When was the first lobotomy performed?
Lobotomy
Freeman performed the first transorbital lobotomy on a live patient in 1946. Its simplicity suggested the possibility of carrying it out in mental hospitals lacking the surgical facilities required for the earlier, more complex procedure. (Freeman suggested that, where conventional anesthesia was unavailable, electroconvulsive therapy be used to render the patient unconscious.) In 1947, the Freeman and Watts partnership ended, as the latter was disgusted by Freeman's modification of the lobotomy from a surgical operation into a simple "office" procedure. Between 1940 and 1944, 684 lobotomies were performed in the United States. However, because of the fervent promotion of the technique by Freeman and Watts, those numbers increased sharply towards the end of the decade. In 1949, the peak year for lobotomies in the US, 5,074 procedures were undertaken, and by 1951 over 18,608 individuals had been lobotomized in the US.
Louis Stromeyer
Stromeyer was a pioneer in orthopedics and orthopedic surgery. In 1831 he performed the first subcutaneous tenotomy (tendon surgery) of the Achilles tendon on a deformed foot. He introduced tenotomic surgery to England through a friend, English surgeon William John Little (1810–1894). Stromeyer performed the operation on Dr. Little in order to correct a clubfoot condition. Stromeyer was also a practitioner of maxillofacial surgery, being remembered for the eponymous "Stromeyer hook", a device used for zygomatic arch fractures.
Lobectomy
Lobectomy means "surgical excision of a lobe". This may refer to a lobe of the lung, a lobe of the thyroid (hemithyroidectomy), or a lobe of the brain (as in anterior temporal lobectomy).
Lobotomy
The lobotomy procedure could have severe negative effects on a patient's personality and ability to function independently. Lobotomy patients often show a marked reduction in initiative and inhibition. They may also exhibit difficulty putting themselves in the position of others because of decreased cognition and detachment from society.
Lobotomy
Concerns about lobotomy steadily grew. Soviet psychiatrist Vasily Gilyarovsky criticized lobotomy and the mechanistic brain localization assumption used to carry out lobotomy: "It is assumed that the transection of white substance of the frontal lobes impairs their connection with the thalamus and eliminates the possibility to receive from it stimuli which lead to irritation and on the whole derange mental functions. This explanation is mechanistic and goes back to the narrow localizationism characteristic of psychiatrists of America, from where leucotomy was imported to us." The USSR officially banned the procedure in 1950 on the initiative of Gilyarovsky. Doctors in the Soviet Union concluded that the procedure was "contrary to the principles of humanity" and "'through lobotomy' an insane person is changed into an idiot." By the 1970s, numerous countries had banned the procedure as had several US states.
Georg Lotheissen
Lotheissen made important contributions in his work involving esophageal surgery and hernia repair. In 1897 he was the first surgeon to suture the conjoint tendon to Cooper's (pectineal) ligament, an operation he performed on a patient with a recurrent inguinal hernia. Decades later, American surgeon Chester McVay (1911–1987) popularized the operation, and this procedure is now referred to as a "Lotheissen-McVay herniotomy". His name is also associated with "Lotheissen's operation", sometimes known as "Lotheissen‘s trans-inguinal approach". This surgery involves operating for femoral hernia through the posterior wall of the inguinal canal.
John Farquhar Fulton
Fulton created the first primate research laboratory in the United States. Through the 1930s, he and other scientists did comparative studies on functional localization in the cerebral cortex. They found that lesioning the prefrontal cortex created calming effects in the monkeys. Fulton proposed, but did not implement, the idea of using this technique on humans to relieve mental diseases. Fulton's team's findings influenced Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, who developed the medical practice of the frontal lobotomy in humans and who won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1949.
George E. Goodfellow
On July 4, two days after the President was shot, a miner outside Tombstone was shot in the abdomen with a .32-caliber Colt revolver. Goodfellow was able to treat the man nine days later, on July 13, 1881, when he performed the first laparotomy to treat a bullet wound. Goodfellow noted that the abdomen showed symptoms of a serious infection, including distension from gas, tumefaction, redness and tenderness. The man's intestines were covered with a large amount of "purulent stinking lymph." The patient's small and large intestine were perforated by six holes, wounds very similar to President Garfield's injury. Goodfellow followed Lister's recommended procedure for sterilizing everything: his hands, instruments, sponges, and the area around the wound. He successfully repaired the miner's wounds and the miner, unlike the President, survived. A laparotomy is still the standard procedure for treating abdominal gunshot wounds today.
Lili Elbe
Elbe became the second transgender woman to undergo Gohrbandt's vaginoplasty technique in 1931, after Dora Richter underwent the same procedure. Her castration and penectomy had been performed by Dr. Ludwig Levy-Lenz (1889–1966) the previous year. These preliminaries have sometimes caused confusion over the date of her reassignment surgery. Gohrbandt's surgery deliberately left remnants of the scrotum intact, with a view to modifying these into labia at a later date, but for reasons that are unclear, he did not perform this further procedure himself. Instead, Elvenes' case was taken over by Dr. Kurt Warnekros (1882–1949), at the Dresden Women's Clinic. Here, the labiaplasty and a subsequent surgical revision led, in the pre-antibiotic age, to Elbe's death from infection in September 1931.
Lobotomy
Walter Freeman coined the term "surgically induced childhood" and used it constantly to refer to the results of lobotomy. The operation left people with an "infantile personality"; a period of maturation would then, according to Freeman, lead to recovery. In an unpublished memoir he described how the "personality of the patient was changed in some way in the hope of rendering him more amenable to the social pressures under which he is supposed to exist." He described one 29-year-old woman as being, following lobotomy, a "smiling, lazy and satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster" who couldn't remember Freeman's name and endlessly poured coffee from an empty pot. When her parents had difficulty dealing with her behaviour, Freeman advised a system of rewards (ice-cream) and punishment (smacks).
Phineas Gage
It is frequently asserted that what happened to Gage played a role in the later development of various forms of psychosurgeryparticularly lobotomyor even that Gage's accident constituted "the first lobotomy". Aside from the question of why the unpleasant changes usually (if hyperbolically) attributed to Gage would inspire surgical imitation, there is no such link, according to Macmillan:
Refractive surgery
In 1983, Stephen Trokel, a scientist at Columbia University, in collaboration with Srinivasan, performed the first Photorefractive Keratectomy (PRK), or keratomileusis in situ (without separation of corneal layer) in Germany. The first patent for this approach, which later became known as LASIK surgery, was granted by the US Patent Office to Gholam Ali. Peyman, MD on June 20, 1989. It involves cutting a flap in the cornea and pulling it back to expose the corneal bed, then using an excimer laser to ablate the exposed surface to the desired shape, and then replacing the flap. The name LASIK was coined in 1991 by University of Crete and the Vardinoyannion Eye.
Leon Sculy Logothetides
Leon Sculy has been formed as surgeons in the service of Professor Ludovic Russ senior. Named professor of surgery in 1881, he was the first dean of the Faculty of Medicine from Iași (1879-1881). Organizer of the health care, his efforts led to the creation of a second surgical service in Iași, the service in which he approached the surgical treatment of abdominal, thoraco-pulmonary and neurosurgical diseases. Leon Sculy was the first to practice in Romania, in December 1904 - January 1905, the pulmonary decortication for chronic pleural empyema.
Mathieu Jaboulay
In 1892 he introduced the side-to-side gastroduodenostomy, an operation used when the pylorus and proximal duodenum are badly scarred, and in 1894 he performed the first inter-ilio abdominal amputation or hemipelvectomy, a surgery involving amputation of the entire leg through the sacroiliac joint. This operation is sometimes referred to as "Jaboulay's amputation".
Gallbladder
The debate whether surgical removal of the gallbladder or simply gallstones was preferred was settled in the 1920s, with consensus that removal of the gallbladder was preferred. It was only in the mid and late parts of the twentieth century that medical imaging techniques such as use of contrast medium and CT scans were used to view the gallbladder. The first laparoscopic cholecystectomy performed by Erich Mühe of Germany in 1985, although French surgeons Phillipe Mouret and Francois Dubois are often credited for their operations in 1987 and 1988 respectively.
