enthalpy

Wednesday, July 13, 2005


I always thought that if I ever saw a headline like Lobotomy Back in Spotlight After 30 Years, it would be from a renewed and prosaic condemnation of its barbarity. Apparently, the New England Journal of Medicine has a different take:
The lobotomy, once a widely used method for treating mental illness, epilepsy and even chronic headaches, is generating fresh controversy 30 years after doctors stopped performing the procedure now viewed as barbaric.

A new book and a medical historian contend the crude brain surgery actually helped roughly 10 percent of the estimated 50,000 Americans who underwent the procedure between the mid-1930s and the 1970s. But relatives of lobotomy patients want the Nobel Prize given to its inventor revoked.
Damn, and doctors wonder why most people are skeptical of their empirical diagnosis. But hey, when you're driving an icepick through someone's skull to destroy brain tissue, one out of ten ain't bad, right? This might change your mind, though not in quite the same and literal manner an icepick would.



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