That would be perfect for those who suffer from stress and anxiety: heal depression, insomnia, eliminates suicidal thoughts, delusions, hallucinations, melancholy, and obsessions.
This is how, in the 1930s, American newspapers advertised not chamomile tea or sessions with a psychologist, but an ice pick put in your head — or, in other words, a lobotomy.
A gas mones, the father of lobotomy, was awarded the Nobel Prize for inventing this barbaric surgery. But what if the award was well deserved?
In this video, I’ll tell you how did a lobotomy replace an enema in treating stomach disorders, does the ice pick in the skull affect a person’s character, and most importantly, could people be wrong in banning lobotomy?
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In the early 20th century, a mentally ill person was an awful stigma to their family. Society used to believe that those people didn’t deserve to live.
That’s why they were treated worse than criminals. They were locked up in prisons, tortured, or killed.
Mental hospitals were supposed to become a humane alternative, but they didn’t. Patients were chained walls or beds, got electrocuted, or forced to take antipsychotic drugs.
They could be kept in asylums for years without visible improvement signs.
But the lobotomy changed everything.
First of all, it let people who suffered from mental disorders avoid ending up in an asylum.
It sounds a bit paradoxical, doesn’t it? Just like if I said we should rescue flu patients from cough syrup.
Especially since a lobotomy looked no less frightening than mental hospitals.
The surgery was performed using a device that resembled a regular ice pick.
Instead of anesthesia, a patient was electrocuted so that they lost consciousness. Then the ice pick was pushed inside the eye socket and hammered through the orbit bone, that’s as thin as an egg shell.
The surgeon would sweep the instrument from side to side to cut the connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
All of that could last just 10 minutes.
And boom! An aggressive patient who was dangerous to society became obedient and submissive within minutes.
Yes, that’s quite a dangerous practice, but it spared people many years of enduring barbaric and excruciating therapies and specialized facilities.
The most famous patient who underwent the lobotomy is Rosemary Kennedy.
That’s right, a sister of the U.S. president John Kennedy.
The young woman faced slight developmental delays that impacted her school performance in her childhood. In young adulthood, however, as Rosemary grew older, she experienced seizures and temper tantrums and later became aggressive towards other people.
In 1941, when the woman turned 23, she was lobotomized.
As a result, she stopped being prone to violence and dangerous to society.
Whereas Howard Dulle had surgery when he was a 12-year-old boy, and he’s still alive.
In his childhood, Howard lost his mother, which negatively affected his mental state. He acted aggressively towards his mother-in-law.
The woman feared for her life because of her son-in-law’s unruly and violent behavior. For that reason, it was decided to lobotomize the child.
He’s 72 now, and he has no history of any sort of trouble over this time.
Lobotomy became a magic wand that, by touching a specific spot on the human skull, turned a villain into a good guy.
But how did people understand which parts of the brain affect human behavior, and how?
During archaeological excavations all around the globe, researchers found lots of skulls with holes. It’s assumed that it was a method our ancestors used to treat headaches.
Theories suggesting that every part of the brain is responsible for some particular function appeared long ago in the ancient world.
It’s believed that some areas in the frontal lobe control our thinking, will, initiative, and decision making.
A gas mones considered that assumption and summarized the knowledge of his head wounds during the First World War.
And then he thought: What if some injuries inflicted on the frontal lobe of the brain could be helpful in some way? What if that could let us modify human behavior?
At the neurological congress, he learned that scientists had already removed monkeys’ cerebral cortex parts.
The apes continued to live after that, but were no longer restless.
Moniz came up with the idea that perhaps people with psychotic disorders could be treated the same way.
That was when he started drilling heads of mentally unstable people.
And it worked.
The lobotomy gradually became a solution to deal with those who were a menace to society.
Nobody ever questioned the effectiveness of the lobotomy because doctors didn’t fully understand how the brain works, but they believed that the lobotomy helped according to the traditions of our ancestors, teachings on the spots of the skull, and miraculous examples of healing.
The lobotomy was believed to be the best cure for rebellious daughters.
We now know that hormonal surges and mood swings are typical during puberty, and that there’s nothing abnormal about that.
But back then, society saw a fiery temper of young lady as poor etiquette, and a lobotomy made her calm and obedient.
