Rosemary Kennedy was a bright young

woman. Once she could read and write,

she would play with her siblings and

keep a diary. She engaged in social

events, traveled the world, and took

part in public life. Not without

difficulty. She'd been born with an

intellectual disability, and everyday

things were harder for her than for

other people. But she was otherwise a

regular, healthy woman, and above all,

she was happy.

But all of that changed after the

operation. Once out from under the

knife, Rosemary could no longer talk

intelligently. She struggled to walk.

She was incontinent. She was left with

the mental capacity of a young child,

and she needed around the clock care.

She was institutionalized shortly after

and so would spend the rest of her life

more than six decades in hospitals and

special schools. Her father never

visited her again. Her mother didn't for

20 years. You might have assumed this

was the result of some terrible accident

like from a harsh fall or perhaps a

major medical event like a stroke or

perhaps the operation was botched. But

it wasn't. Doctors did it on purpose and

called it progress. But we know it today

by a different name entirely,

the labbotomy.

And Rosemary wasn't the only one. Once

lorded as a breakthrough in mental

health medicine and neurology, tens of

thousands of labbotoies were performed

on people in the United States alone.

People celebrated it so much that the

man who pioneered it would receive a

Nobel Prize. So, how did it come to

this? How were thousands of people

irreversibly changed by a practice seen

as compassionate and scientific? Why did

it seem like a reasonable solution at

the time? And was it ever as black and

white as history remembers it? This is

the story of the labbotomy. how it

spread, who it hurt, and what it reveals

about medicine, mental health,

authority, and desperation.

Now, to understand how the labbotomy

came to dominate mental health

procedures for decades, we need to

understand some historical context of

the time during which it was developed.

And to do that, we need to go back to

the early 20th century. At this time,

new mental health conditions were being

officially medically categorized. Due to

the horrors of the First World War,

psychiatry and psychology was given a

new purpose as soldiers came back with

so-called war neurosis, resulting from

the stress and trauma of fighting the

most industrialized campaign ever

fought. Soldiers had been stood in soggy

trenches for four years, watching their

friends get blown to bits and shot to

pieces, resulting in severe

psychological conditions like

post-traumatic stress disorder, what

they called shell shock at the time.

Others suffered from brain injuries from

bullets and shrapnel that fundamentally

changed people's personalities or left

them permanently disabled. At the same

time, other conditions were gaining

mainstream attention in the medical

world, like schizophrenia for the very

first time, ushering in questions about

how to help those with such conditions.

Many in the Western world agreed that

mental health care was becoming an

increasingly important part of medicine

and that some of these people were

seriously unwell and needed looking

after. And this is how the asylum system

came to be. facilities that could hold

mentally unwell people for treatment.

But those treatment options were

limited. To put it nicely, psychiatry at

the beginning of the 20th century was

helpless in comparison to the modern

methods and medicines that we have

today. The asylums quickly became

overcrowded with patients, and drugs

like anti-depressants, antiscychotics,

and mood stabilizers just hadn't widely

been rolled out yet. If people were a

danger to themselves or others and they

were prone to violent outbursts, then

the only options at the time were pretty

barbaric. Straight jackets and other

restraints were common. Isolation,

electric shock therapy, insulin coma

therapy, and chemical shock therapy were

all heavily utilized in an attempt to

try and curtail people's conditions.

They were just unwell people but often

treated more like animals. Believe it or

not, asylums were seen as the kindest

option at the time. If people were

dangerous through no fault of their own,

say through mental illness, then they

couldn't simply be put in the workhouse

or in prisons like they had been before.

And so asylums were supposed to be

society's answer to keep both them and

the general public safer. But in

practice, this was of course rife for

abuse. Some psychiatrists were all too

eager to claim success for unproven

experimental treatments like some of the

ones we mentioned. But the asylums

quickly became full as people were

turfed inside for all kinds of reasons.

And there was pressure from above to see

them emptied. But mental health issues

were often seen as incurable and

degenerative because the science was

just so underdeveloped. The result was

asylons and hospitals buckling under the

sheer number of patients. In 1946, for

example, in the United States, nearly 1/

half of all public hospital beds were

devoted to what they called the mentally

ill. So, not only were psychiatrists

coming up with new experimental and

often harmful treatments, but there was

also a massive incentive from the system

to double down on these treatments. At

the time, there was this belief that

mental health issues were a result of

physical neurological problems that

could be solved or cured. Like with

other physical injuries, if you can cure

a faulty heart or lungs with surgery,

why not the brain? Of course, brain

surgery was a very new and highly

experimental idea at the time. Could

anyone pull it off and find the solution

to these problems?

