The Insane Lobotomy Craze Of The 1950s

in November of 1941 a 23-year-old woman was wheeled into an operating room she had a history of mental disturbances and become difficult for her family to manage so they opted undergo a promising new procedure that was shown to cure personality disorders once in the operating room the doctor strapped her to a table the surgeon grabbed a nice piig shaped instrument inserted it into the patient's eye socket and then that woman was Rosemary Kennedy the younger sister of President John F Kennedy and the surgery was not a success Rosemary's specific diagnosis isn't entirely clear because the

family did everything they could to hide her condition but by all accounts she was mentally challenged and as she entered her early 20s she became more irritable difficult to control sometimes physically violent there were also rumors that she was sexually promiscuous and just in general behaving in ways that were embarrassing for one of the most powerful political families in the world the procedure was a prefrontal labotomy it was a surgery that's about as terrifying as they come but it was hailed at the time as a giant leap forward in the treatment of mental illness this

was before psychiatric drugs like we have now in fact it won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949 but within a decade of winning the highest Acclaim in medicine the procedure was considered barbaric and outlawed partly because of people like Rosemary Kennedy as Rosemary's condition didn't improve after the labotomy she was permanently incapacitated unable to walk unable to speak and incontinent for the rest of her life and she was far from the only person to receive this procedure did I mention the the botomy van yeah there was a labotomy van you're not really familiar with

what a labotomy is it's a procedure that's about as simple as it is brutal a patient is placed under sedation or general anesthesia and then a doctor takes an ice piic like thing they call an orbital clast uh inserts it into the corner of the patient's eye and then Taps it with a mallet like thing that they call a mallet cuz why even bother trying to make it sound less brutal and by the way you clicked on a video about iies this is going to get a little bit gnarly you've been warned by driving the

ice pick into the brain with the Mallet the surgery was thought to cure severe mental illness and there were multiple types of lobotomies which were also by the way called lucoto that's another way of putting it uh the one I just described is called a transorbital labotomy because it goes through the orbit of the eye socket there was also a trans cranial labotomy that went through the top or side of your head uh but this obviously required drilling through the skull and these used a syring likee tool called a lucone to pierce the brain and

then it did its business inside of the brain with a little wire Loop or by injecting a sclerosing agent to harden the fibers but the goal of all of these was to disrupt the prefrontal cortex of the brain so they're often called prefrontal lobotomies or prefrontal lucoto now I know all this sounds grotesque and insane U but there was a reason why they were so popular for a while is because the alternative was even worse there's a stigma around mental illness always has been and it's still there today but it used to be much much

worse because we didn't really understand understand how the brain worked I mean we barely knew how the body worked but especially the brain people thought your emotions and your personality came from your soul so if you were messed up in that department it was a soul thing it was a a spiritual thing a religious thing so most people back then thought that mental illness was some kind of divine punishment or demonic possession which came with just some really swell treatments the first treatment is actually one of the very first surgeries that we have evidence for

and that was trepanation trepanation is quite simply drilling a hole into someone's head to you know let the demons out it's thought that they might have done this for mental health reasons again attributing to a demonic possession or something like that or they may have just used it for headaches but yeah we found skulls with holes in them going back 7,000 years and in a lot of these skulls the hole had healed over so they did survive this procedure in the late Middle Ages blood liting and purging were often used to treat mental illness which

should come as no surprise cuz they treated pretty much everything like that yeah they were all about the four humors at that time so they blamed everything on an imbalance in the humors the humors being blood yellow bile black bile and fleem uh this went all the way back to like ancient Greek times but it was an English physician named Thomas Willis that made the connection between the humors and mental illness which while it sounds silly now it was kind of groundbreaking at the time I mean to blame someone's emotions and behavior on a physical

issue and not like demon possession was incredibly enlightened so all that draining of blood and forcing people to puke and torture that's that's much more Humane hey that's foreshadowing in the 17th century we started to see a proliferation of asylums for the mentally ill in an effort to kind of take them out of society or sweep them under the rug but it was also kind of Justified as a place that would be best for them because at the time isolation was a popular method of treatment another popular treatment was called the bath of surprise which

