Reuters Portugal Part II

Here is a longer version of the Reuters Portugal article that ran in today's San Diego Union-Tribune:

Patients' kin want lobotomy Nobel withdrawn

AVANCA, Portugal – An unsettling rumor is doing the rounds in the dusty Portuguese town of Avanca.

Egas Moniz, the inventor of the lobotomy and Avanca's most famous son, could be stripped of his Nobel prize because of a battle being waged overseas, residents hear.

"A bunch of American scientists, I'm not sure if they're American or British, they're going to take away his Nobel prize," grumbled 71-year-old Armando Hilario, speaking with two other friends, across the street from Moniz's cemetery plot.

"You know. That prize he won for the brain illness."

Fifty years after Moniz's death in 1955, relatives of lobotomy patients in the United States have launched a campaign which they say is meant to shame the Nobel Foundation into breaking precedent by withdrawing the scientist's 1949 award.

They argue that the Nobel prize legitimized the procedure, which sought to calm mentally ill patients by severing nerve fibers between the frontal lobes and the main part of the brain. Moniz called the process a prefrontal leucotomy.

It was later modified and popularized in the United States with the so-called "ice-pick" procedure: using a hammer to tap a metal pick up through the eye socket and into the brain.

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