Prefrontal lobotomy is the most common type of psychosurgery (surgery on the brain to relieve a disorder). In the prefrontal lobotomy a pick-like instrument is used to sever the nerve pathways that connect the prefrontal lobes to the Thalamus. The lobotomy was invented by the Portuguese neurologist, Antonio Egas Moniz and was first performed in the United States in the1930's. He was shot in the spine and paralyzed from the legs down by one of his patient who received an unsuccessful prefrontal lobotomy. After this occurred Antonio Egas Moniz realized that the prefrontal lobotomy was not always successful like he thought in the past. In 1949, Dr. Antonio Egas Moniz was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology, in recognition of his creation of the prefrontal lobotomy or as he called it the prefrontal leucotomy, this made the lobotomy a respectable procedure, and in the following three years more lobotomies were performed than in all of the previous years.
The prefrontal lobotomy took The United States and many other countries by storm. They were performed in a wide scale in the 1940's, because the mental asylums were overloaded with patients after World War 2. Between 1939 and 1951, more than18, 000 lobotomies were performed in The United States, and tens of thousands in other countries. By the 1950's the prefrontal lobotomy was performed on over a thousand people to try to reduce violence and agitation.
It was widely abused as a method to control undesirable behavior, instead of being a last-resort therapeutic procedure for desperate cases. In Japan most of the lobotomies were performed on children with problematic behavior or a bad performance in school. Inmates in prisons for the insane were widely operated on also. .
The prefrontal lobotomy surgery has myriad side effects including Hyperactivity and distractibility, impaired learning ability, overeating, apathy and withdrawal, epileptic-type seizures, reduced creativity, and very rarely death! Because of these side effects, the prefrontal lobotomy has been discontinued in the United States.
