week 10 workshop

In 1945, an American doctor Walter Jackson Freeman II to this kind of “surgery” conducted a “improvement”, he invented the so-called ice – pick lobotomy, this kind of “surgery” is in the true sense of “manifest” heart-pounding – doctors directly with a hammer to a thick steel needle about chopsticks from sinking into the brain above the patient’s eye, and then stir the root steel needle with his hands to destroy the patient frontal lobe.This kind of special operation convenient and quick, what do not need to undertake disinfection, and many of the psychiatric hospital operating table is changing.With the popularity of the operation, however, it started getting worse: due to this kind of surgery is neither precise positioning, also does not have the standard operating procedures, the doctor is often feels to the patient’s brain disorderly dao, so the performance of the postoperative patients have ranged.Some patients died of operation directly or commit suicide because of the surgical complications;Some people appeared different types of disability;There are also some extreme manic or depressive symptoms appeared;And most of the cases, however, patient’s psychotic symptoms relief also appeared serious sequela: withdrawn, slow, numb, dull, acted upon.Even supporters of the frontal lobe white matter, also have to admit that only forty percent of patients got improved, the rest either no effect or worse.To the second half of the 1940 s, because of the media and advertising, this should be a last resort to treat severe mental illness has become in the eyes of the general public to solve all problems of tiger balm.In Japan, many children by their parents to do a frontal lobe resection, and simply because their parents think they “not good”.In Denmark the government built specifically for this type of “new therapy” a large number of hospitals, and for disease from mental retardation to anorexia is everything.In the worst of the United States, such as freeman people advocating “psychosis to kill in the bud”, tens of thousands of people without careful inspection is to do the surgery.Moreover this kind of surgery in the violent criminals and political prisoners.That year, because of the blind treatment suffer far more than these people from frontal lobotomies, also is famous for cutting the corpus callosum brain “split brain” and as a result of the loss of memory due to resection on both sides of the hippocampus of Henry Gustav Molaison, etc.The classic case in the history of neurosurgery are written into the medical textbook, now a reminder standard operation and the importance of evidence-based medicine.Can say, it is these tragic paved the way to modern neurosurgery medicine the trail of tears.

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