Well, as it turns out, one man could.

But you're not going to like the answer

that he came up with. Meet highly

respected Portuguese neurologist Egazmon

Mones. Highly experienced in his field,

he was at a neurology conference in

London in 1935 when he first came up

with an idea for an experimental new

kind of psychosurgery. And in 1936, he

published his first report on what he

believed was a procedure that could

seriously alleviate the mental harm

people were facing. And here we actually

need to stop and talk about a few

different kinds of psychosurgical

procedures as well as medical theories

at the time that would inform the

process that monies would develop. Now

whilst neurology and brain surgery were

relatively new in terms of their

sophistication in medicine, some things

about the brain were known. For

instance, it was widely understood that

the frontal lobe was important for

emotional regulation. And it was also

known that damage to the frontal lobe

sustained by people wasn't always

immediately fatal like with other parts

of the brain. Even by the 1930s, the

famous story of Fineas Gage was

wellknown. He was a railway worker who

had a railway spike launched at high

speeds through his head and frontal

lobe. He survived, but his personality

was forever changed afterwards. So it

was understood that if there was

anywhere in the brain you were going to

cut a few sinapses out of, it should

probably be at the frontal lobe for the

lowest chance of death. Now, as we said,

this front part of the brain is really

important for emotional regulation, but

also things like reasoning, speech, and

executive functions like impulse

control, voluntary muscle movements,

social understanding, and even recalling

information. Moners didn't know much

about the frontal lobe at the time.

Nobody did. His theory around mental

illness was wrong but internally

logical. He believed that mental illness

was a physical issue caused by fixed

pathological circuits in the brain. That

literal physical white matter connected

together caused certain unhealthy

psychological loops, thoughts and

behaviors. If you could sever those

physical connections, then it should

stop the psychological loop of thoughts

that Mones believed contributed to

insanity, obsession, and compulsion.

This, according to Monise, could be

effective for agitated states, anxiety,

depression, and things like OCD as well.

What Manise was advocating for was a

procedure called a lucottomy. A

lucottomy's aim was to surgically cut

white matter connections in the frontal

lobe. The procedure would involve small

holes being drilled into the skull. Then

a lucatome, which is a surgical tool

with a wire loop on the end, would be

inserted to destroy the targeted brain

tissue. This differed from a lobectomy,

which is a really uncommon treatment

that included removing a portion or all

of the frontal lobe or any lobe on any

part of the body for that matter. John

Fton, a professor at Yale University,

experimented on chimps with lobectomies

to study effects on their behavior after

watching frontal lobe injury victims

during World War I. And it would be his

work on chimpanzees that would inspire

Mones at that 1935 London conference. A

labbotomy as we know it today wouldn't

come around until later. And whilst it's

described as a specific procedure later

on, it started out as more of a kind of

catch all term for psychosurgical

procedures performed on the frontal

lobe. Mones wasn't ignorant to the idea

of his lucottomy potentially being able

to fundamentally alter people's brains.

But the way he saw it, cutting those

connections in the frontal lobe, even

allowing for some behavioral and

personality deterioration,

outweighed the debilitating effects of

severe psychiatric illness. In other

words, the trade-off was seen as worth

it because it could help reduce the

numbers in asylums and genuinely

alleviate anguish for people, allowing

them to live relatively normal lives

with their families, even if their

faculties were slightly impaired. Now

there were issues with the lucottomy as

an idea. They were relatively limited in

scope and had to be done under general

anesthetic in a surgical setting which

made them long, timeconuming and

expensive. The procedure was seen as

somewhat controversial from the very

beginning and results were mixed. For

many lucottomies offered low

expectations of improvement among

certain mental conditions and especially

amongst those whose conditions had

deteriorated significantly. Mones

himself accepted that they would be

unlikely to benefit much from the

operation, but he considered the results

acceptable for the first and second

series of trials done on a few dozen

patients. It wasn't like the surgery had

no positive effects whatsoever.