Lithotomy
Human beings have known of bladder stones ("vesical calculi") for thousands of years, and have attempted to treat them for almost as long. The oldest bladder stone that has been found was discovered in Egypt around 1900, and it has been dated to 4900 BC. The earliest written records describing bladder stones date to before the time of Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 BC). Lithotomy was a fairly common procedure in the past, and there were specialized lithotomists. The ancient Greek Hippocratic Oath includes the phrase: "I will not cut for stone, even for the patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners," a clear warning for physicians against the "cutting" of persons "laboring under the stone"; an act that was better left to "surgeons", as distinct from "physicians". Operations to remove bladder stones via the perineum, like other surgery before the invention of anesthesia, were intensely painful for the patient.
History of psychosurgery in the United Kingdom
In 1949 Knight at Runwell Hospital started performing the operation of orbital undercutting (called orbital leucotomy in Britain) devised by American surgeon William Beecher Scoville, in which the lower quadrants of the frontal lobes were cut via holes in the forehead. Knight later modified Scoville's operation to restrict the cut to the lower medial quadrants. Further modifications dating from 1961 included the use of a stereotactic frame and brain images to make it easier to navigate in the frontal lobes, and the use of radioactive seeds (up to 20) to destroy tissue in the subcaudate region. The operation was then called stereotactic subcaudate tractotomy and by the mid-1970s, although only used at two neurosurgical units (which by that time had replaced mental hospitals as the sites for psychosurgical operations), it accounted for 30 per cent of operations in the United Kingdom. Knight operated at the Brook Hospital in South London in collaboration with retired psychiatrist Strom-Olsen and then with psychiatrist Paul Bridges. Knight retired in the early 1970s (the unit was named the Geoffrey Knight psychosurgical unit in his honour) and was replaced by John Bartlett. In all, nearly 1300 subcaudate tractotomies were carried out at the Brook Hospital, with one death attributed wholly to the operation. During the 1980s the unit accounted for over 75 per cent of the psychosurgical operations carried out in Britain. The unit ceased operating in 1994. A team at Kings College Hospital under psychiatrist Stuart Checkley took over the work of the unit and performed 23 stereotactic subcaudate tractotomies over the next five years, using radiofrequency to destroy brain tissue.
Mental health
Lobotomy was used in the 20th century as a common practice of alternative treatment for mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and depression. The first ever modern leucotomy meant for the purpose of treating a mental illness occurred in 1935 by a Portuguese neurologist, Antonio Egas Moniz. He received the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1949. . This belief that mental health illnesses could be treated by surgery came from Swiss neurologist, Gottlieb Burckhardt. After conducting experiments on six patients with schizophrenia, he claimed that half of his patients recovered or calmed down.
Psychiatrist Walter Freeman believed that "an overload of emotions led to mental illness and “that cutting certain nerves in the brain could eliminate excess emotion and stabilize a personality,” according to a National Public Radio article ."
Theodor Billroth
An early adopter of the "white coat" (as shown in Seligmann's c.1890 painting), Billroth was directly responsible for a number of landmarks in surgery; in 1872, he was the first to conduct an esophagectomy, removing a section of the oesophagus and joining the remaining parts together. In 1873, he performed the first laryngectomy, completely excising a larynx. He was the first surgeon to excise a rectal cancer and by 1876, he had performed 33 such operations. By 1881, Billroth had made intestinal surgery seem almost commonplace. But his most famous accomplishment is unquestionably the first successful gastrectomy for gastric cancer. On January 29, 1881, after many ill-fated attempts, Billroth performed the first successful resection for antral carcinoma on Therese Heller, who lived for almost 4 months and died of liver metastases. He accomplished this operation by closing the greater curvature side of the stomach and anatomizing the lesser curvature to the duodenum, in an operation that is still known as the Billroth I to this day.
Trauma surgery
On July 2, 1881, U.S. President Garfield was shot in the abdomen by Charles J. Guiteau. Two days later, a miner was shot outside Tombstone. On July 13, 1881, Goodfellow performed the first recorded laparotomy to treat the miner's gunshot wound. The man had a perforated small intestine, large intestine and bowel. Goodfellow sutured six holes in the man's organs. Similarly, President Garfield was thought later to have a bullet possibly lodged near his liver but it could not be found. Sixteen doctors attended to Garfield and most probed the wound with their fingers or dirty instruments. Unlike the President, the miner survived.
Lakewood Health System
The first laparoscopic surgery was performed when Lakewood Health System was the United District Hospital. The surgery was a gallbladder removal and was performed by Dr. Dan Smith and assisted by Dr. William Mennis on Friday, December 20, 1992. The first in-house CAT scanner purchased in 1992 and in 1999, a new CT scanner was purchased for better image quality.
Laryngoscopy
All previous observations of the glottis and larynx had been performed under indirect vision (using mirrors) until 23 April 1895, when Alfred Kirstein (1863–1922) of Germany first described direct visualization of the vocal cords. Kirstein performed the first direct laryngoscopy in Berlin, using an esophagoscope he had modified for this purpose; he called this device an "autoscope". It is believed that the death in 1888 of Emperor Frederick III motivated Kirstein to develop the autoscope.
Rosemary Kennedy
In November 1941, when Rosemary Kennedy was 23 (and hence legally an adult), doctors told Joseph P. Kennedy that a form of psychosurgery known as a lobotomy would help calm her mood swings and stop her occasional violent outbursts. He decided that his daughter should have the lobotomy performed; however, he did not inform his wife Rose of this until after the procedure was completed. Because Rosemary had been diagnosed as mentally retarded, only his consent was necessary, not hers. Rosemary was strapped to the operating table. James W. Watts, who carried out the procedure with Walter Freeman, both of George Washington University School of Medicine, described what happened next as quoted by Ronald Kessler in his book "The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He founded" in the only interview the doctor ever gave:
Mummy
While interest in the study of mummies dates as far back as Ptolemaic Greece, most structured scientific study began at the beginning of the 20th century. Prior to this, many rediscovered mummies were sold as curiosities or for use in pseudoscientific novelties such as mummia. The first modern scientific examinations of mummies began in 1901, conducted by professors at the English-language Government School of Medicine in Cairo, Egypt. The first X-ray of a mummy came in 1903, when professors Grafton Elliot Smith and Howard Carter used the only X-ray machine in Cairo at the time to examine the mummified body of Thutmose IV. British chemist Alfred Lucas applied chemical analyses to Egyptian mummies during this same period, which returned many results about the types of substances used in embalming. Lucas also made significant contributions to the analysis of Tutankhamun in 1922.
Lobotomy
The first bilateral lobectomy of a human subject was performed by the American neurosurgeon Walter Dandy in 1930. The neurologist Richard Brickner reported on this case in 1932, relating that the recipient, known as "Patient A", while experiencing a flattening of affect, had suffered no apparent decrease in intellectual function and seemed, at least to the casual observer, perfectly normal. Brickner concluded from this evidence that "the frontal lobes are not 'centers' for the intellect". These clinical results were replicated in a similar operation undertaken in 1934 by the neurosurgeon Roy Glenwood Spurling and reported on by the neuropsychiatrist Spafford Ackerly. By the mid-1930s, interest in the function of the frontal lobes reached a high-water mark. This was reflected in the 1935 neurological congress in London, which hosted as part of its deliberations, "a remarkable symposium ... on the functions of the frontal lobes." The panel was chaired by Henri Claude, a French neuropsychiatrist, who commenced the session by reviewing the state of research on the frontal lobes, and concluded that, "altering the frontal lobes profoundly modifies the personality of subjects". This parallel symposium contained numerous papers by neurologists, neurosurgeons and psychologists; amongst these was one by Brickner, which impressed Moniz greatly, that again detailed the case of "Patient A". Fulton and Jacobsen's paper, presented in another session of the conference on experimental physiology, was notable in linking animal and human studies on the function of the frontal lobes. Thus, at the time of the 1935 Congress, Moniz had available to him an increasing body of research on the role of the frontal lobes that extended well beyond the observations of Fulton and Jacobsen.
Bronchoscopy
The German laryngologist Gustav Killian is attributed with performing the first bronchoscopy in 1897. Killian used a rigid bronchoscope to remove a pork bone. The procedure was done in an awake patient using topical cocaine as a local anesthetic. From this time until the 1970s, rigid bronchoscopes were used exclusively.
History of psychosurgery in the United Kingdom
After nine operations the psychiatrists presented the results of the first eight operations in an article in "The Lancet" in July 1941, omitting the ninth case where a blood vessel was cut and the patient, a 27-year-old woman, died. Of the eight, one died of a heart attack two days after the operation, three were discharged (two of them still suffering from incontinence) and four remained in hospital. One of the discharged patients, a veteran of World War I who had broken down during the bombing raids on Bristol and had been diagnosed as neurotic, was operated on after just 4 days in hospital. These results were considered sufficiently encouraging for the leucotomy programme to continue at the Burden Neurological Institute, and for Sargant to gain permission to introduce leucotomy at the Belmont Hospital in London.
