Lobotomies were carried out on thousands of people around the world. You’d think that, like many treatments, it was based on careful research. After all, the operation makes the front quarter of the brain inactive (sometimes by mashing it up with an ice pick). There must have been good reason for thinking that this would help a person, mustn’t there?
The operation was pioneered by Egas Moniz in 1935 and in 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his innovation. The idea first developed after two animal psychologists reported the effect of a similar operation on an aggressive chimpanzee. The operation on the chimp turned a truculent and awkward animal into a passive one.
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