Lobotomy - Context

Context

The lobotomy was one of a series of radical and invasive physical therapies developed in Europe in the first half of the 20th century. These experimental medical procedures signaled a break with a culture of therapeutic nihilism that had prevailed since the late nineteenth-century. These new physical therapies included malarial therapy for general paresis of the insane (1917), barbiturate-induced deep sleep therapy (1920), insulin shock therapy (1933), cardiazol shock therapy (1934), and electroconvulsive therapy (1938).

The development of the leucotomy procedure by Moniz in 1936, took place at a time when all of the above therapeutic interventions were extreme and experimental forms of therapy, and most posed serious risks to the health of the patients who underwent them. Leucotomy was seen by many psychiatrists as no more severe than therapies such as insulin or cardiazol shock; these apparently successful procedures conceived for the treatment of patients suffering severe mental illnesses helped to create the intellectual climate and medical and social warrants that allowed a surgical procedure as radical and irreversible as leucotomy to appear as a viable and even necessary proposition. Moreover, Joel Braslow argues that from malarial therapy onward to lobotomy, physical psychiatric therapies "spiral closer and closer to the interior of the brain" with this organ increasingly taking "centre stage as a source of disease and site of cure." For Roy Porter, these often violent and invasive psychiatric interventions are indicative of both the well-intentioned desire of psychiatrists to find some medical means of alleviating the suffering of the thousands of patients in psychiatric hospitals in the twentieth century and also the relative lack of social power of those same patients to resist the increasingly radical and even reckless interventions of asylum doctors.