Victor Bonney
Bonney's first myomectomy was recorded in 1913, when he successfully removed six fibroids from the uterus of a 30‐year‐old nulliparous woman. He went on to perform over 700 myomectomies across his career-span. With a death-rate of around 1.1% and around 38% of the patients being able to bear children, they were highly successful. In 1934, he made it clear that he "strenuously advocated myomectomy in preference to hysterectomy in all those cases in which the removal of the uterus is liable to be followed by undesirable psychological effects."
As a consequence of his wife's experience with gynaecological procedures, Bonney took interest in a number of surgical scenarios including the functioning of bowel after major surgery.
Psychosurgery
In Japan the first lobotomy was performed in 1939 and the operation was used extensively in mental hospitals. However, psychosurgery fell into disrepute in the 1970s, partly due to its use on children with behavioural problems.
Lobotomy
Inspired by the work of Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti, Freeman at some point conceived of approaching the frontal lobes through the eye sockets instead of through drilled holes in the skull. In 1945 he took an icepick from his own kitchen and began testing the idea on grapefruit and cadavers. This new "transorbital" lobotomy involved lifting the upper eyelid and placing the point of a thin surgical instrument (often called an orbitoclast or leucotome, although quite different from the wire loop leucotome described above) under the eyelid and against the top of the eyesocket. A mallet was used to drive the orbitoclast through the thin layer of bone and into the brain along the plane of the bridge of the nose, around fifteen degrees toward the interhemispherical fissure. The orbitoclast was malleted five centimeters (2 in) into the frontal lobe, and then pivoted forty degrees at the orbit perforation so the tip cut toward the opposite side of the head (toward the nose). The instrument was returned to the neutral position and sent a further two centimeters ( in) into the brain, before being pivoted around twenty-eight degrees each side, to cut outwards and again inwards. (In a more radical variation at the end of the last cut described, the butt of the orbitoclast was forced upwards so the tool cut vertically down the side of the cortex of the interhemispherical fissure; the "Deep frontal cut".) All cuts were designed to transect the white fibrous matter connecting the cortical tissue of the prefrontal cortex to the thalamus. The leucotome was then withdrawn and the procedure repeated on the other side.
Lobotomy
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Controversies about psychiatry
Psychiatry's history involves what some view as dangerous treatments. Electroconvulsive therapy is one of these, which was used widely between the 1930s and 1960s and is still in use today. The brain surgery procedure lobotomy is another practice that was ultimately seen as too invasive and brutal. In the US, between 1939 and 1951, over 50,000 lobotomy operations were performed in mental hospitals. Valium and other sedatives have arguably been over-prescribed, leading to a claimed epidemic of dependence. Concerns also exist for the significant increase in prescription of psychiatric drugs to children.
Gottlieb Burckhardt
Following the death of his wife and one of his sons, Burckhardt left his position at the Préfargier in 1896 and returned to Basel with the intention of setting up a sanatorium. This plan came to fruition in 1900 when the Sonnenhalde Clinic was opened in Riehen near Basel. Burckhardt served as the clinic's Medical Director from 1900 until 1904 and he remained a physician at the facility until his death from pneumonia on 6 February 1907. He was a marginal figure within the professional community of his psychiatric peers, attending few medical symposia and conferences in his discipline. However, he is often seen as a precursor to the Portuguese neurologist, Egas Moniz, who performed the first leucotomy, later known as lobotomy, in 1936.
S.P. Beebe
In 1898 Dr. Beebe worked with Dr. James Ewing a leading pathologist working at the Loomis Laboratory for Research in Experimental Pathology. The Loomis Laboratory was founded in 1886 at Cornell Medical College in New York City with an emphasis on undergraduate instruction and graduate research. Working at the Loomis Lab, Beebe and Ewing produced a report in 1906 on the lymphosarcoma of dogs.
Mike McMahon (professor)
McMahon visited one of the pioneers of laparoscopy, Dr Joe Petelin, in Kansas City, USA, in spring 1990. Together, they organised the UK's first teaching course on laparoscopic (keyhole) surgery in Leeds in June 1990. There, Petelin demonstrated the operation of laparoscopic cholecystectomy (removal of the gallbladder). Since then, Leeds has become a major centre for advanced laparoscopic surgery.
Trepanning
The prefrontal leucotomy, a precursor to lobotomy, was performed by cutting a trephine hole into the skull, inserting an instrument, and destroying parts of the brain. This was later made unnecessary by the development of the "orbital transit" lobotomy where a spike was inserted through the eye-sockets.
Organ transplantation
The first successful corneal allograft transplant was performed in 1837 in a gazelle model; the first successful human corneal transplant, a keratoplastic operation, was performed by Eduard Zirm at Olomouc Eye Clinic, now Czech Republic, in 1905.
The first transplant in the modern sense – the implantation of organ tissue in order to replace an organ function – was a thyroid transplant in 1883. It was performed by the Swiss surgeon and later Nobel laureate Theodor Kocher. In the preceding decades Kocher had perfected the removal of excess thyroid tissue in cases of goiter to an extent that he was able to remove the whole organ without the person dying from the operation. Kocher carried out the total removal of the organ in some cases as a measure to prevent recurrent goiter. By 1883, the surgeon noticed that the complete removal of the organ leads to a complex of particular symptoms that we today have learned to associate with a lack of thyroid hormone. Kocher reversed these symptoms by implanting thyroid tissue to these people and thus performed the first organ transplant. In the following years Kocher and other surgeons used thyroid transplantation also to treat thyroid deficiency that appeared spontaneously, without a preceding organ removal.
Thyroid transplantation became the model for a whole new therapeutic strategy: organ transplantation. After the example of the thyroid, other organs were transplanted in the decades around 1900. Some of these transplants were done in animals for purposes of research, where organ removal and transplantation became a successful strategy of investigating the function of organs. Kocher was awarded his Nobel Prize in 1909 for the discovery of the function of the thyroid gland. At the same time, organs were also transplanted for treating diseases in humans. The thyroid gland became the model for transplants of adrenal and parathyroid glands, pancreas, ovary, testicles and kidney. By 1900, the idea that one can successfully treat internal diseases by replacing a failed organ through transplantation had been generally accepted. Pioneering work in the surgical technique of transplantation was made in the early 1900s by the French surgeon Alexis Carrel, with Charles Guthrie, with the transplantation of arteries or veins. Their skillful anastomosis operations and the new suturing techniques laid the groundwork for later transplant surgery and won Carrel the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. From 1902, Carrel performed transplant experiments on dogs. Surgically successful in moving kidneys, hearts, and spleens, he was one of the first to identify the problem of rejection, which remained insurmountable for decades. The discovery of transplant immunity by the German surgeon Georg Schöne, various strategies of matching donor and recipient, and the use of different agents for immune suppression did not result in substantial improvement so that organ transplantation was largely abandoned after WWI.
History of psychosurgery
Freeman coined the term "surgically induced childhood" and used it constantly to refer the results of lobotomy. The operation left people with an "infantile personality"; a period of maturation would then, according to Freeman, lead to recovery. In an unpublished memoir he described how the "personality of the patient was changed in some way in the hope of rendering him more amenable to the social pressures under which he is supposed to exist". He described one 29-year-old woman as being, following lobotomy, a "smiling, lazy and satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster" who couldn't remember Freeman's name and endlessly poured coffee from an empty pot. When her parents had difficulty dealing with her behaviour, Freeman advised a system of rewards (ice-cream) and punishment (smacks).
Vasectomy
The first recorded vasectomy was performed on a dog in 1823. A short time after that, R. Harrison of London performed the first human vasectomy; however the surgery was not done for sterilization purposes, but to bring about atrophy of the prostate. Soon, however, it was believed to have benefits for eugenics. The first case report of vasectomy in the U.S. was in 1897, by A. J. Ochsner, a surgeon in Chicago, in a paper titled, "Surgical treatment of habitual criminals." He believed vasectomy to be a simple, effective means for stemming the tide of racial degeneration widely believed to be occurring. In 1902, Harry C. Sharp, the surgeon at the Indiana Reformatory, reported that he had sterilized 42 inmates, in an effort to both reduce criminal behavior in those individuals and prevent the birth of future criminals.