was common practice in many of these asylums it kind of became a thing in the 1700s but uh it basically involves sedating a patient by dunking them in ice cold water with no warning again this was before any of the drugs that we had today that would calm a patient down but yeah it turns out that a little dunk arino in the old ice bath can kind of shock a person into calming down which I'm sure there's many people out there in the ice bath cult that are like yes that's what it does it releases

dopamine and it calms you down and it shocks your central nervous system I would just like to point out that you are voluntarily submitting yourself to U torture that they used to do to lunatics just saying the bath of Surprise by the way eventually developed into what's called hydrotherapy which is where the patient is kind of strapped to a tub for hours or even days on in with continuous cold water piped into it as the 19th century in the Victorian age came around institutionalized care was intensified with asylums and Mental Hospitals springing up all across

the United States and Europe um and at this point basically just confinement became the prime directive these asylums were overcrowded and many of the patients were physically violent so they were mostly just concerned with protecting the staff this is where Straight Jackets came in people were often chained to walls and put in cages and I don't mean jail cells I mean like tiny cramped cages the size of a dog cray for hours even days at a time they were subjected to Wacky treatments like the rotating chair which just spun the patients around until they threw

up which again goes back to that purging thing that was based on the four humor so that was like way behind the times they would sedate them with drugs which was arguably ahead of its time but these were very rudimentary drugs and basically just incapacitated them and the worst part it all was that many of the people who found themselves in these asylums were committed for Fairly mundane things like epilepsy and Melancholy um willfulness was considered committable whatever that was women were especially targeted so yeah if you didn't obey your husband or didn't abide by

the crushing Victorian social norms of the time you could be labeled hysterical and sent off to the Asylum it's safe to say that neurodiversity was not celebrated back then not to mention that many of the people who went in there might have just been a little bit different when they first went in but after 6 months or a year in that environment they actually did develop mental illness which only extended their stay and led to more overcrowding so yeah none of this was working and and it's a shame because it was all instituted with the

best of intentions um these asylums Were Meant to provide exactly that Asylum it was supposed to be a respit from the world that was causing them all this mental instability but it usually just made things worse at the same time this was happening though brain science was progressing and our our understanding of the brain was increasing due in part to some lucky accidents uh like one that happened in Vermont in 1848 on September 13th 1848 a railroad worker named Phineas Gage was tapping down some explosive powder when the powder ignited and blew the tamping rod

through the bottom of his cheek and out the top of his head and somehow he survived the Phineas Gaye story has been told a million times I've actually covered it on this channel before it's remarkable and gruesome and just wild that this guy survived a meter long iron Rod going through his head uh but he did he did not survive completely unscathed though Gage's personality changed drastically before the accident he was amiable well balanced employee got along with everybody but afterwards he became difficult to deal with easily irritable he was impatient he cursed at people

a lot which he never did before he also developed severe epilepsy which eventually he died from 13 years later but it was this change in his personality that got the attention of the psychiatric Community this was the first time that damage to a specific part of the brain could be linked to personality issues especially emotional regulation and it started a whole field of study around you know like figuring out which parts of the brain control what there was a motor cortex there was a language and speech processing area visual processing area long-term memory short-term memory

and they figured out that the brain kind of evolved from the back to the front yeah so if you look at the brain at the back of the brain at the base of the brain that's what what controls sort of your more core functions of your body your breathing your digestion like body temperature regulation that kind of thing and as you move forward it evolves more advanced processing so it's actually the front of your brain up here the prefrontal cortex that handles your personality your judgment um your emotional regulation higher core stuff like that that's

why Phineas was able to survive this blast it didn't go through the back of the brain if it had gone through the back of the brain he would have been toast the fact that he was lucky enough that it went up only through the prefrontal cortex that's why he was able to survive so over the next century more attention have been paid to other you know lucky accidents that helped refine our understanding of the brain and its uh structures that along with some animal experimentation that was being done and actual brain surgery which was a

thing but it was still in its infancy all of which came to a head at the second International Congress of Neurology in 1935 a conference that would change the landscape of psychology and neurology and ultimately leave thousands of people in vegetated States it was held at the University College London on July 29th to August 2nd and while epilepsy was the main theme of the conference it was actually a handful of presentations on the frontal loes that stole the show there was the French neurosurgeon Clovis Vincent with a paper titled modification of function observed after surgical

