The Operations

Egas Moniz performed the first Prefrontal Leukotomy in 1935. He received the Nobel Prize for his work in 1949.

Prefrontal Leukotomy or Lobotomy consisted of cutting or scraping away most of the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain.

Transorbital or "Ice Pick" Lobotomy involved lifting the upper eyelid and placing the point of a thin surgical instrument called an orbitoclast under the eyelid and against the top of the eyesocket. A mallet was used to drive the orbitoclast through the thin layer of bone and into the brain along the plane of the bridge of the nose, around fifteen degrees toward the interhemispherical fissure. The orbitoclast was malleted five centimeters (2 in) into the frontal lobes, and then pivoted forty degrees at the orbit perforation so the tip cut toward the opposite side of the head (toward the nose). The instrument was returned to the neutral position and sent a further two centimeters (4⁄5 in) into the brain, before being pivoted around twenty-eight degrees each side, to cut outwards and again inwards.

In the United States approx. 40,000 people were lobotomized.

Walter Freeman performed his last operation in 1967.

"The often violent and invasive psychiatric interventions developed during the 1930s and 1940s are indicative of both the well-intentioned desire of psychiatrists to find some medical means of alleviating the suffering of the vast number of patients then in psychiatric hospitals and also the relative lack of social power of those same patients to resist the increasingly radical and even reckless interventions of asylum doctors." Roy Porter