“The miracle cure that wasn’t: ‘White Matter’ on the personal tragedy of lobotomy,” by Meehan Crist, Los Angeles Times
In 1949, Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for “one of the most important discoveries ever made in psychiatric therapy.” The discovery was that surgically removing part of a person’s frontal lobes could relieve symptoms of mental illness. During its heyday in the 1940s and ‘50s, prefrontal leucotomy, or lobotomy, was performed on more than 40,000 people in the United States and 10,000 in Western Europe.
Yet even at the time at least one critic observed...Forward