intervention on the frontal loes neurologist Richard Brickner from the New York Neurological Institute talked about a surgery called a bilateral frontal lobectomy that was performed by John Hopkins University to remove a brain tumor and a Yale neurophysiologist named John Fulton presented a study called quote the functions of the frontal lobes a comparative study in monkeys chimpanzees and man the study reported on a couple of chimpanzees that received lobectomies and they demonstrated how they had a noticeable change in personality specifically having fewer temper tantrums and experimental Neurosis through all of this an idea began to form

so in the brain the actual processing mostly occurs on the outside the wrinkled surface which that's why it's wrinkled there's more surface area to do more processing but inside the brain there's these bundles of fibers they call white matter that basically move signals around to other parts of the brain um you can think of it kind of like the cables coming out the back of a rack of servers like each server is a different module and the cables allow those different modules to communicate with each other so these studies were showing that removing parts of

the frontal lobe can make an animal more complacent of course that's that's a major risky surgery so maybe instead of removing you know that frontal lobe Al together what if all you had to do was just cut some of those cables so it can't communicate anymore this idea resonated strongly with another attendee of the conference a Portuguese neurologist named Antonio igas Monon mere months after attending the conference Mon and his assistant Pedro Lima performed the first leukotomy which involved going in through the skull with a lucone tool to separ the white matter fibers white MIT

fibers connecting the prefrontal cortex although in this first surgery he also injected alcohol to destroy the frontal Lo completely cuz you know why not he would refine this procedure over the years though his work was cut short in 1939 when a schizophrenic patient shot him several times in his office um he survived but he was paralyzed for the rest of his life he eventually died in 1955 the fact that he was gunned down by a patient only highlighted the fact or at least the perception that some people with mental illness were dangerous which only Justified

the surgery he pioneered even though it was permanent and resulted far more often than not in total mental incapacitation and nobody picked up this cause and ran with it more than a US doctor named Walter Freeman Freeman was also at the second International Congress of Neurology and he met mon there uh mon actually came became a bit of a mentor for him seriously that conference was like a focal point where all of this came together Walter Freeman modified Mon's procedure calling his version a labotomy which is why we call it that today uh he did

his first labotomy in 1936 on a woman named Alice Hood Hammet a 63-year-old housewife from Topeka Kansas it um did not go well Hammet suffered debilitating convulsions in the weeks following the surgery and she died 5 years later likely from complications over the years Freeman refined his procedure always looking for a an easier and faster less messy way to do it and he found one the forementioned transorbital labotomy enter The Ice Pick It was kind of a brilliant procedure in a way cuz the layer of bone at the back of the eye socket is much

thinner than at the top of the skull which makes it a lot easier to puncture with a sharp Implement it's also a lot closer to that white matter that you have to sever so you don't have to go through as much brain tissue all you did was just knock it in and then wiggle it around once you got it in there and the nerves are severed and it left no visible scars but its main claim to fame was that it was fast and could be performed in less than 10 minutes you know like an oil

change it's only brain surgery why take your time with it he performed the first one in 1946 on a 29-year-old housewife named Sally Ellen yanco and for a brief amount of time and I mean a very brief amount of time this surgery was extremely popular I mean again keep in mind the Alternatives Straight Jackets cramped cages spinning chairs overcrowded hospitals injured staff members and now there was this 10minute surgery that left the patients totally docile easy to manage and maybe even happier clearly this was far more Humane there was a lot more drool though because

most of these patients were basically left in a vegetative state which again if you're only talking about like the most violent unmanageable patients who were suffering themselves from extreme mental illness and given there were no better alternatives I mean there is some gray area there the problem is that they went way way further than that they started giving out labotomy like it was freaking candy they touted it as a permanent cure for virtually any mental condition people were requesting labotomy to fix their Mala and they got one it became so popular and Freeman himself was

so in demand that he took it on the road just visiting hospitals and mental institutions across the United States and he did it in a mod van that he called and I am not making this up the labot mobile you know like Batman with his ice pick of Justice over two weeks in 1952 he performed 228 labotomy in West Virginia for a state sponsored labotomy project called operation ice pick Freeman himself performed over 3,500 labotomy but something to keep in mind he was just the face of the whole thing there were hundreds of doctors performing

this surgery between 1949 and 1952 over 50 thousand labotomy were performed in the us alone and I cannot stress this enough most were left in vegetated states or incapacitated in some way and hundreds of people just straight up died from the surgery and again these were not all like violent menaces to society many of them were just like on the Spectrum or mentally challenged in some way in fact Dr Freeman himself performed the labotomy on Rosemary Kennedy after meeting her just once he diagnosed her with agitated depression and performed the surgery on the same day