According to Maners, of the patients in

the second group of 18 people, all

schizophrenic, three were categorized as

almost cured and another two also had

become much better. His conclusion was

that a preffrontal lucottomy is a simple

operation always safe which may prove to

be an effective surgical treatment in

certain cases of mental disorder. And

that's actually not entirely outrageous

to say. The dottomy was in theory and if

done right most of those things despite

the trade-off in a person's personality

that may result. But there's also reason

to believe that Mones's findings were

somewhat flawed. Mones almost never

performed the surgeries himself and

early trials were quite small, poorly

controlled and with no patient follow-up

to actually assess the effects that it

might have on a person over the long

term. Outcomes could also be seen as

vague and subjective where a patient

would appear calmer and less distressed

in general after the surgery. But it's

hard to know if this is because the

procedure worked as intended or just did

significant damage to make it so. In

that sense, the side effects of the

surgery could be reframed as successes.

If it left you bedbound for weeks during

recovery, then you would be calmer. It

wasn't necessarily about what was good

for the patient in total terms, but

their impact on society and their

immediate surroundings. Yes, I'm afraid

you're bedbound, but you are calmer and

easier to be around. Of course, this

sounds bad, but then it gets worse. You

see around this time an American doctor

by the name of Walter Freeman saw the

lucottomy and thought h not bad but what

if we could make this more efficient and

this is where the lobotomy officially

came to be as well as where its true

horror would also arise. Freeman pushed

for a widespread quick version of the

nuctomy which we know now today as the

labbotomy and the details of how they

were done is pretty horrifying. An

icepic like instrument would be inserted

into the patient's eye socket above the

eye before then being hammered through

the thin orbital bone to reach the

frontal lobe where the tool would be

swept left to right to sever connections

in the frontal lobe completely. This was

not the delicate white matter cutting

like Monese's lottomy, but instead a

complete mashing of the frontal lobe

from the inside, indiscriminate and

total. The transorbital lobotomy, as it

was known, already sounds like a ghastly

and barbaric procedure, but the extra

details make it even more grizzly. These

were done often outside of a sterile

operating theater, completed in mere

minutes, and were often done without a

surgeon or any anesthesia whatsoever.

All factors that differ significantly

from Monise's method. It would also be

repeated until the desired result was

reached. This allowed Freeman to mass

industrialize labbotoies across the

world because they were so quick and

cheap and easy to perform. By

comparison, he would perform assembly

line labbotoies at state mental

hospitals and asylums where

psychiatrists would identify patients

for the procedure and have them ready

for him when he arrived. On one

occasion, he labized 228 patients over

12 days for the West Virginia Labbotomy

Project. That's 19 people per day across

an 8hour day. That's faster than one

every half an hour. Hardly very long to

perform such a dangerous and complex

procedure. And to be honest, no one

knows if he even took that long. The

other scary part was the creeping scope

of the labbotomy as well. As its

popularity widened and spread across the

world from Freeman's methods, many were

subjected to it with a whole wide range

of differing conditions. At first, it

was mainly for people experiencing major

schizophrenia or a dangerous form of

psychosis that made them a threat to

themselves and others and in

considerable distress. But soon the

lobotomy would be seen as a kind of cure

all among doctors to conditions like

depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, OCD,

and epilepsy. Some of you may even have

these conditions today. And if you were

alive back then, you might have found

yourself staring at Walter Freeman's

icepic a little too closely. Eventually,

labbotoies were even considered useful

procedures for people seen as having

behavioral problems like women and

children who were seen as difficult,

hysterical, or otherwise exhibited

inconvenient behaviors. In fact, later

studies would suggest that the majority

of those who were given the procedure

were women. But what actually happens to

them when a patient got a transorbital

labbotomy? What was their life like

afterwards? Well, across the board, the

results weren't good. The effects that

labbotoies had on patients were far more

expansive than Monese's lucottomy. Even

Freeman himself admitted that every

patient probably loses something by this

operation. Some spontaneity, some

sparkle, some flavor of their

personality. He also stated that the

best possible option for some patients

was to turn them into a veritable

household pet in utilizing the

procedure. British psychiatrist Maurice

Partridge, who conducted a follow-up

study of 300 patients, said that the

treatment achieved this effect by

reducing the complexity of psychic life.

But negative effects on patients were

recorded as early as the late 1930s.

