Nobel Prize and lobotomy

 The extent to which the Nobel Prize committee can serve as a vehicle for maintaining the power of certain medical interests was also demonstrated in 1949, when criticism of the so-called lobotomy—a neurosurgical operation in which the nerve tracts between the thalamus (the largest part of the diencephalon) and the frontal lobe (frontal lobe of the cerebrum) as well as parts of the grey matter (certain areas of the central nervous system) are severed and thus destroyed—began to spread. Nevertheless, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, who had introduced lobotomy, received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949.

It should be noted that the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to Moniz without any scientific proof of the safety and effectiveness of lobotomy. Originally, the lobotomy was used as the last resort treatment for schizophrenia patients. However, with the Nobel Prize to Moniz, the lobotomy gained credibility and popularity—especially in the USA. „The lobotomy is an inglorious example of how a Nobel Prize can serve as a promotional tool,“ says Vera Sharav of the patient protection organization Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHTP).1199In 1946, only 100 lobotomies were performed in the United States—in 1949, the year the Nobel Prize was awarded, the number of lobotomies went up to 5000.1200 In 1950, just one year later, the then USSR banned lobotomy. Soviet doctors had declared that this radical procedure was „incompatible with the principles of humanity“ and „turned mentally disturbed people into idiots,“ as the New York Times wrote in 1953.1201 1202 Today, lobotomy is considered as one of the most barbaric „medical“ methods in history.

„The public was fooled from the beginning,“ says Vera Sharav. „The medical community and the drug regulatory agency, the FDA, have been complicit in this by concealing the tragic consequences of this brain mutilation—for decades. Hospital operators and doctors considered the lobotomy to be a milestone in modern medicine—and so the method was widely accepted, especially after the Nobel Prize cloak was put around it.

The American psychiatrist Walter Freeman (1895-1972) and the neurosurgeon James Winston Watts (1904-1994) had made the method a popular standard technique in psychiatry in the early 1940s. What Walter Freeman was made of is shown by his distorted understanding of his own profession: „Psychosurgery achieves its success by shattering the imagination, dulling emotions, destroying abstract thinking and creating a robot-like, controllable individual.“1203 And the lobotomy—a mutilation of the brain-achieves just that.

Freeman also approached the media with verve. And the media was at his service. The eminent Washington Star newspaper described the procedure as „one of the greatest surgical innovations of this generation“; the New York Times once called the lobotomy „surgery of the soul,“ which „made history.”

Nurses and doctors flocked in droves to the lecture halls to learn about lobotomy in theory and practice. The procedure was performed by tens of thousands of practitioners—at the most elite institutions in the country, including John Hopkins University, Harvard Mass General Hospital, Mayo Clinic and Columbia University Hospital in New York, Columbia Presbyterian, where Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of US President John F. Kennedy, was lobotomized.“1204

In Sweden, according to a report by the Swedish national television station SVT in April 1998, about 4,500 people had been lobotomized by 1963, many of them against their will. At least 500 of them, according to today’s interpretation, were not psychiatrically ill, but among others hyperactive or retarded children. In Finland, until 1969, about 1,500 people had been lobotomized. In Norway, between 3,000 and 4,000 people were lobotomized between 1941 and 1981.1205 Worldwide, the number of operations performed is estimated at about one million.1206 In the 1950s, the operation was even carried out, among other things, to „cure“ homosexuality or a communist attitude.1207In 1967, Harvard authors Vernon Mark, Frank Ervin, and William Sweet, in a letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the official organ of the American Medical Association, got carried away with the thesis that the cause of the race riots in Detroit was a „focal brain disorder“ that only needed to be surgically removed to prevent further riots.1208 In 1970, Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin published a book entitled „Violence and the Brain“ in which they proposed psychosurgery as the definitive solution to the problem of violence, for example in the case of unteachable prison inmates.

The psychiatrist L.G.West called this approach „biosocial humanism“ in a 1969 article. In 1979, the Californian psychiatrist H. Brown recommended psychosurgery for the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents. Brown’s proposals were discussed in the London Times and the Washington Post— pointing out that this type of rehabilitation was far more cost-effective, at only $6,000, than lifelong custody, which costs around $100,000.1209Civil rights movements began to take action against the lobotomy in the 1960s. In 1962 Ken Kesey’s novel „One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” impressively demonstrated the effects of the surgery on psychiatric patients. The novel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film in 1975 by Milos Forman with Jack Nicholson in the leading role (winning five Oscars). In the end, the lobotomy was recognized for what it was: a brutal mutilation that was like a permanent straitjacket for the brain. However, it is suspected that this procedure was abandoned by the medical establishment, not because it was tantamount to mutilation, but perhaps also because the psychotropic drugs that could be used to sedate patients had been appearing since the 1950s.

Just how unteachable the medical elite can be is shown by the fact that as late as 1998 the Nobel Prize organization defended the Nobel Prize award for Egas Moniz in 1949 with the words: „There is no doubt that Moniz deserves the Nobel Prize for Medicine.” 1210

 Meanwhile, the series of mistakes made in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Medicine is long and goes back to the medical light-shining figure Robert Koch, who in 1890, out of glory, wanted to make the world believe that he had discovered a miracle cure for tuberculosis with tuberculin—which later turned out to be a hoax that cost thousands of people their lives.

from Virus Mania ...

by Torsten Engelbrecht & Claus Köhnlein