Rosemary's mother didn't even have time to approve the operation and believe it or not the labotomy received the Nobel Prize for physiology in 1949 he was awarded to easmon and he was nominated by Walter Freeman and yet by 1955 only 6 years later the labotomy was almost completely discredited and banned in most places so what happened to put it simply science happened yes science you know how I kept saying that given that there were no better Alternatives the labotomy made it kind of sense well suddenly there were some much better Alternatives the introduction of antipsychotic

drugs like Thorazine just changed everything in the 1950s they worked better they were non invasive they weren't permanent they were cheap and best of all they didn't turn people permanently into vegetables for the rest of their lives they just immediately made lobotomies look Savage and brutal and they just fell out of favor really quickly also just the more of them that got performed the more people got to see the actual results of the procedure which were usually horrifying but Dr Freeman of course would stand by his surgery to The Bitter End um he continued advocating

for lobotomies and doing them wherever he could for the next decade or so he performed his last labotomy in 1967 on a woman named Helen mortensson who believe it or not had already had two labotomy both of them by Freeman this third one would be your last though because she died of a brain hemorrhage after the surgery this kind of seemed to be the last straw for the medical community and Freeman was banned from operating after that he died a few years later in 1972 some of Freeman's patients are still alive today like Howard dully

he got a labotomy from Freeman in 1960 when he was 12 years old he was 12 years old God he told NPR in 2005 quote I'll never know what I lost in those 10 minutes with Dr Freeman and his ice pick by some miracle it didn't turn me into a zombie Crush my spirit or kill me but it did affect me deeply Walter Freeman's operation was supposed to to relieve suffering in my case it did just the opposite ever since my labotomy I felt like a freak ashamed so yes there were people who survived it

and weren't turned into vegetables but very few came out on scathed thankfully lobotomies are a thing of the past and mental health has come a long way and brain surgery especially has come a long way now there are still surgeries that operate on the same principle of like severing the white miter fibers to treat things like say extreme epileptic seizures and whatnot um but these are done on a totally like a microsurgical level with extreme precision and they use robots and not ice picks and they take longer than 10 minutes today medications and Psychotherapy are

the go-to course of treatment for most mental illnesses though there are still like brain stimulation therapies that get down inside the brain like deep brain stimulation electr convulsive therapy repetitive trans cranial magnetic stimulation and Vegas nerve stimulation we have never been as a society more aware and accepting a mental illness than we are today in fact everybody seems to be have something or be on some kind of Spectrum it seems like and that all can be a bit much and there are definitely um trendy mental illnesses which is a whole Hornet's Nest I'm not going

to poke here but bottom line I would a million times rather have that over people getting ice piics jammed into their eyes for a mild depression you know the world is stressful and we've got a lot of problems but just for a minute let's just uh let's just be thankful for that in fact today the challenge can be that there are too many options for mental health and mental illness um it can lead to a lot of confusion over the right choices to make that's why I think it's important to you know find Qualified and

objective voices in the mental health space to stay informed on the latest protocols what to look out for um and just be more educated on how the brain works thankfully over on nebula we have several awesome creators who know their stuff in the brain space like neurotransmissions who talk not only about psychology and higher level brain stuff but also get down to the nitty-gritty of how your brain works on a cellular level and how mental health habits and psychiatric drugs do their work there you can also find Georgia da who is a li therapist and

often covers like pop culture through the lens of a therapist she's also on a new nebula original show the getaway which was just released last week it was created by the people behind the hit show jet lag and it follows a group of popular YouTubers some of them good friends of mine uh as they go through a series of challenges while someone is sabotaging everything and they have to kind of figure out who that someone is plot twist uh it's all of them but that's just the newest and a long line of cool original content

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