the operation typically made those who underwent it into zombies with virtually no personality whatsoever. Prefrontal lobotomies were conducted on many thousands of patients in the US, the UK, the Nordic countries, Japan, the Soviet Union and Germany, among others. The technique was first reported by Egas Moniz in 1936 – he surprisingly received a Nobel Prize for its discovery7 – but was generally abandoned in 1967, when psychiatrist Walter Freeman killed one of his patients.
