Posts com a Tag ‘JOHNSON Jenell (Aut)’

Many memories and images are brought to mind when talking about lobotomy. This term has, even today, the power to provoke uproar, astonishment, revolt, curiosity. To talk of its story is to be surrounded by attentive and curious eyes.

The word lobotomy is nowadays often used indiscriminately in reference to variations of psychosurgery that have their origins with a technique called prefrontal leucotomy. Elaborated by the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, published in his book Tentatives opératoires dans le traitement de certaines psychoses in 1936, the procedure was imported that same year to the United States and applied by the doctors Walter Freeman and James Watts. Known in the country as the prefrontal lobotomy, this variation of the surgery consisted of damaging the fibers that connected the thalamus to the central lobes. Another American variation, developed by these doctors in the 1940s, consisted of a “simplification” of the surgical process – since it did not require trepanation, that is, the perforation of the skull. The transorbital lobotomy accessed the patient’s brain, by means of an instrument similar to an ice picker, through the ocular cavity. These techniques, which were applied in anatomically normal brains, were developed for the treatment of mental illnesses (Raz 2013), especially those with manifestations of uncontrollable behavior (Braslow 1997, 2005). Still, in Jenell Johnson’s words, “the operation was used to “bleach” or “blunt” strong emotions in people diagnosed with certain mental illnesses and, to a less extent, to ameliorate chronic pain” (Johnson 2013, 2) and has been performed on tens of thousands of women, men, and children in the United States. Leia Mais