Lobotomy impact lingers

This is from today's Newsday:

Lobotomy impact lingersGranddaughter of LI woman who had the procedure in the 1950s is pressing the Nobel committee to rescind its prize to the inventor

BY JAMIE TALAN

When Christine Johnson was a little girl and learned her grandmother was "crazy" and that a lobotomy had left her "childlike," she pulled out her Barbies so Grandma Beulah could play."No, dear, I'm too old for that," her grandmother said.

Now, more than two decades later, Johnson, 32, has pored over hundreds of pages of her grandmother's medical and psychiatric files from her time as a patient at Pilgrim State Psychiatric Center in Brentwood from 1952 to 1972.

She has attempted to understand why doctors performed the procedure, which involved drilling holes into her brain and swiping at the frontal lobes. It was thought to be a cure for psychosis.

Johnson, of Levittown, also is challenging the 1949 Nobel Prize awarded to Portuguese Dr. Egas Moniz, who invented the lobotomy procedure. Moniz died in 1955, and soon after, the procedure began to be discredited.

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