What do lobotomies cure

Lobotomy, also called prefrontal leukotomy, surgical procedure in which the nerve pathways in a lobe or lobes of the brain are severed from those in other areas.Lobotomy was an umbrella term for a series of different operations that purposely damaged brain tissue in order to treat mental illness, said dr.In the transorbital lobotomy, the brain is accessed through the eye.The modern lobotomy originated in the 1930s, when doctors realized that by severing fiber tracts connected to the frontal lobe, they could help patients overcome certain.Freeman himself is said to have performed about.

The left lung has 2 lobes.Since the discovery of the lobotomy procedure, it spread around the world and became the standard treatment for these conditions, as well as others.Today, the lobotomy is seen as an embarrassing failure of recent psychiatry, but during the craze it was a very respected procedure.A lobectomy is a surgery to remove one of the lobes of the lungs.State hospitals were over capacity, psychiatrists were in short supply, and other than the shock therapies (insulin, electrical, and cardiazol), there wasn't much available to treat mental illnesses.

The procedure was formerly used as a radical therapeutic measure to help grossly disturbed patients with schizophrenia, manic depression and mania (bipolar disorder), and other mental illnesses.The widespread use of the lobotomy led to the training of many lobotomists in the world, and one could find a lobotomist in any.Though lobotomies were initially only used to treat severe mental health condition, freeman began promoting the lobotomy as a cure for everything from serious mental illness to nervous indigestion.