Labbotoies left patients with reduced

responsiveness, self-awareness, and

self-control, which makes sense given

that these are the things regulated by

the frontal lobe. Other side effects

included disorientation, strange

behaviors, flattened emotions. Surprise,

surprise. Some suffered personality

irerasia, others incontinents, some had

seizures, some people ended up with a

childlike dependency, and some people

just died. Dr. JL Hoffman wrote in the

New England Journal of Medicine in 1949

that quote, "These patients are not only

no longer distressed by their mental

conflicts, but also seem to have little

capacity for any emotional experiences,

pleasurable or otherwise. They are

described by the nurses and the doctors

over and over as dull, apathetic,

listless, without drive or initiative,

flat, lethargic, placid and unconcerned,

childlike, dosile, needing pushing,

passive, lacking in spontaneity, without

aim or purpose, preoccupied

and dependent. In so many cases, it

effectively turned people into mindless

zombies. Were people's symptoms reduced?

Yes, but only because their very

capacity to feel such symptoms were

taken from them alongside large aspects

of their individual personalities. The

result was some ending up as

unrecognizable to those who cared for

them. In 1948, Swedish professor of

forensic psychiatry Gusta Rylander

reported that a mother said about her

daughter who underwent a lobotomy that

quote, "She is my daughter, but yet a

different person. She is with me in

body, but her soul is in some way lost.

Freeman's public demonstrations of the

labbotomy also sometimes went

disastrously wrong, including people

losing their lives during the procedure.

Stabbing an ice pick into someone's

brain and then sloshing it around is

bound to have some adverse effects. It

was inevitable with the less careful,

less surgical method that some people

would suffer and others would die.

Monese's lucottomy wasn't perfect.

But it wasn't this. And yet, asylums and

hospitals loved it. Patients became

quieter and easier to manage, which made

them cheaper to house, as well as making

it possible for patients to be cared for

safely at home. It helped empty the

asylums and hospitals. But those that

left certainly weren't the same people

who arrived for all the worse reasons.

And then you have the ethical questions

about intent, authority of medical

professionals, and desperation. In cases

where patients had families, doctors

would pressure them into going along

with a labbotomy as a last resort

because it offered them a chance of

being discharged over a lifetime of

institutionalization.

Families were often desperate to get

their members back home, and so they

reluctantly agreed, assuming that the

psychiatrists knew best. Between having

a mentally unwell and potentially

violent person at home, or seeing them

be locked away in an asylum for life,

the risk of having them turned into a

benign household pet, as per Freeman's

words, may have been the least bad

option. Let's remember there were no

good options in cases where somebody had

no advocate or next of kin. The state

then took the executive decision-making

role when a patient was deemed not to

have decision-making capacity for

themselves. This makes the question of

medical consent murky and semicoerced at

best and really not even considered at

worst. After all, it's an ethically

dubious treatment if carried out against

a patient's wishes. But this is a

difficult question in severely psychotic

patients who lack insight about their

condition. It's almost inevitable that

some people were fully conscious of the

fact that they were getting a labbotomy

against their will as it happened. And a

lot of these people weren't left happier

or healthier as a result. A few actually

were. This can't be ignored, but most

were just seen as easier to deal with,

especially in terms of schizophrenic

cases where the labbotomy was originally

believed to provide some relief. It

appeared to show very little marked

improvement for the majority of

patients. The mortality rate was between

0.8 8 and 2.5% which aren't great odds

and 10% of those who underwent

operations were known to have some

problems with epilepsy afterwards making

seizures a frightening new reality for

many. In the end over many countries

tens of thousands of patients would

undergo labbotoies and lucottomies with

varying levels of success in their

treatment. Many underwent multiple

operations. Freeman himself did

thousands. But even despite the invasive

surgery, major risks, and lack of

understanding around the long-term

consequences, the scientific community

were sufficiently impressed. In the end,

Mones was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize

in Physiology and Medicine for his

development of the lucottomy, even if it

eventually led to Freeman's brutal

icepic variant. All of this brings us

back to Rosemary Kennedy, the woman with

whom we opened this story. She is

perhaps the most famous case of anyone

who underwent a lobotomy. She was the

daughter of Joseph Patrick Kennedy and

Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald and she was

the older sister of the future United

States President John F. Kennedy. When

Rosemary was born at home in 1918, her

mother was told to hold her legs closed

for two extra hours as there were no

doctors available to help deliver the

baby. Hospitals were overwhelmed with

the outbreak of the Spanish flu which

left them short staffed for home visits.

