The Lobotomist, a PBS documentary about Walter Freeman which I mentioned recently, is now available online as a series of short clips that require either QuickTime or Windows Media Player for viewing.
The program charts how the lobotomy came to be regarded as a cure for most types of mental illness, how Freeman "refined" the procedure, and how, in the face of criticism, it was eventually replaced in the 1950s by the newly-developed neuroleptic drugs.
Read more about the rise and fall of the prefrontal lobotomy, and watch a film clip of James Watts and Walter Freeman performing a prefrontal leucotomy.
[Via Mind Hacks]
- Log in to post comments
More like this
A forthcoming PBS documentary called The Lobotomist examines the career of psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman, who performed nearly 3,000 "ice pick" lobotomies during the late 1930s and 1940s.
The hour-long program, which is partly based on Jack El-Hai's book of the same name, contains old footage of…
LOBOTOMY (from the Greek lobos, meaning lobes of the brain, and tomos, meaning cut) is a psychosurgical procedure in which the connections the prefrontal cortex and underlying structures are severed, or the frontal cortical tissue is destroyed, the theory being that this leads to the uncoupling…
Here's some fascinating footage from 1942, showing Drs. James Watts and Walter Freeman performing a prefrontal leucotomy. The footage accompanies a short article called Lobotomy Revisited, and, like last week's trepanation film clip, is not for the squeamish.)
The procedure shown in the film is the…
My recent post on prefrontal lobotomy has been the most popular thing on this blog so far, and the comments on it are worth reading.
While searching for more information about lobotomies and the neuroleptic drugs that replaced them, I came across this fantastic webpage at NobelPrize.org,…