A New Operation on the Brain.

In 1941 the word psychosurgery was not yet in the dictionary. Nevertheless, that year some two hundred Americans had their worries, persecution complexes, suicidal tendencies, obsessions, indecisiveness, or nervous tensions literally cut out of their brains. Many of these patients, surgeons claimed, were transformed into "useful members of society." Psychosurgery severed the connections between the prefrontal lobes and the thalamus in the brain and seemed a viable solution for those desperate cases unsuccessfully treated by drugs, shock therapy, or psychoanalysis. Physicians thought psychosurgery, also popularly known as lobotomy, gave intractable patients a chance of "being restored to the world with a more flexible personality" rather than living out a life of mental insanity.

Cutting Out Cares.

The psychosurgical technique was first developed in 1935 by a Portuguese surgeon,...