This starved Rosemary's new brain of

oxygen and resulted in her developing an

intellectual disability of which there

was and still is major stigma. She

learned to walk and talk somewhat slower

than her siblings, but still grew up

managing her disability into a

well-adjusted young woman. She was happy

and healthy. She enjoyed shopping for

clothes, going to dances, and spending

time with her friends. Her mother stated

that she was quote an affectionate,

warmly responsive, and loving girl. She

was so willing to try to do her best, so

appreciative of attention and

compliments, and so hopeful of deserving

them. As Rosemary grew older though, her

care, education, and life circumstances

all got more demanding. She was sent to

several private boarding schools and

moved around a lot as a young adult,

including to the UK when her father was

the US ambassador to Britain between

1938 and 1940. Her parents tried to find

schools that offered special support for

students with intellectual challenges,

which were limited given the standards

of the time. And so Rosemary found

education understandably difficult. And

being a Kennedy, she wasn't like the

other kids. The Kennedys were a

political dynasty even back then with

social obligations to make and

appearances to keep up. The Kennedy

parents had high expectations of their

children, and as a result, the siblings

could be very competitive. This

frustrated Rosemary as she struggled

with the challenges of this very

different lifestyle that just didn't

suit her as she was unable to live up to

the accomplishments of her siblings. Not

to mention the fact that the instability

of moving around all the time likely

wouldn't have helped her settle

anywhere. Her behavior started to get

troubling after she returned home from

the UK in 1940 at the age of 22. She

suffered from convulsions and was prone

to violent outbursts which did sometimes

injure those around her. She was

expelled from a summer camp in

Massachusetts and moved around a few

more schools before being placed in a

convent school in Washington DC. Once

there, Rosemary started sneaking out at

night which alarmed the school and her

parents. The nuns were worried that she

might become sexually active which would

put her at risk of a disease or

pregnancy. Her father, on the other

hand, was more worried that her

daughter's behavior could jeopardize the

political ambitions of his other kids

through scandal. Father of the year. In

1941, at 23 years old, Joseph Kennedy

arranged for a pair of doctors to

perform a labbotomy on his daughter in

the hope of curing her. He did not

notify the rest of the family. One of

the doctors was

Walter Freeman. The other doctor was

James Watts, who'd been present through

much of Freeman's work that we've

discussed up to this point. Dr. Watts

later recalled the procedure. Quote, "We

went through the top of the head. I

think she was awake. She had a mild

tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision

in the brain through the skull. It was

near the front. It was on both sides. We

just made a small incision, no more than

an inch." As Watts operated, Freeman

asked Rosemary to do things like recite

the Lord's Prayer, sing God Bless

America, or count backwards. Watts

explained, "We made an estimate on how

far to cut based on how she responded."

When Rosemary's speech dissolved into

total incoherent gibberish, they

considered it job done. It quickly

became clear after the fact that the

operation was a disastrous failure.

Rosemary had lost most of her ability to

walk and to talk. Her personality was

permanently altered. She was left

physically disabled, incontinent, and

whilst having high functioning capacity

before, she could no longer look after

herself with something more akin to the

mind of a young child or a toddler. She

was institutionalized shortly afterwards

for the rest of her life, and the whole

story was kept under wraps until 1987.

She would ultimately recover the ability

to walk with a limp, but never regained

her ability to speak coherently. She

eventually died at the age of 86 in

2005, surrounded by her siblings. She

was reconnected with her family by then,

but let's not forget it was her parents'

actions who' taken this bright,

confident young woman who needed help

and completely erased the person she

used to be. As we said in the intro, her

mother didn't visit her for 20 years,

and her father never did, dying in 1969,

almost 30 years later. Her siblings

treated her better, especially her

younger sister, Ununice Kennedy, who

acted as Rosemary's advocate for a large

portion of her life. She even started

the Special Olympics, what we now call

the Parolympics, in her honor in 1968.

But the reality was Rosemary didn't need

to be cured. She needed help managing

her condition in a less demanding and

stressful environment. Eventually, the

labbotomy would fall out of fashion. By

the 1950s, the first antisycchotic drugs

were coming onto the market that

provided better outcomes than an

experimental and invasive brain surgery.