Temporal lobe epilepsy
Epilepsy surgery has been performed since the 1860s and doctors have observed that it is highly effective in producing freedom from seizures. However, it was not until 2001 that a scientifically sound study was carried out to examine the effectiveness of temporal lobectomy.
Takamine Tokumei
It was Matsuki Akitomo, the professor of anesthesiology, Hirosaki University who reported about this surgery first in the medical world. He wrote that a half century has passed since K. Higaonna, a historian from Okinawa, first reported that in 1689 Tokumei Takamine (1653–1738) had performed successfully a hare-lip operation under general anesthesia with mafutsu-san for a royal grandchild Shō Eki of the Second Shō Dynasty in the Ryukyus, now known as Okinawa.
Lobotomy
Leucotomy was first reported in the Italian medical press in 1936 and Moniz published an article in Italian on the technique in the following year. In 1937, he was invited to Italy to demonstrate the procedure and for a two-week period in June of that year he visited medical centres in Trieste, Ferrara, and one close to Turin – the Racconigi Hospital – where he instructed his Italian neuropsychiatric colleagues on leucotomy and also oversaw several operations. Leucotomy was featured at two Italian psychiatric conferences in 1937 and over the next two years a score of medical articles on Moniz's psychosurgery was published by Italian clinicians based in medical institutions located in Racconigi, Trieste, Naples, Genoa, Milan, Pisa, Catania and Rovigo. The major centre for leucotomy in Italy was the Racconigi Hospital, where the experienced neurosurgeon Ludvig Puusepp provided a guiding hand. Under the medical directorship of Emilio Rizzatti, the medical personnel at this hospital had completed at least 200 leucotomies by 1939. Reports from clinicians based at other Italian institutions detailed significantly smaller numbers of leucotomy operations.
Lobotomy Software
Lobotomy Software was founded in 1993, when a group of friends working at Nintendo of America left to form their own company, becoming the creative department of Lobotomy, with the engineering talent coming from Manley & Associates (Manley & Associates was later acquired by Electronic Arts in 1996, renamed Electronic Arts Seattle, and subsequently shut down in 2002). They originally worked out of co-founder Paul Lange's apartment, but after a few months set up an office in Redmond, Washington. The team began working on various game demos, one of which later became the first-person shooter game, "PowerSlave".
Lobotomy
In 1912, two physicians based in Saint Petersburg, the leading Russian neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev and his younger Estonian colleague, the neurosurgeon Ludvig Puusepp, published a paper reviewing a range of surgical interventions that had been performed on the mentally ill. While generally treating these endeavours favorably, in their consideration of psychosurgery they reserved unremitting scorn for Burckhardt's surgical experiments of 1888 and opined that it was extraordinary that a trained medical doctor could undertake such an unsound procedure.
"We have quoted this data to show not only how groundless but also how dangerous these operations were. We are unable to explain how their author, holder of a degree in medicine, could bring himself to carry them out ..."
Lobotomy
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Hugh Morriston Davies
Hugh Morriston Davies (10 August 1879 — 4 February 1965) was a Welsh thoracic surgeon, the first to perform a dissection lobectomy in the world, and the first to perform a thoracoplasty in the United Kingdom, both firsts achieved in 1912.
Walter Jackson Freeman II
Following his development of the transorbital lobotomy, Freeman traveled across the country visiting mental institutions, performing lobotomies and spreading his views and methods to institution staff. (Contrary to myth, there is no evidence that he referred to the van that he traveled in as a "lobotomobile".) Freeman's name gained popularity despite the widespread criticism of his methods following a lobotomy on President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary Kennedy, which left her with severe mental and physical disability. A memoir written by former patient Howard Dully, called "My Lobotomy" documented his experiences with Freeman and his long recovery after undergoing a lobotomy surgery at 12 years of age. Walter Freeman charged just $25 for each procedure that he performed. After four decades Freeman had personally performed as many as 4,000 lobotomy surgeries in 23 states, of which 2,500 used his ice-pick procedure, despite the fact that he had no formal surgical training. In February 1967, Freeman performed his final surgery on Helen Mortensen. Up to 40% of Freeman's patients were gay individuals subjected to a lobotomy in order to change their homosexual orientation, leaving most of these perfectly healthy individuals severely disabled for the rest of their life. Mortensen was a longterm patient and was receiving her third lobotomy from Freeman. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage, as did as many as 100 of his other patients, and he was finally banned from performing surgery. His patients often had to be retaught how to eat and use the bathroom. Relapses were common, some never recovered, and about 15% died from the procedure. In 1951, one patient at Iowa's Cherokee Mental Health Institute died when Freeman suddenly stopped for a photo during the procedure, and the surgical instrument accidentally penetrated too far into the patient's brain. Freeman wore neither gloves nor a mask during these procedures. He lobotomized 19 minors including a 4-year-old child.
Leucotome
Another, different, surgical instrument also called a leucotome was introduced by Walter Freeman for use in the transorbital lobotomy. Modeled after an ice-pick, it consisted simply of a pointed shaft. It was passed through the tear duct under the eyelid and against the top of the eyesocket. A mallet was used to drive the instrument through the thin layer of bone and into the brain along the plane of the bridge of the nose, to a depth of 5 cm. Due to incidents of breakage, a stronger but essentially identical instrument called an orbitoclast was later used.
Lobotomy
The source of inspiration for Moniz's decision to hazard psychosurgery has been clouded by contradictory statements made on the subject by Moniz and others both contemporaneously and retrospectively. The traditional narrative addresses the question of why Moniz targeted the frontal lobes by way of reference to the work of the Yale neuroscientist John Fulton and, most dramatically, to a presentation Fulton made with his junior colleague Carlyle Jacobsen at the Second International Congress of Neurology held in London in 1935. Fulton's primary area of research was on the cortical function of primates and he had established America's first primate neurophysiology laboratory at Yale in the early 1930s. At the 1935 Congress, with Moniz in attendance, Fulton and Jacobsen presented two chimpanzees, named Becky and Lucy who had had frontal lobectomies and subsequent changes in behaviour and intellectual function. According to Fulton's account of the congress, they explained that before surgery, both animals, and especially Becky, the more emotional of the two, exhibited "frustrational behaviour"that is, have tantrums that could include rolling on the floor and defecatingif, because of their poor performance in a set of experimental tasks, they were not rewarded. Following the surgical removal of their frontal lobes, the behaviour of both primates changed markedly and Becky was pacified to such a degree that Jacobsen apparently stated it was as if she had joined a "happiness cult". During the question and answer section of the paper, Moniz, it is alleged, "startled" Fulton by inquiring if this procedure might be extended to human subjects suffering from mental illness. Fulton stated that he replied that while possible in theory it was surely "too formidable" an intervention for use on humans.
That Moniz began his experiments with leucotomy just three months after the congress has reinforced the apparent cause and effect relationship between the Fulton and Jacobsen presentation and the Portuguese neurologist's resolve to operate on the frontal lobes. As the author of this account Fulton, who has sometimes been claimed as the father of lobotomy, was later able to record that the technique had its true origination in his laboratory. Endorsing this version of events, in 1949, the Harvard neurologist Stanley Cobb remarked during his presidential address to the American Neurological Association that, "seldom in the history of medicine has a laboratory observation been so quickly and dramatically translated into a therapeutic procedure." Fulton's report, penned ten years after the events described, is, however, without corroboration in the historical record and bears little resemblance to an earlier unpublished account he wrote of the congress. In this previous narrative he mentioned an incidental, private exchange with Moniz, but it is likely that the official version of their public conversation he promulgated is without foundation. In fact, Moniz stated that he had conceived of the operation some time before his journey to London in 1935, having told in confidence his junior colleague, the young neurosurgeon Pedro Almeida Lima, as early as 1933 of his psychosurgical idea. The traditional account exaggerates the importance of Fulton and Jacobsen to Moniz's decision to initiate frontal lobe surgery, and omits the fact that a detailed body of neurological research that emerged at this time suggested to Moniz and other neurologists and neurosurgeons that surgery on this part of the brain might yield significant personality changes in the mentally ill.
Heller myotomy
It was first performed by Ernst Heller (1877–1964) in 1913. Then and until recently, this surgery was performed using an open procedure, either through the chest (thoracotomy) or through the abdomen (laparotomy). However, open procedures involve greater recovery times. Modern Heller myotomy is normally performed using minimally invasive laparoscopic techniques, which minimize risks and speeds recovery significantly. The 100th anniversary of Heller’s description of the surgical treatment of patients with achalasia was celebrated in 2014.
