Transcription: Lobotomy banned in Soviet as Cruel

Below is a hand-digitisation of the New York Times article reporting the outlawing of lobotomies by the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

The United States and Europeans continued the practice for decades after, as late as 1980 in France.

The history of Mental Health institutions, or asylums, are a keen interest of mine and I’ll be posting more with regards to them in future. The artist Louis Wain, who’s artwork is used for the site logo (the two fencing cats), and other artwork around the site was himself sadly a patient of several mental hospitals.

The NYT article below notably quotes indirectly from Dr. Walter Freeman who “pioneered” (an ill-suited term for his work) the well known ice-pick trans-orbital lobotomy. During his tenure he performed 4,000 lobotomies on patients as young as 4, killing as many as 100. Freeman was largely responsible for the spread of the procedure across the Western World and most now know his work from the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

He, and others similar persons, like John Crumbie, of Croydon Mental Hospital, inventor of his own Leucotome (an egg-whisk like device for performing lobotomy), were in my view, large part to blame for the dramatic shift of mental institutions from intending to fulfil the Victorian ideal of respite and rurality for the mentally unwell, to being mills of dubious practice and ready guinea pigs. This shift toward promotion of surgery over respite, was sometimes spurred by something as mundane as a desire for funding, by being a hospital rather than an asylum; an institution like Croydon Mental Hospital could secure more from Government. With that came the neurosurgeons and their “pioneering” ideas and shock therapies.

Rather disturbingly, perhaps depressingly and unsurprisingly, the haphazard tinkering and inhumane procedures performed on patients were not the chief reasoning for the eventual, and sudden, mass institutional closures in England. Instead they were brought down by the eternal and incessant Tory desire to cut public expenditure. You can read the once Health Minster Powell’s famous “Water Tower” speech here where he lay the foundations for the eventual mass closures and expulsion of patients into the doomed care of the community (yes, that Powell).

The transcription of the New York Times follows.

Lobotomy banned in Soviet as Cruel

New York Times – August 22, 1953, page 13

Brain Operation on the Insane is Inhumane, Russian Tells Vienna Health Session

By William L. Laurence
Special to The New York Times

VIENNA, Aug. 21 – The brain operation widely known as lobotomy that is widely performed in the United States has been outlawed in the Soviet Union as inhumane, Prof. Nikolai I. Oserezki director of the Pavlov Institute of Medicine of Leningrad, reported here today at the closing sessions of the annual meeting of the World Federation for Mental Health. He said Soviet psychiatrists had found the operation was “an antiphysiological method that violates the principles of humanity.”

The operation, which severs the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, the seat of the higher intelligence, from the hypothalamus, the seat of the emotions, does much harm and no good, Professor Oserezki said.

The operation which was originally used to quiet violently insane persons. Since then, however, its use has become widespread so that it is now performed for a large variety of ends, including the relief of pain in the late stages of cancer and other conditions, and even the removal of the tendency to commit crimes in habitual criminals.

Views Supported by Many

Leading European and American psychiatrists at the meeting were inclined to agree in general with Prof. Oseresky, a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the Soviet Union. Some however, held the operation was advisiable in a few rare instances.

Among the latter were Prof. H.C. Ruemke, rector of the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and president of the World Federation for Mental Health. He said the operation was being performed much too frequently in the United States, where it is done even on children.

The procedure contrary to the principles of humanity, Proffessor Oserezki said, because it destroys higher brain centers and trasnforms a human being into a “vegetable”. After its performance, he said, the patient is deprived forever of any hope for future help that may become available by new discoveries or by the proper application of less drastic available methods.

By making a patient apathetic and indifferent, he said it becomes possible to send him home and thus free a hospital bed. “This may be good for the psychiatrists who complain of the overcrowding of mental institutions, but what about the patient?” he asked.

Lobotomy, he said, offers a strong temptation to surgeons because of the extraordinary cheapness and quickness of the operation. It was originally suggested as far back as 1890 and was scorned at the time as a “medieval procedure for cleansing the brain by driving out devils.” Post-mortem examinations of the patients on whom a lobotomy had been formed revealed great damage to many other parts of the brain, he reported.

U.S Doctors Views Quoted

“Lobotomy deprives the patient of a last hope for removing his pathological symptoms, so that by performing a lobotomy the surgeon is guilty of therapeutic nihilism,” Prof. Oserezki asserted. As evidence he quoted Dr. Walter Freeman of Washington, one of the strongest advocates of the operation in the United States, as having said in 1945 that a lobotomy leads to the following: “A disturbance in the activity of personality, the loss of interest by the patient in himself and his surroundings, emotional dullness, infantilism in behavior, loss of previously aquired training and difficulty in acquiring new learning.”

Prof. Oserezki quoted another Soviet psychiatrist to the effect that through lobotomy “an insane person is changed into an idiot.” Experiments on animals in the Soviet Union, he reported, have shown that lobotomy leads to a higher decided diminution of the higher cerebral functions, the loss of ability of the cerebral cortex to acquire new learning, and the intensification of inertia in all nervous activity.

Speaking in German before a large audience of psychiatrists from more than a score of nations on four continents, Prof. Oserezki concluded: “As a result of our experience, we Soviet psychiatrists and neuro-surgeons have reached the definite conclusion that lobotomy is an anti-physiological method that makes the patient an intellectual invalid. For this reason we refrain from using this alledged’therapeutic method’ and search for more humane and pathologically justified procedures.”