Page "Lobotomy" Paragraph 7

The development of the leucotomy procedure was the work of the Portuguese physician and neurologist António Egas Moniz, who was highly acclaimed for his work on cerebral angiography ( radiographical visual of the blood vessels in the brain ) in 1927.

Despite having no clinical psychiatric experience and, indeed, little interest in psychiatry, in 1935 at the Hospital Santa Marta in Lisbon, he devised the surgery called prefrontal leucotomy which was carried out under his direction by the neurosurgeon Pedro Almeida Lima.

He was also responsible for coining the term psychosurgery.

The procedure involved drilling holes in the patient's head and destroying tissue in the frontal lobes by injecting alcohol.

He later changed technique, using a surgical instrument called a leucotome that cut brain tissue by rotating a retractable wire loop ( a quite different cutting instrument also used for lobotomies shares the same name ).

Between November 1935 and February 1936 Moniz and Lima operated on twenty patients, publishing their findings in the same year.

Their own assessment was that 35 % of the patients improved greatly, 35 % improved moderately and that in the remaining 30 % there was no change.

The patients were aged between 27 and 62 years of age, 12 were female and eight were male.

Nine of the patients were diagnosed as suffering from depression, six from schizophrenia, two from panic disorder, and one each from mania, catatonia and manic-depression with the most prominent symptoms being anxiety and agitation.

The duration of the illness prior to the procedure varied from as little as four weeks to as much as 22 years, although all but four had been ill for at least one year.

The post-operative follow-up assessment took place anywhere from one to ten weeks following surgery.

The observed complications were less severe than in Burckhardt's sample as there were no deaths or epileptic convulsions and the most cited complication was fever.