Tracheotome
The tracheostomy procedure is an ancient medical procedure which dates back to 2000 BC. There are some records of physicians performing tracheostomy to save the lives of children and sick people from choking. However, several complications were also common after the procedure was performed due to the severity of the infections and other diseases causing the oxygen obstruction. It was not until the mid 1900s that this medical tool was improved. The introduction of the mechanized tracheotome illustrates how the procedure and the device were improved. The introduction of the mechanized tracheotome by Joseph John Amato in 1972, North Riverside, provided a quicker, cleaner and precise cut which reduced the possibility of tissue damage and infection. Previous procedures for tracheotomy were being implemented at the time, but many would lead to severe complications and were difficult to operate. Most of them required special skills and well trained practitioners.
Hepatectomy
The first hepatectomies were reported by Dr. Ichio Honjo (1913–1987) of (Kyoto University) in 1949, and Dr. Jean-Louis Lortat-Jacob (1908–1992) of France in 1952. In the latter case, the patient was a 58-year-old woman diagnosed with colorectal cancer which had metastasized to the liver.
History of psychosurgery in the United Kingdom
The first leucotomies in the UK were carried out at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol and were a collaboration between Frederick Golla, director of the Burden Neurological Institute, Effie Hutton, clinical director of the Burden Neurological Institute, surgeon F. Wilfred Willway, and the medical superintendents of Barnwood House in Gloucester and Brislington House in Bristol, who volunteered their patients as guinea pigs. Frederick Golla was persuaded to undertake the surgery by psychiatrist William Sargant who had seen three of Freeman's patients in the US and tried to introduce leucotomy at the Belmont Hospital in London, only to be refused permission by London County Council.
The first operation was carried out in December 1940, a further eight over the next four months – all of them on detained patients. The operations were done with a paper knife, using the standard Freeman-Watts technique. Some were performed under local anaesthesia, some under general.
Obstetrics
Ephraim McDowell developed a surgical practice in 1795 and performed the first ovariotomy in 1809 on a 47-year-old widow who then lived on for thirty-one more years. He had attempted to share this with John Bell whom he had practiced under who had retired to Italy. Bell was said to have died without seeing the document but it was published by an associate in "Extractions of Diseased Ovaria" in 1825. By the mid-century the surgery was both successfully and unsuccessfully being performed. Pennsylvanian surgeons the Attlee brothers made this procedure very routine for a total of 465 surgeries–John Attlee performed 64 successfully of 78 while his brother William reported 387– between the years of 1843 and 1883. By the middle of the nineteenth century this procedure was successfully performed in Europe by English surgeons Sir Spencer Wells and Charles Clay as well as French surgeons Eugène Koeberlé, Auguste Nélaton and Jules Péan.
James W. Watts
James Winston Watts (January 19, 1904 – November 15, 1994) was a neurosurgeon, born in Lynchburg, Virginia and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Watts is noteworthy for his professional partnership with the neurologist and psychiatrist Walter Freeman. The two became advocates and prolific practitioners of psychosurgery, specifically the lobotomy. Watts wrote two books on lobotomies with Dr. Freeman: "Psychosurgery, Intelligence, Emotion and Social Behavior Following Prefrontal Lobotomy for Medical Disorders" in 1942 and "Psychosurgery in the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain" in 1950.
Frances Farmer
In 1978, Seattle film reviewer William Arnold published "Shadowland," which for the first time alleged that Farmer had been the subject of a transorbital lobotomy. Scenes of Farmer being subjected to this lobotomy procedure were featured in the 1982 film "Frances", which had initially been planned as an adaptation of "Shadowland", though its producers ultimately reneged on their agreement with Arnold. During a court case against Brooksfilms (the film's producers), Arnold revealed that the lobotomy episode and much of his biography about Farmer was "fictionalized". Years later, on a DVD commentary track of the "Frances" movie, director Graeme Clifford stated, "We didn't want to nickel and dime people to death with facts."
Lobotomy
A lobotomy, or leucotomy, is a form of psychosurgery, a neurosurgical treatment of a mental disorder that involves severing connections in the brain's prefrontal cortex. Most of the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain are severed. It was used for psychiatric and occasionally other conditions as a mainstream procedure in some Western countries for more than two decades. This was despite general recognition of frequent and serious side effects. While some people experienced symptomatic improvement with the operation, the improvements were achieved at the cost of creating other impairments. The procedure was controversial from its initial use in part due to the balance between benefits and risks. Today, lobotomy has become a disparaged procedure, a byword for medical barbarism and an exemplary instance of the medical trampling of patients' rights.
Gallbladder
The first surgical removal of a gallstone (cholecystolithotomy) was in 1676 by physician Joenisius, who removed the stones from a spontaneously occurring biliary fistula. Stough Hobbs in 1867 performed the first recorded cholecystotomy, although such an operation was in fact described earlier by French surgeon Jean Louis Petit in the mid eighteenth century. German surgeon Carl Langenbuch performed the first cholecystectomy in 1882 for a sufferer of cholelithiasis. Before this, surgery had focused on creating a fistula for drainage of gallstones. Langenbuch reasoned that given several other species of mammal have no gallbladder, humans could survive without one.
James W. Watts
He is also known for carrying out the lobotomy of Rose Marie Kennedy under the supervision of Freeman. Kennedy's mental capacity diminished to that of a two-year-old child. She could not walk or speak intelligibly and was considered incontinent.
Kidney stone disease
The existence of kidney stones was first recorded thousands of years ago, and lithotomy for the removal of stones is one of the earliest known surgical procedures. In 1901, a stone discovered in the pelvis of an ancient Egyptian mummy was dated to 4,800 BC. Medical texts from ancient Mesopotamia, India, China, Persia, Greece, and Rome all mentioned calculous disease. Part of the Hippocratic Oath suggests there were practicing surgeons in ancient Greece to whom physicians were to defer for lithotomies. The Roman medical treatise "De Medicina" by Aulus Cornelius Celsus contained a description of lithotomy, and this work served as the basis for this procedure until the 18th century.
Lobotomy
On 12 November 1935 at the Hospital Santa Marta in Lisbon, Moniz initiated the first of a series of operations on the brains of the mentally ill. The initial patients selected for the operation were provided by the medical director of Lisbon's Miguel Bombarda Mental Hospital, José de Matos Sobral Cid. As Moniz lacked training in neurosurgery and his hands were crippled from gout, the procedure was performed under general anaesthetic by Pedro Almeida Lima, who had previously assisted Moniz with his research on cerebral angiography. The intention was to remove some of the long fibres that connected the frontal lobes to other major brain centres. To this end, it was decided that Lima would trephine into the side of the skull and then inject ethanol into the "subcortical white matter of the prefrontal area" so as to destroy the connecting fibres, or association tracts, and create what Moniz termed a "frontal barrier". After the first operation was complete, Moniz considered it a success and, observing that the patient's depression had been relieved, he declared her "cured" although she was never, in fact, discharged from the mental hospital. Moniz and Lima persisted with this method of injecting alcohol into the frontal lobes for the next seven patients but, after having to inject some patients on numerous occasions to elicit what they considered a favourable result, they modified the means by which they would section the frontal lobes. For the ninth patient they introduced a surgical instrument called a leucotome; this was a cannula that was in length and in diameter. It had a retractable wire loop at one end that, when rotated, produced a diameter circular lesion in the white matter of the frontal lobe. Typically, six lesions were cut into each lobe, but, if they were dissatisfied by the results, Lima might perform several procedures, each producing multiple lesions in the left and right frontal lobes.
Tracheotomy
In 1620 the French surgeon Nicholas Habicot (1550–1624), surgeon of the Duke of Nemours and anatomist, published a report of four successful "bronchotomies" which he had performed. One of these is the first recorded case of a tracheotomy for the removal of a foreign body, in this instance a blood clot in the larynx of a stabbing victim. He also described the first tracheotomy to be performed on a pediatric patient. A 14-year-old boy swallowed a bag containing 9 gold coins in an attempt to prevent its theft by a highwayman. The object became lodged in his esophagus, obstructing his trachea. Habicot suggested that the operation might also be effective for patients suffering from inflammation of the larynx. He developed equipment for this surgical procedure which displayed similarities to modern designs (except for his use of a single-tube cannula).
