Lobotomy Drill

Afterwork: Levels and sharpened.

Conner Prairie, Indianapolis, Indiana. Civil War Days.


Surgeon's tent on the Union lines. I found the bone saw plus the little bottle of ether very macabre.

Lobotomy now seems like a medically sanctioned form of torture. The main theory behind it was that anxiety and agitation could be quelled by severing the emotional center of the brain from the part that controls intellect, but the evidence to support this idea was meager. The person performing the surgery usually couldn’t even see what he was cutting, and doctors considered patients "cured" after minimal follow-up.

Yet, as Elliot S. Valenstein points out in Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness (Basic Books, 1986), "Even a surgeon who was convinced that he was not obtaining good results seldom gave up lobotomy. It was difficult to admit that the effort had been completely wasted, especially when other surgeons were reporting success. Rather than abandoning psychosurgery, neurosurgeons much more commonly introduced some change in the operation in the hope of increasing the success rate."



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