How many lobotomies are performed a year

Shortly after doing his first ice pick lobotomy, Freeman began traveling the country performing lobotomies on all who were willing. Though lobotomies were initially only used to treat severe mental health condition, Freeman began promoting the lobotomy as a cure for everything from serious mental illness to nervous indigestion.

About 50, people received lobotomies in the United States, most of them between and Freeman himself is said to have performed about 3, patients, including 19 children. The youngest was just 4 years old. In many instances, lobotomies had negative effects on a patient's personality, initiative, inhibitions, empathy, and ability to function on their own.

Here are a few people who underwent lobotomies and the impact the operation had on their lives. Freeman and Watts performed the first lobotomy in the U. Six days after the operation, Hammatt experienced transient language difficulties, disorientation, and agitation. Nevertheless, Freeman considered the outcome a success.

Probably the most notable person to have undergone a lobotomy is Rosemary Kennedy, sister of U. President John F. As a child and young adult, Kennedy has mild developmental delays that impaired her performance in school. As Rosemary got older, she reportedly began to experience violent seizures and temper tantrums, lashing out at those around her.

Seeking a treatment to ease her outbursts and fearing that Rosemary's behavior would create a bad reputation for herself and for the whole family, Rosemary's father arranged a lobotomy for Rosemary when she was 23 years old.

Throughout the entire procedure, Rosemary is said to have been awake, speaking with doctors, and reciting poems to nurses. Doctors knew the procedure was over when she stopped speaking. Following the procedure she became severely disabled. She was unable to function independently, and was institutionalized for the remainder of her life.

The lobotomy is considered one of the most barbaric treatments in the history of modern medicine. Even in the s, lobotomies were the subject of growing controversy. But despite it's ethical issues regarding the procedure, it gained widespread popularity for several reasons:. The Soviet Union banned the surgery in , arguing that it was "contrary to the principles of humanity. The United States performed more lobotomies -- roughly 40, -- than any other nation. Some very conspicuous failures, including a lobotomy that reduced John F.

Kennedy's elder sister, Rosemary , to a near-vegetative state, helped turn public opinion against the surgery. Lobotomies declined in popularity in the s, as their undesirable side effects became more well-known. Criticism of the procedures also grew among medical professionals who said the doctors who performed lobotomies were not neurosurgeons, neglected to report negative outcomes for many of their patients, and overall had "a lack of scientific rigor," according to the Frontiers in Neuroscience study.

By the mids, scientists had developed psychotherapeutic medications such as the antipsychotic chlorpromazine, which was much more effective and safer for treating mental disorders than lobotomy. Nowadays, mental illness is primarily treated with drugs and psychotherapies.

In cases where drugs or talk therapy are not effective, people may be treated with electroconvulsive therapy, a procedure that involves passing electrical currents through the brain to trigger a brief seizure, according to the Mayo Clinic. Lobotomy is rarely, if ever, performed today, and if it is, "it's a much more elegant procedure," Lerner said.

This article was updated on Oct. Live Science. Jump to: When was the first lobotomy? How is a lobotomy performed? What happens after a lobotomy? Are lobotomies performed today? In he devised the "transorbital lobotomy" in which steel instruments resembling ice picks were hammered into the brain through the fragile bones at the back of the eye sockets. The operating time was drastically reduced, and patients did not need an anaesthetic - they were knocked out before the operation using a portable "Electro-Shock" machine.

Freeman would drive across America during the long summer holidays to conduct his "ice-pick lobotomies" - sometimes taking his children along. Initially described as a surgery of last resort for psychiatric patients for whom all other treatments had failed, Freeman began to promote lobotomy as a cure for everything from serious mental illness to post-natal depression, severe headaches, chronic pain, nervous indigestion, insomnia and behavioural difficulties.

Many patients and their families were grateful to Freeman, who kept boxes filled with the letters of thanks and Christmas cards they sent him. But in other cases the results were disastrous. She was left incontinent and unable to speak clearly after a lobotomy at the age of Over the course of his career, Freeman conducted lobotomies on 3, patients, including 19 children, the youngest just four years old. Freeman's counterpart in the UK was the neurosurgeon, Sir Wylie McKissock, who carried out his own variation of the lobotomy on about 3, patients.

A competent team in a well-organised mental hospital can do four such operations in two to two-and-a-half hours," he boasted. Thanks in large part to McKissock, more lobotomies were carried out in the UK, per head of population, than in the US. As a medical student in the s, Henry Marsh took a job as a psychiatric nursing auxiliary in a mental hospital, on what he describes as "the end-stage ward where the burnt-out cases went to die".

There he saw first-hand the devastating effects of lobotomy. They had all been operated on by McKissock and his assistants. Later, after Marsh had qualified as a neurosurgeon, a modification of the procedure, known as a limbic leucotomy, was still in use. Marsh describes it as "a sort of microscopic version, much more refined, of the sort of lobectomies people had been carrying out many years earlier".

He himself performed this operation on a dozen patients with severe OCD until as recently as I was assured by the psychiatrists involved that the operations were a success. I ask him how he feels about these operations now.