Richard Ledes
The film tells the story of young woman Anna (played by Michelle Williams) in an American suburbs of the 1950s. Her brother comes home devastated after World War II and her father rejects him. The girl is lured into a relationship with Billy, a local mob boss. When her brother dies and she witnesses Billy murder a local nightclub owner, she is driven to the edge of insanity. She develops a fixation with mental health that drives her to seek out a transorbital lobotomy. When Dr. Harold Ashton, the foremost practitioner of this brand of lobotomy, comes to town, the entire community is buzzing. He starts performing the icepick lobotomy on alcoholics, veterans and other troubled outsiders. Influenced by the hyperbole surrounding the
instant cure for a range of problems, Anna announces to Bill that she wants one.
James W. Watts
Watts' colleague, however, was less conservative and sought other ways to access the frontal lobes of the brain without the complications associated with conventional brain surgery. Inspired by the work of the Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti, Freeman developed, without the knowledge or participation of Watts, a procedure for reaching the frontal lobes by inserting a probe under the eyelid and above the tear duct, then hammering it through the thin bone of the eye socket. The instrument was swished around, severing the white matter, and was then repeated on the other side. The whole operation took only minutes under local anesthesia. This new procedure became known as the transorbital lobotomy, also dubbed the "ice pick lobotomy" because the instrument used, an orbitoclast, was very similar to a common ice pick. The new procedure also signaled the end of the professional relationship between Freeman and Watts. After performing the new procedure by himself on ten patients, Freeman finally revealed to Watts what he had been doing. Watts, unlike Freeman, was a trained neurosurgeon and adamantly believed lobotomy should only be performed by a proper surgeon. He insisted that Freeman cease performing operations alone, but it was to no avail and Watts soon left the practice that he had jointly established with Freeman.
History of psychosurgery
It was the work of the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz in the 1930s that led to a wider use of psychosurgery. Moniz, working with neurosurgeon Pedro Almeida Lima, started operating on patients in late 1935. The first operations involved injections of alcohol into the frontal lobes of patients to destroy white matter; Moniz then devised an instrument he called a leucotome to remove small cores of white matter. He coined the terms "leucotomy" and "psychosurgery". Moniz's methods were taken up in the United States by the neurological team headed by Walter Freeman and the neurosurgeon James Watts, who, in the words of American psychiatrist Victor Swayze, "did more to promote the use of psychosurgery than anyone else in the world". At first they used the same technique as Moniz, but then they devised their own technique which more completely severed the connections between the frontal lobes and deeper structures. They coined the term lobotomy for the operation, and it became known as the standard prefrontal lobotomy or leucotomy of Freeman and Watts. Freeman and Watts eventually performed 600 of these standard operations; in the United Kingdom neurosurgeon Wylie McKissock performed over 1,400.
Minimized extracorporeal circulation
In 1937 Gibbon reports the first successful use of extracorporeal circulation in animals (in this case, cats). On May 6, 1953 Gibbon performed his first successful operation using an extracorporeal circuit in an 18-year-old woman who had a large atrial septum defect with a large left-to-right shunt. It was Lillehei who one year later introduced the bubble oxygenator, simple and inexpensive, opening the doors of open heart surgery to all surgeons around the world.
Laparotomy
A laparotomy is a surgical procedure involving a large incision through the abdominal wall to gain access into the abdominal cavity. It is also known as a celiotomy. The first successful laparotomy was performed without anesthesia by Ephraim McDowell in 1809 in Danville, Kentucky.
St. Elizabeths Hospital
Several important therapeutic techniques were pioneered at St. Elizabeths, and it served as a model for later institutions. Walter Freeman, onetime laboratory director, was inspired by St. Elizabeths to pioneer the transorbital lobotomy. During American involvement in World War II, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor to the CIA) used facilities and staff at St. Elizabeths hospital to test "truth serums". OSS unsuccessfully tested a mescaline and scopolamine cocktail as a truth drug on two volunteers at St. Elizabeths Hospital. Separate tests of THC as a truth serum were equally unsuccessful. In 1963 Dr. Luther D. Robinson, the first African American superintendent of St. Elizabeths, founded the mental health program for the deaf and was throughout his career a leading authority on treating deaf patients with mental disorders.
Robot-assisted surgery
In 1985 a robot, the Unimation Puma 200, was used to place a needle for a brain biopsy using CT guidance. PROBOT was then used to perform prostatic surgery and ROBODOC to assist with hip replacement surgeries. The latter was the first surgical robot that was approved by the FDA. The ROBODOC from Integrated Surgical Systems (working closely with IBM) was introduced in 1992 to mill out precise fittings in the femur for hip replacement. The purpose of the ROBODOC was to replace the previous method of carving out a femur for an implant, the use of a mallet and broach/rasp.
Walter Jackson Freeman II
After almost ten years of performing lobotomies, Freeman heard of a doctor in Italy named Amarro Fiamberti who operated on the brain through his patients' eye sockets, allowing him to access the brain without drilling through the skull. After experimenting with novel ways of performing these brain surgeries, Freeman formulated a new procedure called the transorbital lobotomy. This new procedure became known as the "icepick" lobotomy and was performed by inserting a metal pick into the corner of each eye-socket, hammering it through the thin bone there with a mallet, and moving it back and forth, severing the connections to the prefrontal cortex in the frontal lobes of the brain. He performed the transorbital lobotomy surgery for the first time in Washington D.C. on a housewife named Sallie Ellen Ionesco. This transorbital lobotomy method did not require a neurosurgeon and could be performed outside of an operating room without the use of anesthesia by using electroconvulsive therapy to induce seizure. The modifications to his lobotomy allowed Freeman to broaden the use of the surgery, which could be performed in psychiatric hospitals throughout the United States that were overpopulated and understaffed. In 1950, Walter Freeman's longtime partner James Watts left their practice and split from Freeman due to his opposition to the cruelty and overuse of the transorbital lobotomy.
History of neuraxial anesthesia
The first described placement of a lumbar epidural catheter was performed by Pío Manuel María Martínez Curbelo (5 June 19061 May 1962) on January 13, 1947. Curbelo, a Cuban anesthesiologist, introduced a 16 gauge Tuohy needle into the left flank of a 40-year-old woman with a large ovarian cyst. Through this needle, he introduced a 3.5 French ureteral catheter made of elastic silk into the lumbar epidural space. He then removed the needle, leaving the catheter in place and repeatedly injected 0.5% percaine (cinchocaine, also known as dibucaine) to achieve anesthesia. Curbelo presented his work on September 9, 1947, at the 22nd Joint Congress of the International Anesthesia Research Society and the International College of Anesthetists, in New York City.
Thomas Keith (surgeon)
After 1856 Keith devoted himself to surgery and in particular to the then new and controversial procedure of ovariotomy. The first documented successful performance of this procedure was by Ephraim McDowell (1771–1830) in Kentucky in 1809. McDowell had studied surgery in Edinburgh under John Bell (1763–1820) who described the operation but never performed it. Bell’s successor in Edinburgh John Lizars (1787–1860), was sent McDowell’s account and he performed the first successful ovariotomy in Britain, publishing the results in 1825. Surgeons like Charles Clay (1801–1893) in Manchester and Thomas Spencer Wells (1818-1897) in London began to perform the procedure regularly, but the mortality rate was so high that mainstream medical opinion felt that it was too dangerous to perform. Keith performed his first ovariotomy in 1862, having learned the technique from Spencer Wells. From the outset he recorded his results in detail. His early mortality rate was consistently lower that of other published series like Spencer Wells 
Keith further reduced the mortality rate to 4% when he began to use antiseptic technique, taught to him by his lifelong friend Joseph Lister.
Umedalens sjukhus
The youngest known patient that underwent lobotomy was a 17-year-old girl, diagnosed with schizophrenia. Old lobotomy journals claim that the girl was “seduced” at the age of 14, and in 1946 she was admitted to the hospital. After being treated with electric shocks and insulin therapy, the girl was eventually lobotomised – with the results regarded as successful.
Thomas Bond (physician)
Dr. Bond earned a high reputation as a surgeon, especially for amputations and bladder stone operations. Many patients traveled considerable distances (from as far away as Boston) to avail themselves of his surgical care. He performed the first lithotomy in the United States at Pennsylvania Hospital in October 1756 and developed a splint for fractures of the lower arm, known as a "Bond splint." In 1737, he was also one of seven physicians to publicly recommend inoculation against small pox. Thomas Bond also served as trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, where, in 1766, he began clinical lectures for the benefit of medical students. These formal lectures supplemented the bedside clinical instruction he conducted in the hospital. For his learning and pedagogy, he earned the title, "Father of Clinical Medicine." The alumni association of the Pennsylvania Hospital is today known as the Thomas Bond Society.
