Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

Lobotomies now share a shelf in the dusty cabinet of medical sideshows next to whips, chains, snake pits, truth serums, phrenology machines, and trephining, the ancient ritual of drilling holes in the brain to loose the evil spirits. So why were lobotomies so readily accepted, indeed sought after, in the late 1930s through the early 1970s? Three reasons. First, psychiatrists, families, and patients were desperate to do something, anything to treat untreatable mental disorders, most commonly schizophrenia. And there weren’t any other good options. Second, state mental hospitals were bursting at the seams. The number of patients rose from 159,000 in 1909 to 480,000 in 1940, a rate twice the growth rate of the general population. Indeed, in the 1940s and 1950s, as many people were hospitalized with mental disorders in the United States as for all other diseases combined. Lobotomies provided a seductive way out of an unmanageable situation. Third, conditions in state hospitals were hideous. In May 1946, an article written in Life magazine titled “Bedlam 1946” described just how badly things had deteriorated. Patients were beaten, abandoned, provided little clothing, put in dark, damp, padded dungeons, restrained in straitjackets for weeks, and forced to lie in their own excrement. Facilities resembled “concentration camps on the Belsen pattern.” The staff—which was often composed of uneducated transients who were plucked from local jails—raped, sodomized, and occasionally murd...