Marilyn Lukach Column

Some want Nobel Prize revoked from man who developed lobotomy

Lobotomy. Just the word conjures up a nightmare that was all too true for many psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1970s.

In the current New England Journal of Medicine, an editorial discusses lobotomies and notes the "procedure was a desperate effort to help mental patients." The historian from this editorial admitted in a later interview that the "numbers that were harmed were quite substantial."

The lobotomy was first performed in November 1935 under the direction of noted Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz. In the book "The Lobotomist" by Jack El-Hai, it was noted that Moniz did not actually perform the operation. His hands crippled by gout, he was unable to hold surgical instruments. The surgery was performed by Almeida Lima under Moniz's direction. Another interesting point to note:I could not find any articles that stated he was a surgeon, so operating should have been a moot point even without the gout.

Moniz had already refined techniques using radioactive tracers or cerebral angiographies that helped doctors visualize blood vessels in the brain. He felt that some mental illnesses were caused by abnormal stickiness in the nerve cells that caused neural impulses to actually get stuck. This caused, in his opinion, a repeat of pathological ideas in the patient. There was no real evidence for his theory, but Moniz was determined to push on.

The first attempt at psychosurgery drilled holes in the skull and gave a series of alcohol injections into the frontal lobe (which controls thinking). The switch was made to cutting the lobe with wire and severing the connections. Nothing in the brain was removed.

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