Mike McMahon (professor)
Alongside Professor David Johnston, McMahon performed the first laparoscopic M&M operation and this evolved into sleeve gastrectomy, which was first performed as a standalone operation in Leeds. It was carried out as the first stage of the operation of duodenal switch by Michel Gagnier, whom McMahon visited in New York. He then went on to perform the first laparoscopic gastric bypass in the UK, shortly followed by the first duodenal switch. McMahon worked with trainee, Simon Dexter, who has since become one of the leading obesity surgeons in the country.
Lymphocytic pleocytosis
Determination of lymphocytic pleocytosis became possible with the advent of the diagnostic lumbar puncture and the technology necessary to analyze the cerebrospinal fluid via microbiological, biochemical, and immunological tests. While the first lumbar punctures were performed in the late 19th century, the tests revealing elevated lymphocyte levels within the CSF were not available until much later. Modern lumbar punctures testing for lymphocyte counts are commonly used to diagnose or rule out certain diseases such as meningitis and determine whether an infection is present within the CSF.
Lobotomy
Throughout the remainder of the 1930s the number of leucotomies performed in most countries where the technique was adopted remained quite low. In Britain, which was later a major centre for leucotomy, only six operations had been undertaken before 1942. Generally, medical practitioners who attempted the procedure adopted a cautious approach and few patients were leucotomised before the 1940s. Italian neuropsychiatrists, who were typically early and enthusiastic adopters of leucotomy, were exceptional in eschewing such a gradualist course.
Tracheotomy
Tracheotomy was first depicted on Egyptian artifacts in 3600 BC. Hippocrates condemned the practice of tracheotomy as incurring an unacceptable risk of damage to the carotid artery. Warning against the possibility of death from inadvertent laceration of the carotid artery during tracheotomy, he instead advocated the practice of tracheal intubation.
Oophorectomy
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 454,000 women in the United States underwent oophorectomy in 2004. The first successful operation of this type, account of which was published in the "Eclectic Repertory and Analytic Review" (Philadelphia) in 1817, was performed by Ephraim McDowell (1771-1830), a surgeon from Danville, Kentucky. McDowell was dubbed as the "father of ovariotomy". It later became known as Battey's Operation, after Robert Battey, a surgeon from Augusta, Georgia, who championed the procedure for a variety of conditions, most successfully for ovarian epilepsy.
Orbitoclast
Because actual ice picks were used in initial experimentation and because of continued close resemblance to ice pick shafts, the procedure was dubbed "ice pick lobotomy".
The Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 was awarded to Egas Moniz "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses."
LGBT history in New York
A 1942 medical journal article by the Journal of Criminal Psychopathology described the lobotomization, using only local anaesthetics, of a homosexual man convicted for sodomy; a later study showed that he had mentally degenerated as a result of the lobotomy.
António Egas Moniz
Since falling almost completely from use in the 1960s, leucotomy has been deplored by many as brutally arrogant, and collateral derision has been directed at Moniz as its inventor. Others suggest judging the inventor separately from the invention, characterizing Moniz' work as a "great and desperate" attempt to find effective treatment for severe forms of mental illness for which there was at the time no effective treatment at all. Some claim it was aggressive promotion of lobotomy by other doctors (such as Walter Freeman) which led to its being performed in large numbers of cases now considered inappropriate.
Lobotomy
The first prefrontal leucotomy in the United States was performed at the George Washington University Hospital on 14 September 1936 by the neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman and his friend and colleague, the neurosurgeon, James W. Watts. Freeman had first encountered Moniz at the London-hosted Second International Congress of Neurology in 1935 where he had presented a poster exhibit of the Portuguese neurologist's work on cerebral angiography. Fortuitously occupying a booth next to Moniz, Freeman, delighted by their chance meeting, formed a highly favourable impression of Moniz, later remarking upon his "sheer genius". According to Freeman, if they had not met in person it is highly unlikely that he would have ventured into the domain of frontal lobe psychosurgery. Freeman's interest in psychiatry was the natural outgrowth of his appointment in 1924 as the medical director of the Research Laboratories of the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, known colloquially as St Elizabeth's. Ambitious and a prodigious researcher, Freeman, who favoured an organic model of mental illness causation, spent the next several years exhaustively, yet ultimately fruitlessly, investigating a neuropathological basis for insanity. Chancing upon a preliminary communication by Moniz on leucotomy in the spring of 1936, Freeman initiated a correspondence in May of that year. Writing that he had been considering psychiatric brain surgery previously, he informed Moniz that, "having your authority I expect to go ahead". Moniz, in return, promised to send him a copy of his forthcoming monograph on leucotomy and urged him to purchase a leucotome from a French supplier.
John Glasgow Kerr
Dr. Peter Parker established the Ophthalmic Hospital in Canton on November 4, 1835. After a few months, the hospital expanded to hold more than 200 people. The hospital performed the first ophthalmological surgery, the first ovariotomy, the first lithocystotomy, the first etherization, and the first pathological anatomy in China. The hospital also had China’s first X-ray film shot and the first medical magazine printed. The Ophthalmic Hospital was later called the Boji Hospital. 
Kerr opened a Vaccine Department at the hospital in 1859, offering free smallpox vaccinations to Cantonese children. Kerr also published informational pamphlets on the importance of vaccinations.
James W. Watts
Watts was recruited into a medical partnership by his colleague Walter Freeman, who needed the collaboration of a trained surgeon in order to practice the leucotomy, a technique pioneered by the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz. In the procedure developed by Moniz, the "white matter" in the frontal lobes was severed using a leucotome, an instrument Moniz designed specifically for the procedure. Freeman and Watts acquired several of the instruments and performed their first operation in 1936. They eventually modified the procedure to sever more of the white matter, and renamed it "lobotomy" in order to distinguish it from the earlier procedure developed by Moniz. Their technique soon became the standard form of the operation, and was known as the "Freeman-Watts Procedure".
Rudolph Nissen
In 1931, Nissen treated a 12-year-old girl who had sustained a crush injury to the chest with chronic pus production from the left lung. Nissen elected to perform left pneumonectomy, or removal of the lung. The first surgery was halted when the patient experienced asystole ("flatline"). The patient was stabilized and the second phase of the pneumonectomy was completed two weeks later. The patient survived for several years. Nissen was the first Western physician to complete the procedure; successful pneumonectomy was reported in the United States in 1933.
History of tracheal intubation
In March 1878, Wilhelm Hack of Freiburg published a paper describing the use of non-surgical orotracheal intubation in the removal of vocal cord polyps. In November of that year, he published another study, this time on the use of orotracheal intubation to secure the airway of a patient with acute glottic edema, progressively introducing sizes 3 through 11 of "Schrotter's graduated triangular vulcanite bougies" into the larynx. In 1880, the Scottish surgeon William Macewen (1848–1924) reported on his use of orotracheal intubation as an alternative to tracheotomy to allow a patient with glottic edema to breathe, as well as in the setting of general anesthesia with chloroform. All previous observations of the glottis and larynx (including those of García, Hack and Macewen) had been performed under indirect vision (using mirrors) until 23 April 1895, when Alfred Kirstein (1863–1922) of Germany first described direct visualization of the vocal cords. Kirstein performed the first direct laryngoscopy in Berlin, using an esophagoscope he had modified for this purpose; he called this device an "autoscope". The death in 1888 of Emperor Frederick III may have motivated Kirstein to develop the autoscope.
Conversion therapy
In the 1940s and 1950s, neurologist Walter Freeman popularized the ice-pick lobotomy to treat homosexuality. He personally performed as many as 3,439 lobotomy surgeries in 23 states, of which 2,500 used his ice-pick procedure, despite the fact that he had no formal surgical training. Up to 40% of Freeman's patients were gay individuals subjected to a lobotomy in order to change their homosexual orientation, leaving most of these individuals severely disabled for the rest of their lives. While promoted at the time as a treatment for various psychoses, the effectiveness of lobotomy in changing sexual orientation was already the subject of critical research in 1948 when a single case was investigated by Joseph Friedlander and Ralph Banay. A video depicting the "ice-pick lobotomy" of a homosexual man was featured in the documentary film, "".
Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.
