What is lobotomy?

What is lobotomy? This is a long-forgotten and ostracized method by modern psychiatrists. In Russia, what is the lobotomy began to be forgotten, since 1950, when this psychosurgical method was banned, while overseas, in the US in the same year conducted up to five thousand such operations.

What is lobotomy, what is its essence?

It is believed that the authorship of lobotomy belongs to a citizen of Portugal, but the history of surgery refutes this fact. What is lobotomy was known in the XIX century, when the Swiss clinic was the first in the history of psychiatry to remove frontal lobes. Then, the well-known surgeon Bekhterev came to an independent way to neutralize the brain with the help of damaging neural connections. The effectiveness of such interference in the brain was questioned and experiments stopped. Prefrontal lobotomy received a "new breathing" frame later, when the method was improved to a simple, half-hour procedure.

Initially, this procedure was called leukotomy, from the Greek words λευκός, which means white and τομή - to cut. The author of this invention even received in his time the Nobel Prize for a significant contribution to the impact on a number of acute mental illnesses. So in 1949 the world recognized the merits of the Portuguese doctor Monish, who developed a method of disconnecting the tissues that connect the lobus frontalis cerebri - the frontal lobes with the brain. Until recently, it was believed that the frontal lobes are responsible for the activity of reasonable human activity, moreover, they were called the main zone that controls the function of the brain. Unlike the animal world, the human frontal lobes are more developed, and without them Homo sapiens can not be considered as such. Psychiatrist Monish believed that especially dangerous, aggressive forms of psychosis can be neutralized, saving the patient from the need to be a man. Of course, the Portuguese doctor had other considerations and one can not deny the general value of his work on studying the structure of the brain, however, those operations that he implemented have now been considered anti-humane almost all over the world.

The surgical operation itself is quite simple in the technological sense. Its main task is in separating the frontal lobes controlling the thought process from the rest of the brain structures. The first experience, which showed the world what a lobotomy, was held in the thirties of the last century. The author of the psychosurgical innovation did not conduct the operation on his own due to chronic gout, obviously fearing that the hand would falter and the scalpel would damage the brain irreversibly. The procedure under his sensitive guidance was conducted by his devoted companion, also a Portuguese citizen, a surgeon named Lim. The name of the experimental patient history is unknown, as well as the names of many other patients whose account went to thousands since the first operation. Psychiatrists instantly approved such a radical way of solving pathological conditions and actively began to operate unfortunate patients in psychiatric hospitals. Frontal lobes were not damaged, the cut was on the white matter line, which was a neural link between lobes and other brain regions. After the surgery, the patients were diagnosed with a "frontal lobe syndrome", which was saved for them for life.

What is lobotomy, how was the operation performed?

The zone above both eyes was carefully treated with an antiseptic and a local anesthetic for pain relief. The first operations were generally performed without anesthesia, since it was believed that this site does not contain pain receptors. 

A small incision was made from bottom to top. The scalpel surgeon felt the edge of the incision, as the instrument met a small resistance of the elastic shells of the brain. Then a conical section of tissues was cut out. Sensitivity in this zone is low, and the patient, as a rule, does not experience strong painful sensations. 

A special instrument was introduced into the incision - a probe, through which blood and liquor fluid were removed. Then the incision was processed and sewed.

Literally after five to seven days the patient could be discharged and return, according to doctors, to a normal life. However, the lack of a clear and detailed description of the justification, focusing only on practical experimental actions, often led to the fact that the operations transformed patients into apathetic beings far from the real world. In addition, that patients lost the ability of common sense, often with seizures that resembled epilepsy.

What is the lobotomy found out the whole world, although Monish called the operation differently. The authorship of the term "lobotomy" belongs to another experimenter, American doctor Freeman, who shared the laurels and the glory of the Nobel Prize with his Portuguese counterpart. It was Freeman who became a real fan of bringing patients into the state of "plants", developing a new technology of turning off the brain. Freeman conducted operations with the help of a specific anesthesia - electroshock.

Despite the growing popularity of neutralizing particularly aggressive and hopeless people in the sense of psychiatric supervision of patients, many doctors were extremely negative about such a radical procedure. Gradually, their protest took a wide scale, and many side-by-side post-operation phenomena, even lethal, only stepped up the process. Soon, many clinics stopped practicing lobotomy, besides, the latest developments in pharmacology made it possible to successfully manage mental illnesses with the help of drug therapy. Obsessions (obsessive states), manic-depressive psychosis in the acute stage, severe forms of schizophrenia were effectively treated with pills and psychoanalysis. Prefrontal lobotomy as a method has become an "outcast" in the medical world.

What is lobotomy? This is already the history of psychosurgery and psychiatry, the same paradoxical, striking imagination its sometimes barbarous and unjustified from a scientific point of view, such as treatment with electric shock or immersion in ice water. Modern methods and technologies for treating patients in psychiatric clinics do not presuppose such radical experiments: firstly, it is inhumane, secondly, it is practically ineffective and sometimes dangerous not only for intellectual activity, but also for the life of the patient.