Last night I watched a PBS special on the man (Walter Freeman) who brought the lobotomy technique to the US and "refined" it from a complex procedure requiring a neurosurgeon, anesthesiologist, assistants and lots of money to a 5-minute outpatient job that could be done through the eye socket with an icepick and a hammer almost anywhere. It was a brutal assault on the brain that basically destroyed a huge portion of the frontal lobes and robbed many people of their personalities in a profound way. This occurred before the advent of medications to treat mental health issues such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and psychosis. He would often go into a mental institution and have the doctors line the patients up. Then he would proceed to lobotomize all of them within a few hours. At the end of his career, when the medical community was starting to realize that his technique might not be the panacea they had originally thought (several studies were showing the long-term effects), he got increasingly desperate for new patients. He even started doing the procedure on children (the youngest being 4 years old). It was a very sad and disturbing documentary highlighting the dangers of unchecked ambition. Luckily, we now have strict protections in place to prevent things like this from happening. But most people who have studied this era in medical history think that Freeman actually believed he was helping until almost the very end. Here's a wikipedia article on lobotomies if you want to know more...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
Was this romantic enough for you?
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