Lobotomies
Imagine
if you will. You're sitting on your psychiatrist's couch, pouring your tortured
heart out about how depressed you are. He listens, jotting notes on a piece of
paper and nodding intently. "I think I have the solution to your
depression," he says as he produces a 10-inch-long ice pick. "I'm
going to jam this into your eye socket, then put it into your brain using this
mallet over here. Then, I'll wiggle it around so that it shreds part of your brain.
Then you won't be depressed any more. Just lie still."
Congratulations
hypothetical version of yourself living in the 1940s, you've just been
lobotomized! Lobotomies were a popular fad for the first half of the 20th
century and were floated as a "cure" for pretty much any mental issue
you can name, from conditions as serious as schizophrenia to something as mild
as depression or anxiety.
The inventor of the lobotomy was given a Nobel Prize for it
in 1949. Doctors claimed the "ice-pick-to-the- freaking-eye" method
of lobotomy would be as quick and easy as a trip to the dentist. By 1960,
parents were getting them for their moody teenage children.
This practice didn't hang around
as long as some on our list, but still some 70,000 people were lobotomized
before somebody figured out that driving a spike into the brain probably was
not the answer to all of life's problems.
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