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The frontal lobotomy procedure could have severe negative effects on a patient's personality and ability to function independently. [18] Lobotomy patients often show a marked reduction in initiative and inhibition. [19]
Walter Jackson Freeman II (November 14, 1895 – May 31, 1972) was an American physician who specialized in lobotomy. [1] Wanting to simplify lobotomies so that it could be carried out by psychiatrists in psychiatric hospitals, where there were often no operating rooms, surgeons, or anesthesia and limited budgets, Freeman invented a transorbital lobotomy procedure.
The new procedure also signaled the end of the professional relationship between Freeman and Watts. After performing the new procedure by himself on ten patients, Freeman finally revealed to Watts what he had been doing. Watts, unlike Freeman, was a trained neurosurgeon and adamantly believed lobotomy should be performed only by a proper ...
The pick would then be swung medially and laterally to separate the frontal lobes from the thalamus. In 1948, Freeman embellished the procedure by adding the deep frontal cut, an additional swing of the pick deep into the lobe which placed such an increase of strain on the instrument that it occasionally snapped off while in the patient's head ...
Lobotomy (Sweden, 1949) The use of psychosurgery increased during the 1940s, and there was a proliferation of the techniques used for the operation. [4] In 1946 Freeman developed the transorbital lobotomy, based on a technique first reported by Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti. [4]
The practice was enthusiastically taken up in the United States by the neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman and the neurosurgeon James W. Watts who devised what became the standard prefrontal procedure and named their operative technique lobotomy, although the operation was called leucotomy in the United Kingdom. [4]
The American term lobotomy has never been used by medical writers in the UK to describe a psychosurgical operation on the frontal lobe. The standard Freeman-Watts operation, called a lobotomy in the US, was called a leucotomy in the UK. Freeman later developed a psychosurgical technique in which an instrument is inserted through the eye-socket.
A frontal lobotomy (sometimes called frontal leucotomy) successfully reduced distress but at the cost of often blunting the subject's emotions, volition and personality. The indiscriminate use of this psychosurgical procedure, combined with its severe side effects and a mortality rate of 7.4 to 17 per cent, [17] earned it a bad reputation. The ...