The Lobotomist

Raj Persaud reviews The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and his Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness by Jack El-Hai, in the British Medical Journal:

Aside from the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the US neurosurgeon Walter Freeman ranks as the most scorned physician of the 20th century. The operation Freeman refined and promoted, the lobotomy, still maintains a uniquely infamous position in the public mind nearly 70 years after its introduction and a quarter of a century after its disappearance...

But back in 1936, when Freeman performed his first leucotomy, the only alternative treatment for severe mental illness was prolonged institutionalisation, and the procedure did seem to liberate many patients from this fate. How else to explain why, in the United States alone, more than 40 000 such procedures would be carried out over the next few decades, and why it remained in use well into the 1970s?

More here.