Dr. Lobotomy

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The Evolvement of Treatment for Disabilities
Understanding and treating those with disabilities in the 1930s was more like many experiments. It was the time when doctors were discovering ways to treat people and they did not know what the outcome of certain procedures would be. This sometimes left patients with more problems than what they had before and the procedures were in many instances painful. Even though there were many unfortunate events people still went to the doctors because they didn’t have the knowledge that there were better and more effective ways to treat disabilities. Today, there are many alternatives to treat different disabilities. Doctors now know the different side effects that their patients can have and they have options. …show more content…
It began when two neurologists named Dr. John Fulton and Dr. Carlyle Jacobson tested two monkeys named Becky and Lucy for their intelligence and then removed half their brains’ frontal lobes and tested them again. The frontal lobes of the brain are the parts concerned with behavior, learning, personality, and voluntary movement. After removing this part of the brain the two monkeys seemed to retain their skills and intelligence, but what did change was their personalities. Becky and Lucy didn’t become violent when they didn’t get their treats after completing a task anymore. Dr. Moniz, from Europe, saw Fulton and Jacobson present this at a convention and he decided he was going to start figuring out how these procedures worked because he saw similarities in the monkies and his mentally ill patients. He thought that he could do a procedure a little different on his patients that would separate their emotions from their thoughts, but still keeping their intelligence the same. He practiced these procedures on cadavers constantly before actually trying it on a patient of his. In the United States, Dr. Walter Freeman was performing at least 25 lobotomies per day while being under the eye of the public. He did a procedure on Rosemary, John F. Kennedy’s sister, that left her a vegetable for the rest of her life. Despite this and the many horrible effects that lobotomies had on people, they were not stopped (The Strange, Sad History of
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