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Anaesthesia => Psychiatry => Lobotomy
Lobotomy
Lobotomy, in medicine, destruction or removal of the prefrontal lobes of the cortex of the brain. The procedure was popularized by Portuguese psychiatrist Antonio Egas Moniz in 1935 as a means of controlling aggressive or violent behaviour-work for which Moniz received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1949. The original procedure was modified in 1937 to involve severing almost all the nerve tracts connecting the prefrontal lobes with the rest of the brain. Although the operation was hailed as a major advance in treating severely emotionally ill patients, doctors realized in the late 1940s that many patients were transformed by the lobotomy into inactive individuals without initiative.
Neurosurgeons also developed less extensive procedures for achieving control of violent behaviour or severe emotional illness by removing parts or severing tracts of the brain. Together these operations come under the term psychosurgery. The effectiveness of such procedures has never been adequately evaluated, and the advent of antipsychotic drugs has greatly reduced their use.
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