PBS documentary ‘Lobotomist’ serves as a warning
January 15th, 2008
By Sandra G. Boodman in the Washington Post: a review of a “riveting” documentary on PBS’s “American Experience, scheduled to air Jan. 21.
One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital or “ice pick” lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness.
… The story of how [Walter J.] Freeman sold his procedure to credulous colleagues, assiduously courted the press and convinced desperate families that sticking an ice pick through a patient’s upper eye sockets and twirling it like a swizzle stick through brain matter would cure psychosis, depression or troublesome behavior is the ultimate in cautionary medical tales.
…The issue at the heart of this powerful and unsettling film is not, as one writer puts it, “how a man could go off the rails, but how science could go off the rails.”
It’s a question well worth pondering.
See earlier post here.
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on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 10:03 am and is filed under disputed treatments, documentary, general news, history, mental health.
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