Frontal Lobotomy: Zombies Created by One of Medicine’s Greatest Mistakes
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/frontal-lobotomy-zombies-created-by-one-of-medicines-greatest-mistakes/#more-38810"It’s not clear who first quipped “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” but it’s not just a joke. Almost anything would be preferable to a frontal lobotomy. It was a barbarous procedure with catastrophic consequences, and yet it was once widely accepted and even earned a Portuguese doctor a Nobel Prize. In the annals of medical history, it stands out as one of medicine’s biggest mistakes and an example of how disastrously things can go wrong when a treatment is put into widespread use before it has been adequately tested.
A new book by Janet Sternburg, White Matter: A Memoir of Family and Medicine, puts a human face on the suffering of mentally ill patients and their families, and helps us understand why they agreed to lobotomies. It is the affecting story of how her relatives made the difficult but misinformed decision to lobotomize two of her mother’s five siblings, one for schizophrenia and the other for depression, and the consequences of that decision.
She says “even as a child I had a slight awareness, compounded from fear and pity, that something wrong had been done, that it couldn’t be right for people to be this way, expressionless and indifferent to anything around them.” As an adult, she questioned how good, kind people like her aunts could have done this to their siblings, and how they could have authorized a lobotomy on a second family member after they had seen its effects on the first. She did extensive research, interviewed family members, and tried to understand what had happened. She was shocked when her one surviving aunt denied that Sternburg’s uncle was ever mentally ill, claiming the other sisters had lied about him when they had told the author he had tried to kill people, and that he would have grown out of it if they hadn’t insisted on the surgery. The family was dysfunctional; other members had mental health problems, and there was animosity between the sisters. What had really happened? The truth proved elusive.
As best the author could piece the story together, her uncle Bennie developed schizophrenia as a teenager and became a danger to his family, attacking his sisters with knives and anything else that might serve as a weapon. He was properly diagnosed, but every time he was locked up in an asylum, his mother literally howled in protest at the conditions, rescued him, and took him home…until the next time he tried to kill someone and had to be locked up again. His sisters lived in fear.
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A great bit on a book that looks like a definite must read.
= new reply since forum marked as read
before it has been adequately tested"
(cough) GMOs (cough)
until it wasn't. Which is a reminder of the evolving, mutable, nature of science. 
With that rationale, I wonder if you understand the nature of anything. 
it's not examining and analyzing other people's tests, hypotheses, and experiments.
that means it's possible you'll learn your current viewpoint is nonsense too. 
That's why so many people have died and have developed all sorts of reactions to them.
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Oh, wait. No they haven't. But don't let reality stand in the way of a bad quip.
from birth, as in, what were thought to be good obstetrical practices. The nurse apparently spent two hours shoving her head back up the birth canal to prevent her from being born before the OB could get their to collect his delivery fee. The most likely reason for the developmental disabilities that she had prior to the lobotomy.
Nurses tried to do something similar to my mother in 1964, when she had my brother in a large New Jersey hospital, and he was threatening to arrive before the doctor could get there, so this notion was in vogue for quite a long time period.
It makes me wonder what current "good ideas" in medicine will one day be looked on with astonishment and horror. Or maybe we've finally got it all "perfect" now. 
was high functioning and social as you say and a lovely and lively child and young woman as seen in photos. According to some authors the story is that she became puzzled at the time when her sisters and brothers were dating and courting (who wouldn't) and began to have some attraction to fellows. Joe Sr. and others knew 'what that would lead to' and so her future was brutally altered.
