Lobotomy

A neurosurgical operation that disrupts connections in the brain’s frontal lobes, historically used to treat severe mental illness. Its widespread use declined as serious harms became clear and psychiatric drugs emerged.

Prefrontal cortex: The front portion of the cerebral cortex, involved in planning, decision-making, and regulation of behavior. Lobotomy targeted connections involving this region to alter behavior and emotional responses.
Egas Moniz: A Portuguese neurologist who developed prefrontal leucotomy and received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Moniz introduced the operation that became known as lobotomy in the 1930s.
Psychosurgery: Surgery that alters brain tissue to treat psychiatric or behavioral disorders. Lobotomy became the most notorious form of psychosurgery.
Electroconvulsive therapy: A psychiatric treatment that uses electrically induced seizures under anesthesia to relieve certain severe mental illnesses. Unlike lobotomy, it does not intentionally sever brain connections and can be repeated.
Leucotomy: A surgical procedure that cuts white-matter connections in the brain, especially those associated with the frontal lobes. This was the name Egas Moniz gave the operation that preceded the term lobotomy.
John Fulton: An American neurophysiologist whose work on frontal-lobe lesions in chimpanzees influenced psychosurgical research. His findings helped inspire Moniz’s attempt to alter psychiatric symptoms through frontal disconnection.
Institutionalization: The placement of people in long-term residential institutions, often under systems of medical or social care. Overcrowded psychiatric institutions formed a major setting for lobotomy’s widespread use.
Antipsychotic: A medication used chiefly to reduce psychosis, including hallucinations and delusions. Drug treatment offered a less destructive route to managing symptoms that had prompted surgery.
Transorbital lobotomy: A lobotomy technique that reached frontal brain tissue through the eye socket. Walter Freeman popularized this rapid approach as an alternative to opening the skull.
Walter Freeman: An American physician who promoted lobotomy and developed the transorbital technique with James Watts. Freeman drove the operation’s rapid expansion in the United States.

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