António Egas Moniz was considered a visionary, but his method, which was used on prominent figures like JFK’s sister soon fell into disrepute.
António Egas Moniz, who won the 1949 Nobel Prize in medicine for the invention of lobotomies, in his office in the Portuguese parliament in 1908. In the mid-1930s, when Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz pioneered a method for severing brain tissue to treat psychiatric disorders, he was seen as a visionary.
the 2023 Nobel Prizes have been announced over the past week, Moniz’s award stands as a symbol of the bumpy path progress can take, experts say, and sparks questions about whether history is best told through individual heroes.Moniz’s award “would be at the top of pretty much everybody’s list” if you were going to reevaluate Nobel Prizes, said, a doctor and historian of medicine at New York University, but it would “open a can of worms” to do so.
“This was not done in any malevolent way,” Lerner said of Moniz’s work. The procedure was for “people in very overcrowded, depressing institutions who had no chance of getting out,” and practitioners should “not think we are so different from doctors in the past who were so desperate to help their patients,” he said.Lobotomies are based on the idea that mental illness exists in the neural pathways of the brain.
The procedure fell into disrepute in the mid-1950s, as stories spread about damage, people grew paranoid about brainwashing and drug therapies became more common. Freeman did not perform his last lobotomy until 1967. The patient died, and he was banned from operating again.Over the years, “mental illness has been seen in terms of spiritual malaise or through a moral deficiency,” Nicole Shepherd,
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