Kennedy requested that surgeons perform a lobotomy (one of the earliest in the U.S.) on his eldest daughter Rosemary in 1941. Various reasons for the operation have been given, but it left her permanently incapacitated. James W. Watts, who performed the surgery with Walter Freeman, both of George Washington University School of Medicine, described what happened as quoted by Ronald Kessler in his book "The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Funded" in the only interview the doctor ever gave:
History of mental disorders
In early 20th century, lobotomy was introduced till the mid-1950s.
Erich Mühe
In 1987, when one of Mühe's patients died from complications related to the surgery, Mühe faced charges of manslaughter. He was cleared of the charges in 1990, by which time laparoscopic cholecystectomy was being performed widely across North America; Mühe was only recognised years later as the first to perform the surgery. The achievement has also been credited to two French surgeons: Phillipe Mouret, who first performed the surgery in 1987; and Francois Dubois, who did the same in 1988. In 1992, the German Society of Surgery—which had initially rejected Mühe's work—awarded him its top honour, the Anniversary Award. The following year, the president of the society's 1986 congress apologised to Mühe, describing his work as "without a doubt one of the greatest original achievements of German medicine in recent history". The Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons formally recognised Mühe as the first surgeon to perform a laparoscopic cholecystectomy in 1999.
Xenotransfusion
Jean-Baptiste Denis, a French physician, and Paul Emmerez, a surgeon, performed the first documented xenotransfusion on June 15, 1667. The transfusion occurred between a lamb and a 15-year-old boy. Carotid artery blood from the lamb was introduced to a vein in the patient’s inner elbow, and the procedure ultimately resulted in a successful recovery. Denis and Emmerez performed multiple xenotransfusions together. On June 24, 1667, the duo performed a transfusion on a young Swedish nobleman. When they arrived, the patient had already lost his ability to speak and was practically unconscious. Shortly after the transfusion began, the patient was able to speak again. His health was improving until his condition grew progressively worse. A second transfusion took place, but it was unsuccessful, and the patient died.
Napoleon Murphy Brock
Brock is mentioned in the 2007 memoir "My Lobotomy" by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming, which describes Dully's experiences before and after undergoing an icepick transorbital lobotomy in 1960, at 12 years of age. Brock, while studying psychology and music at San Jose State University, was employed in the mid-1960s as a counselor at Rancho Linda, a "residential center for special education" where Dully lived after having the procedure and being released from juvenile hall and a mental asylum. Dully had fond memories of Brock, and described him having "played all kinds of instruments" and as "cool."
History of psychosurgery in the United Kingdom
Since the introduction of the Mental Health Act 1983 no more than 28 psychosurgical operations have been carried out in the United Kingdom in any year. No operations were performed in England between 1999 and 2009; Frenchay Hospital, Bristol, performed one anterior cingulotomy in 2010. A few stereotactic anterior capsulotomies are performed every year at the University of Wales Hospital, Cardiff. Stereotactic anterior cingulotomies are performed at the Dundee Royal Infirmary in collaboration with the psychiatric unit at Ninewells Hospital. The Cardiff and Dundee units introduced psychosurgery programmes in the early 1990s and have used psychosurgery in the treatment of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety.Egas Moniz coined two terms to describe his operation: leucotomy (cutting of the white matter of the brain) and psychosurgery (surgery for psychiatric disorder). The American neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts adapted Moniz's techniques and coined a new term: lobotomy (cutting of the lobe). In the United Kingdom, psychiatrists used the Freeman-Watts surgical technique but retained the terminology of Moniz – leucotomy and psychosurgery. 
In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the term leucotomy was used as a generic term with writers distinguishing between the standard, pre-frontal, or Freeman-Watts leucotomy on the one hand and modified leucotomies, such as rostral leucotomy, cingulotomy, etc., on the other. In the 1970s the term psychosurgery became more popular as a generic term, with individual operations being named according to the part of the brain in which tissue is destroyed, for example, cingulotomy, capsulotomy, subcaudate tractotomy, amygdalotomy, etc. The term leucotomy is still used to refer to the standard prefrontal leucotomies of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and is occasionally used as a generic term for psychosurgical operations. Some doctors prefer the term neurosurgery for mental disorder (NMD) to psychosurgery.
Cholecystostomy
A cholecystostomy or cholecystotomy is a procedure where a stoma is created in the gallbladder, which can facilitate placement of a tube for drainage, first performed by American surgeon, Dr. John Stough Bobbs, in 1867. It is sometimes used in cases of cholecystitis where the person is ill, and there is a need to delay or defer cholecystectomy. The first endoscopic cholecystostomy was performed by Drs. Todd Baron and Mark Topazian in 2007 using ultrasound guidance to puncture the stomach wall and place a plastic biliary catheter for gallbladder drainage.
Carotid endarterectomy
The endarterectomy procedure was developed and first done by the Portuguese surgeon Joao Cid dos Santos in 1946, when he operated an occluded superficial femoral artery, at the University of Lisbon. In 1951 an Argentinian surgeon repaired a carotid artery occlusion using a bypass procedure. The first endarterectomy was successfully performed by Michael DeBakey around 1953, at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, TX, although the technique was not reported in the medical literature until 1975. The first case to be recorded in the medical literature was in The Lancet in 1954; the surgeon was Felix Eastcott, a consultant surgeon and deputy director of the surgical unit at St Mary's Hospital, London, UK. Eastcott's procedure was not strictly an endarterectomy as we now understand it; he excised the diseased part of the artery and then resutured the healthy ends together. Since then, evidence for its effectiveness in different patient groups has accumulated. In 2003 nearly 140,000 carotid endarterectomies were performed in the USA.
History of neurology and neurosurgery
Egas Moniz (1874–1955) in Portugal developed a procedure of leucotomy (now mostly known as lobotomy) to treat severe psychiatric disorders. Though it is often said that the development of lobotomy was inspired by the case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who had an iron bar driven through his left frontal lobe in 1848, the evidence is against this.
Lobotomy
In the United States, approximately 40,000 people were lobotomized. In England, 17,000 lobotomies were performed, and the three Nordic countries of Finland, Norway, and Sweden had a combined figure of approximately 9,300 lobotomies. Scandinavian hospitals lobotomized 2.5 times as many people per capita as hospitals in the US. Sweden lobotomized at least 4,500 people between 1944 and 1966, mainly women. This figure includes young children. In Norway, there were 2,005 known lobotomies. In Denmark, there were 4,500 known lobotomies. In Japan, the majority of lobotomies were performed on children with behavior problems. The Soviet Union banned the practice in 1950 on moral grounds, and Japan and Germany soon followed suit. By the late 1970s, the practice of lobotomy had generally ceased, although it continued as late as the 1980s in France..
Lobotomy
The originator of the procedure, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the "discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses", although the awarding of the prize has been subject to controversy.
Yellow Mama
The first execution by electrocution in Alabama was performed in the Yellow Mama on April 8, 1927. Between 1930 and 1976 there were 135 executions completed using Yellow Mama. In 1983, the State Senate Judiciary Committee voted in favor of using lethal injections in place of electrocutions. However, the bill failed. In 1997, a bill was discussed which would allow the condemned prisoners to be executed by the option of lethal injection.
Lobotomy
Before the 1930s, individual doctors had infrequently experimented with novel surgical operations on the brains of those deemed insane. Most notably in 1888, the Swiss psychiatrist, Gottlieb Burckhardt, initiated what is commonly considered the first systematic attempt at modern human psychosurgery. He operated on six chronic patients under his care at the Swiss Préfargier Asylum, removing sections of their cerebral cortex. Burckhardt's decision to operate was informed by three pervasive views on the nature of mental illness and its relationship to the brain. First, the belief that mental illness was organic in nature, and reflected an underlying brain pathology; next, that the nervous system was organized according to an associationist model comprising an input or afferent system (a sensory center), a connecting system where information processing took place (an association center), and an output or efferent system (a motor center); and, finally, a modular conception of the brain whereby discrete mental faculties were connected to specific regions of the brain. Burckhardt's hypothesis was that by deliberately creating lesions in regions of the brain identified as association centers a transformation in behavior might ensue. According to his model, those mentally ill might experience "excitations abnormal in quality, quantity and intensity" in the sensory regions of the brain and this abnormal stimulation would then be transmitted to the motor regions giving rise to mental pathology. He reasoned, however, that removing material from either of the sensory or motor zones could give rise to "grave functional disturbance". Instead, by targeting the association centers and creating a "ditch" around the motor region of the temporal lobe, he hoped to break their lines of communication and thus alleviate both mental symptoms and the experience of mental distress.