Dr. Robinson began working at the hospital in 1933 and assisted there until her retirement in 1963.  She took two years off during that time.  One year she spent in Washington D.C. doing research with Dr. Walter Freeman.  The other year she took off to finish her book Psychosurgery and the Self that was published in 1954 with Dr. Freeman.

 

Robinson, who also taught psychology at St. Joseph Junior College, was a one-person psychology department at the Hospital when she began her work.  By 1945 she saw lobotomies as "among the more promising contributions made by psychiatry to neurological and psychological theory."  But analytical studies were needed to evaluate the experimental procedure.  According to Dr. Robinson, "The forty-minute surgical procedure may change a completely inaccessible creature, resistant to available treatments, into a cheerful, cooperative, intelligent human being - or it may not."

 

In 1943 Dr. Mary Robinson and Dr. Paul J. Schrader performed prefrontal lobotomies on 16 Missouri State Hospital patients in St. Joseph.  They published their results "An Evaluation of Prefrontal Lobotomy Through Ward Behavior"  in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1945.

 

"There is a possibility, even a probability, that some of the ward attendants who made the ratings had a bias in favor of lobotomy.  As regards the objectivity of the psychologist, one can only hope."   Patients were chosen "because they were unmanegeable on their wards" and "permission to perform the operation was secured from nearest relatives."  According to their findings, "the operation produces some mental deficits as well as emotional changes" and "prefrontal lobotomy can do little more than render the individual more amendable to institutional routine."

 

Robinson was initially a proponent of lobotomies but through her research she brings to light for herself and for all of us that lobotomies are not a cure but another way of managing patients.  They are merely another form of restraint, a traumatic and irreversible mental straightjacket.  The lobotomized patients understandably resisted, "only one patient was cooperative enough to make possible the use of local anesthetic."