The Rise and Fall of Lobotomies: A Nobel Prize Medical Breakthrough Turned into a Catastrophe
- Crystal Kong
- Jan 2
- 3 min read
By Crystal Kong and Chloe Cherng, High School Students
Once viewed as a groundbreaking Nobel Prize treatment for mental health, lobotomies are now regarded as one of the most controversial and horrific medical procedures in history. What went wrong?
What is a Lobotomy?
A lobotomy is a surgical procedure that involves the severing of the nerve pathways in the brain’s prefrontal cortex and the anterior part of the frontal lobes. Often depicted as a freak procedure on television, the procedure was administered by drilling a pair of holes into the skull and pushing a sharp instrument into the brain tissue.
Lobotomies were a popular “cure” for patients with psychiatric disorders; however, their side effects became devastating. Many experienced disabling impairments, becoming emotionally blunted and restricted in their intellectual range.
History of Lobotomies
Lobotomies emerged in the early twentieth century, a period of immense stigmatization around mental illness, as a widely accepted “cure” for severe psychiatric disorders. Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz first introduced this treatment to alleviate symptoms of psychosis. It was later popularized in 1936 when Walter Freeman performed the first lobotomy at a mental hospital in the United States. By 1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies had been performed in the US, and even a greater number of procedures performed around the world.
The widespread acceptance of lobotomies were not solely based on scientific evidence but also because of the social climate of the era. Mental illness was poorly understood and highly stigmatized. Patients with mental illness were deemed to be inherently incapable of making informed decisions about their own care. Uneducated families of the mentally ill wanted to “fix this disease,” and thus made medical decisions on behalf of them. Compounding this issue, few legal and ethical safeguards for human subjects allowed invasive and irreversible procedures, like lobotomies, to be performed without accountability.
Ethical Violations
Lobotomies represent a case where autonomy was systemically stripped away. Patients were deemed incompetent to make their own decisions simply because they had a psychiatric diagnosis rather than an individualized assessment of decision-making capacity. Patients did not give informed consent; they were framed as incapable of autonomy, making the procedure “necessary” because the patient needed to be “fixed.”
Nonmaleficence was violated as the procedure caused irreversible harm, inevitably worsening patients’ conditions. Despite weak evidence, physicians justified the procedure by stating that the potential benefit outweighed harm. Patients suffered neurological complications, personality and emotional changes, and postoperative complications, including death.
Rather than restoring health, lobotomies aimed to make patients less disruptive, violating beneficence. Additionally, justice was not honored. The distribution of lobotomies was not random; they disproportionately targeted women who challenged social norms, poor and institutionalized individuals, people with disabilities, and racial and ethnic minorities. Those with fewer social protections were more likely to be considered expendable for experimentation.
Rosemary Kennedy
A notable case of a lobotomy being done was on Rosemary Kennedy. She received the procedure at 23 to control mood swings. Her father authorized the procedure performed by Dr. Walter Freeman and Dr. James Watts without Rosemary’s informed consent and without her mother’s knowledge. At the time, lobotomy was still considered an experimental and controversial procedure. She was awake during the procedure and was asked to perform tasks so surgeons could gauge when to stop cutting brain tissue. This operation left her unable to speak coherently, care for herself, walk independently, and required institutionalization for the rest of her life.
Conclusion
Lobotomies remain a cautionary tale in bioethics. It illustrates the dangers of unchecked medical authority, the necessity of informed consent and capacity assessment, and the ethical risks of substituting medical care with behavioral regulation. The future of medicine depends not only on innovation but on an unwavering commitment to autonomy, consent, and respect for personhood.
Works Cited
“Lobotomy.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Dec. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy.
Staff, NPR. “The Lobotomy of Patient H.M: A Personal Tragedy and Scientific Breakthrough.” NPR, NPR, 14 Aug. 2016, npr.org/2016/08/14/489997276/how-patient-h-m-and-his-lobotomy-contributed-to-understanding-memories#:~:text=Counting%20The%20Cost%20Of%20Medical,a%20man%20named%20Henry%20Molaison.
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