This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Psychiatry, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Jack D. Pressman, 555 pp, New York, NY, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1999;56:96-97.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

On September 14, 1936, James Watts, a neurosurgeon, performed the first frontal lobotomy on a psychiatric patient in the United States. Walter Freeman, a neurologist, assisted. The patient was a woman with agitated depression, whose family had been recommended to Freeman by Karl Menninger. They wrote afterwards telling him how pleased they were with the results. During the next 20 years more than 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States. In 1949 alone, the year in which Egas Moniz received the Nobel prize for developing the procedure, there were more than 5000. Today we look back on this epoch as "cruel and barbaric," to use the words of Gerald Grob, the distinguished historian of psychiatry. What happened? Why? How do we understand it today? How was it understood at the time? What can we learn from it? These are the questions that frame this study by Jack D. Pressman, . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?