ASSOCIATED PRESS
The lobotomy, once a widely used method for treating mental illness, epilepsy and even chronic headaches, is generating fresh controversy 30 years after doctors stopped performing the procedure now viewed as barbaric.
A new book and a medical historian contend that the crude brain surgery helped roughly 10 percent of the estimated 50,000 Americans who underwent the procedure between the mid-1930s and the 1970s. But relatives of lobotomy patients want the Nobel Prize given to its inventor revoked.
The lobotomy debate is discussed in an editorial in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
The lobotomy was pioneered in 1935 by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, who operated on people with severe psychiatric illnesses, particularly agitation and depression. Through holes drilled in the skull, Dr. Moniz cut through nerve fibers connecting the brain’s frontal lobe, which controls thinking, with other brain regions — theorizing that as new nerve connections formed, the patient’s abnormal behavior would end.
Dr. Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949.
The procedure was so in vogue that Rosemary Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s mildly retarded sister, had a lobotomy in 1941 at age 23. She remained in an institution until she died in January.
By the late 1930s, doctors were reporting that many lobotomy patients were left childlike, apathetic and withdrawn. Use eventually waned with the advent of effective psychiatric drugs in the mid-1950s and the growing use of electroshock therapy.
Modern views of lobotomy have led to a call to pull Dr. Moniz’s Nobel Prize.
“How can anyone trust the Nobel Committee when they won’t admit to such a terrible mistake?” asked Christine Johnson, a medical librarian in Levittown, N.Y., who started a campaign to have the prize revoked.
Her grandmother, Beulah Jones, became delusional in 1949, was lobotomized in 1954 after unsuccessful psychiatric and electroshock treatments and spent the rest of her life in institutions.
Several years ago, Miss Johnson, whose grandmother died in 1989, started the Web site psychosurgery.org to build a support network among families of lobotomy patients. The group then began urging removal of an article on the Nobel Web site (nobelprize.org) praising Dr. Moniz.
The Nobel Foundation refused to remove or change the article. Now Miss Johnson is asking Nobel laureates to support her campaign to strip Dr. Moniz’s prize.
“There’s no possibility to revoke it,” said foundation executive director Michael Sohlman, who could not recall a medicine prize ever being challenged. “It’s a non-starter.”
Meanwhile, journalist Jack El-Hai recently published “The Lobotomist” about neurosurgeon Walter Freeman, who performed roughly 3,400 of the procedures.
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