Lobotomy
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Dec. 11, 2013 - 08:37PM
The
U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans — and
likely hundreds more — during and after World War II, according to a
cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by
The Wall Street Journal.
“They got the notion they were going to
come to give me a lobotomy,” Roman Tritz, a World War II bomber pilot,
told the newspaper in a report published Wednesday. “To hell with them.”
Tritz
said the orderlies at the veterans hospital pinned him to the floor,
and he initially fought them off. A few weeks later, just before his
30th birthday, he was lobotomized.
Besieged by psychologically
damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe
and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the
brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as
depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people
identified as homosexuals, according to the report.
The VA’s use
of lobotomy, in which doctors severed connections between parts of the
brain then thought to control emotions, was known in medical circles in
the late 1940s and early 1950s, and is occasionally cited in medical
texts. But the VA’s practice, never widely publicized, long ago slipped
from public view. Even the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says it
possesses no records detailing the creation and breadth of its lobotomy
program.
The Wall Street Journal’s reporting series began with Wednesday’s
Forgotten Soldiers and included
a documentary, archived photos, maps and medical records.
The
Journal quoted the VA’s response to its inquiry: “In the late 1940s and
into the 1950s, VA and other physicians throughout the United States
and the world debated the utility of lobotomies. The procedure became
available to severely ill patients who had not improved with other
treatments. Within a few years, the procedure disappeared within VA, and
across the United States, as safer and more effective treatments were
developed.”
The newspaper reported that musty files warehoused in
the National Archives show VA doctors resorting to brain surgery as they
struggled with a vexing question that absorbs America to this day: How
best to treat the psychological crises that afflict soldiers returning
from combat.
Between April 1, 1947, and Sept. 30, 1950, VA doctors
lobotomized 1,464 veterans at 50 hospitals authorized to perform the
surgery, according to agency documents rediscovered by the Journal.
Scores of records from 22 of those hospitals list another 466 lobotomies
performed outside that time period, bringing the total documented
operations to 1,930.
Read More Here
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The Lobotomy Files: Inside the Mind of Roman Tritz
WSJDigitalNetwork
Published on Dec 12, 2013
Roman Tritz was one of thousands of WWll veterans who were lobotomized by the Veterans Administration. The nation forgot, but Mr. Tritz remembers. WSJ's Michael M. Phillips reports.
Visit the Wall Street Journal: www.wsj.com
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Lobotomy - PBS documentary on Walter Freeman
ting196
Uploaded on Jan 27, 2008
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