had enjoyed such a good image that it still took a couple of decades to appear. The simplicity of the procedure (which could be done in less than 10 minutes) continued to make this measured in an attractive option for when there was no surveillance of relatives or entities public.

Bibliographic references:

• Cosgrove, G. Rees; Rauch, Scott L. (1995). "Psychosurgery" Neurosurg. Clin. N. A.M.
• Martínez, Luis Antonio (2009). Reconstructive regressive therapy. Books on the Net.