Shunned for years, lobotomies back in spotlight

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Johnson, whose grandmother died in 1989, several years ago started the Web site psychosurgery.org to build a support network among families of lobotomy patients. Then she and group members began urging removal of an article on the Nobel Web site praising Moniz and saying he deserved the prize because there were no alternative psychiatric treatments at the time.

The Nobel Foundation refused to remove or change the article. Now Johnson is asking Nobel laureates to support her campaign to strip Moniz’s Nobel.

“There’s no possibility to revoke it,” said foundation executive director Michael Sohlman, who could not recall a Medicine Prize ever being challenged. “It’s a nonstarter.”

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The Nobel charter has no provision for appeal of a prize awarded, he said, and the foundation ignores such criticisms, as it did when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Peace Prize was challenged.

Meanwhile, journalist Jack El-Hai recently published “The Lobotomist,” about the chief U.S. proponent, neurosurgeon Walter Freeman, who did roughly 3,400 operations. He developed the icepick technique.

Some patients helped?
In the New England Journal editorial, Dr. Barron H. Lerner, a medical historian and associate professor at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, wrote that the procedure was a desperate effort to help many of the 400,000 patients confined to U.S. mental hospitals at mid-century.

He said a small number of patients became calmer and more manageable.

“I think the numbers that were harmed were quite substantial,” Lerner said in an interview. “It was way overused, and it was used in inappropriate circumstances — retardation, anxiety, headaches.”

El-Hai began his research eight years ago after meeting a relative of a man committed to a mental hospital for epilepsy around 1930 and later lobotomized. As he got into his research about Freeman, El-Hai wondered, “What led this undeniably gifted and compassionate doctor to champion a brain-mutilating procedure and why he stayed with it so long, past the point of reason?”

El-Hai said patients no longer felt strong emotions and their behavior changed immediately, which was Freeman’s goal. But he concluded Freeman was driven to be a showman.

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