They proved to be decisive as public

criticism, personal shame from the

psychiatric field and Freeman's

dwindling public perception all slowly

spelled the end for this gruesome

procedure that robbed so many of being

able to live a semi-normal life. But

then, of course, the damage had been

done. Tens of thousands of people were

already permanently affected by the

procedure, which was, let's not forget,

completely irreversible. You can't just

stitch brain matter back on and have

people go back to the way they were

before. And that leaves a few loose ends

to tie up with the main one being Monise

who received that Nobel Prize for his

work on the dotomy.

After all, should he have received that

prize? There have been calls for the

Nobel Committee to formally withdraw his

prize after you take into account the

harm he caused both directly through the

lucottomy but also indirectly through

the later widely established

transorbital labbotomy. If anything,

Mones should have gotten the Nobel Prize

for a different medical technique he

developed entirely, agography. Mon

realized back in the 1920s that if you

injected a contrast agent containing

iodine into certain blood vessels that

supplied the brain, you could X-ray

someone's head and reveal both brain

tumors and vascular deformities. Before

this technology, there was really no way

to know exactly where a brain tumor

could be within someone's head. This

development has undoubtedly saved

countless lives in the decades since,

and it's still utilized to this day in

modern medicine via angiograms. But his

prize wasn't for that. It was for the

lucottomy. Some might argue he made a

groundbreaking step forward in neurology

that was later tainted by Freeman and

Watt's despicable practices. But others

say he created something not based in

scientific merit and rushed ahead with

his findings leading to significant

harm. But it's always not quite so cut

and dry. Statistics appeared to show

that lucottomies and even labbotoies in

some cases did help people in particular

treatment resistant cases of certain

conditions. Ultimately though the

evidence was weak, harm was

underestimated and patients simply being

seen as more compliant and dosile was

attributed as a positive even if it

actually wasn't. The procedure also

opened the door to cases of catastrophic

misuse and abuse like in the case of

Rosemary Kennedy and many others. Lots

of people had procedures performed

against their will and people trusted

the doctors because of their

professions. Ultimately, even if we're

being generous, monies being awarded the

Nobel Prize was premature until it was

possible to learn the long-term

consequences of what psychosurgery could

do for a person's quality of life, not

just for the ease of hospitals as a

cost-saving measure. As for Freeman and

Watts, they should have gone to jail for

the harm they caused and propagated

throughout the medical community. But

arguably,

all of this wasn't just for nothing,

which is the one shred of good from the

story. Not only did these procedures

eventually lead to the better

understanding of neurology that we have

today, but also the development of

safeguarding practices in medicine as

well as the creation of systems to work

out complicated questions like what

actually is capacity and consent in a

medical context. It helps us on the

journey of better understanding mental

health and hopefully puts us on the path

as a species to work out how to treat

certain psychological conditions with

greater compassion and understanding.

One could argue it's hard to judge

historical medicine by modern standards,

but this wasn't medieval plague doctors

putting leeches on people's wounds to

balance the humorus. These were people

who were being lobtomized less than a

century ago. In 100 years time, people

may well look back on the medical

practices we undertake today and think

much the same as we do of the labbotomy.

But the systems we have in place now are

designed to value change and are more

mature at putting the patients care and

quality of life first. Today, the idea

of the lobotomy in a medical context

isn't completely gone. Nowadays, heavily

regulated versions of the labbotomy do

occur like the kingulotomy and the

capsulotomy. They're only for treatment

resistant conditions that are highly

damaging to a person's life performed as

a last resort. They're done in fully

sterile surgical conditions and cut mere

millimeters of tissue at most with

overlapping layers of consent being the

cornerstone of such procedures. Less

than a dozen take place every year

across the entire world. Overall, the

story of the labbotomy is one that shows

the danger of accepting positions of

authority for authorities's sake, both

in the case of patients and doctors, but

also between doctors and those who ran

their hospitals and asylums. It shows

how medicine is often judged by the

success of the moment, and it's a

warning that we should be wary of

so-called miracle cures. Of course, it

also shows the lack of accountability

that occurs when the system fails.

Somewhat ironically, the lobotomy is now

characterized as a blunt instrument to a

societal problem that had no solution at

the time, but arguably only makes things

worse. But it is important to remember

that the lobotomy was not born out of

cruelty or laziness,

but desperation. And sadly, it was

rewarded before anyone could truly

understand the full cost it had on

individuals.