The History of Lobotomy

by Read Listen Learn

A lobotomy is an operation to cut the nerves between the two halves of the brain, close to the front. This was done by making holes in the head (often near the eyes) and then putting a knife in and cutting the nerves. Between 1935 and the 1980s, surgeons performed 40,000 lobotomies in the States, 17,000 in Britain and more than 9,000 in Scandinavia, among many other countries. Children as young as three years old have had lobotomies to control hyperactivity. President Kennedy’s mentally challenged sister, Rose, spent the rest of her life in hospital after an unsuccessful lobotomy.

The first lobotomies were performed by a Swiss surgeon, Gottlieb Burckhardt, between 1888 and 1891 on six severely psychologically disturbed patients. One died five days after the operation and another committed suicide. Two of the other four were, unsurprisingly, “quieter” and the other two showed no real change. Burckhardt’s colleagues criticised him for his belief that certain parts of the brain controlled certain actions and behaviour – something that we now know is true - and he never performed another operation again. He excused himself for his psycho surgery by saying that he could not leave such unhappy people without trying to help them:

“Doctors are different by nature. One kind believes in the old principle: first, do no harm; the other says: it is better to do something than nothing. I am certainly in the second category.”

There were no more psycho surgery operations performed until Egas Moniz, a politician, diplomat and doctor, reported a dramatic improvement in twenty patients he had operated on (although he was not a surgeon) in 1936. It is important to remember that these patients never agreed to have the operations and no later study was done to see if they improved.

Still, in 1949, Moniz got the Nobel Prize for Medicine. This was although a patient that he had operated on shot him in 1939, breaking his spine, so that Moniz never walked again.

Let’s not forget either that Burckhardt and Moniz could not actually see what they were doing when they put the knife in the brain but assumed that the organ was in the centre of the head, so that they needed to operate halfway between the eyes but a few centimetres up, to cut the nerves between the two halves of the brain. They were wrong. We now know that the position of the brain is not so exact but differs from one person to the next. What Burckhardt and Moniz were very often doing was pushing a knife straight into one half of the brain or the other.

Obviously, because of the injuries the knife caused, the brain swelled. As the brain sits quite tightly in the skull so that there is not much space for it to move around, when it got bigger there was nowhere for it to go except out through the holes the surgeons had made in the patients’ skulls. So, they had little horns coming out of their heads just above the eyes. How these doctors expected their patients to live normally with their families, friends and employers, for instance, when they had horns, has never been explained.

In 1950, the Soviet Union banned lobotomies as they were “inhumane”. However, most countries continued to use them for decades, although there was never any research to decide how successful the operations were. In the 1960s, Ronald Reagan, who was then Governor of California, recommended their use on people against the Vietnam War, who used drugs and took part in other ‘anti-social’ activities. He later became President of the USA. In the 1970s, the operation was used to quieten hyperactive children in the States, Japan and Korea. Some were as young as three.

In short, lobotomy was bad science and is no longer used today. This, of course, does not help nearly 100,000 people worldwide who were given the operation. The most famous portrayal of the effects of lobotomy was in the Oscar-winning film, based on the novel by Ken Kesey, ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’. You should watch it.