The Chilling History of the Lobotomy

Blocko of Life Noggin explained the chilling history behind lobotomies, noting when they were invented, who received them and how they were performed.

If you suffered from a mental illness in the early 1900s doctors might have treated you with something called a lobotomy. …Physicians broke the connections between the frontal lobe and the thalamus…scientists believed that severing the neural fibers between them would stop abnormal behavior. This was originally accomplished through open brain surgery until the 1930, when the less invasive leukotomy was developed that first involved drilling through the skull.

Up until 1967, doctors prescribed lobotomies for any type of mental illness, anxiety, insomnia, and other conditions that didn’t require such extreme measures, but were done without a thought.

Yet despite their gruesome methods and terrible outcomes lobotomy were super popular in the 1930s and 40s they were performed on tens of thousands of people across the world.

History shows that more women got lobotomies than men.

At the time the term mental illness encompassed a wide range of behaviors including intellectual disability homosexuality and committing a crime but the group most often subjected to a lobotomy was women, even though mental hospitals contained more male patients. …And in most cases their symptoms were simply apprehension or insomnia.