Criticism
As early as 1944 an author in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease remarked: "The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance." Beginning in 1947 Swedish psychiatrist Snorre Wohlfahrt evaluated early trials, reporting that it is "distinctly hazardous to leucotomize schizophrenics" and lobotomy to be "still too imperfect to enable us, with its aid, to venture on a general offensive against chronic cases of mental disorder" and stating that "Psychosurgery has as yet failed to discover its precise indications and contraindications and the methods must unfortunately still be regarded as rather crude and hazardous in many respects." In 1948 Norbert Wiener, the author of Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, said: "refrontal lobotomy... has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."
Concerns about lobotomy steadily grew. The USSR officially banned the procedure in 1950. Doctors in the Soviet Union concluded that the procedure was "contrary to the principles of humanity" and that it turned "an insane person into an idiot." By the 1970s, numerous countries had banned the procedure as had several US states. Other forms of psychosurgery continued to be legally practiced in controlled and regulated US centers and in Belgium, Finland, India, Sweden, the UK, and the Netherlands.
In 1977 the US Congress created the National Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research to investigate allegations that psychosurgery—including lobotomy techniques—were used to control minorities and restrain individual rights. It also investigated the after-effects of surgery. The committee concluded that some extremely limited and properly performed psychosurgery could have positive effects.
There have been calls for the Nobel Foundation to rescind the prize it awarded to Moniz for developing the lobotomy, a decision that has been called an astounding error of judgment at the time and one that psychiatry might still need to learn from, but the Foundation declined to take action and has continued to host an article defending the results of the procedure.
Read more about this topic: Lobotomy
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)