LGBTQ+ people used to be diagnosed with attachment disorder. That meant the patient was attached to inappropriate erotic and sexual desires.
Doctors believed that using various stressors, like an electric shock or skull drilling, could modify the behavior and lead to heterosexuality and recovery.
But the thing is, diagnoses like that were made up — not even by doctors, but rather by relatives of supposedly ill people.
Nobody asked them if they agreed to undergo a lobotomy. The operation was forced on the patients by their families.
At the same time, doctors didn’t mind and eagerly helped. But all they had on their minds was making money.
However, the situation rapidly changed, and soon people started joining the queue for the lobotomy.
But why?
All came down to Walter Freeman, a neurologist and psychiatrist. But I’d instead call him a showman and the best marketing specialist in human history.
Freeman wasn’t even a surgeon and, as a matter of fact, couldn’t operate on his patients himself.
That didn’t stop him, though.
Egas Moniz said that a lobotomy was an extreme measure, but Freeman made drilling holes in a human skull a panacea for all problems, including waywardness and violent nature.
He promoted it as a treatment that was only slightly riskier than tooth extraction.
Freeman started offering his services while traveling around to different countries, just like Lady Gaga with the Monster Ball tour.
He turned the operation into a big show.
For example, he shocked his audience — doctors and nurses — by simultaneously performing lobotomies on two patients.
He got so many fans that he once operated on 25 women in just one day.
As time passed, Freeman started to assure people that the lobotomy could cure everything, even indigestion.
A broader spectrum of diseases potentially curable by the lobotomy meant a more significant number of clients.
They should have made him a marketing specialist at Quibi. Then it indeed wouldn’t have shut down if Freeman could brainwash people into believing that driving an ice pick through their heads was cool.
Then the Qibi show about a girl who made friends with her boyfriend’s sex doll would have become a Golden Globe nominee.
Anyway, was Freeman’s product as good as its wrapping?
What really happened to patients after the lobotomy?
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Freeman kept quiet about many things in his ad campaign.
The barbaric procedure resulted in the death of at least 490 people and made thousands of others go on living in a vegetative state.
They lost their ability to react to the outside world and even themselves.
And what about those whose surgeries were allegedly successful?
Before she went through the treatment, Rosemary Kennedy was just a short-tempered kid with a restless mind.
Her family concluded that that could reflect badly on her brother’s career, so they turned to Freeman.
After the lobotomy, Kennedy’s mental capacity diminished to that of a two-year-old child.
She lost most of her ability to walk and talk intelligibly.
And in that condition, it’s difficult to argue with your parents, isn’t it?
In his memoirs, the other patient, Howard Dulle, who went through the lobotomy at the age of 12, recalls that his stepmother hated him, and he never understood why.
One of the reasons Howard’s father’s new love decided that the kid needed the lobotomy was his weird behavior.
He would turn on the lights in a room when the sun was still shining.
Is that a good reason for punishing a child?
And what if Howard had broken a cup? Would he sentence him to an electric chair?
After Freeman performed the surgery, Howard in fact became incapacitated and got thrown out of his own house.
That was followed by depression, which he tried to get rid of abusing alcohol and drugs.
It took years for him to get his life in order.
He told about his pain in a book called My Lobotomy.
Howard was fortunate to survive the procedure and even write his memoirs.
Other patients were not so blessed.
Most patients who suffered the lobotomy were sent back to asylums.
The thing is, a patient’s character is in no way influenced by their sex, age, level of education, and most certainly it can’t be changed by drilling their skull.
Scientists were wrong.
And the resulting brain injury didn’t transform patients into placid and balanced people.
It just transformed them into disabled humans.
But this wasn’t acknowledged until 1967, when lobotomies were finally banned.
Now people are treated in a far more humane way through psychological therapy sessions, and a person’s short temper or sexual orientation are no longer stigmas to be ashamed of.
To the present day, there are numerous calls to rescind Moniz’s Nobel Prize for developing lobotomy.
But so far, no luck.
The mind boggles at thinking what could have happened if this surgery hadn’t been banned.
Who do you think could be prescribed the lobotomy nowadays, and what ailments could be treated with an ice pick to the brain?
Unwillingness to eat asparagus?
Uncontrollable scrolling through Tik-Tok?
Or an overwhelming urge to re-watch Louis C.K.’s stand-up routines?
Leave comments with your suggestions.
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