who developed the surgical procedure known as a lobotomy
António Egas Moniz
title: Lobotomy text: impairments. The procedure was controversial from its initial use in part due to the balance between benefits and risks. Today, lobotomy has become a disparaged procedure, a byword for medical barbarism and an exemplary instance of the medical trampling of patients' rights. The originator of the procedure, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the "discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses", although the awarding of the prize has been subject to controversy. The use of the procedure increased dramatically from the early 1940s and into the 1950s; title: Lobotomy text: the official version of their public conversation he promulgated is without foundation. In fact, Moniz stated that he had conceived of the operation some time before his journey to London in 1935, having told in confidence his junior colleague, the young neurosurgeon Pedro Almeida Lima, as early as 1933 of his psychosurgical idea. The traditional account exaggerates the importance of Fulton and Jacobsen to Moniz's decision to initiate frontal lobe surgery, and omits the fact that a detailed body of neurological research that emerged at this time suggested to Moniz and other neurologists and neurosurgeons that surgery on this part title: Lobotomy text: no change, two patients became quieter, one patient experienced epileptic convulsions and died a few days after the operation, and one patient improved. Complications included motor weakness, epilepsy, sensory aphasia and "word deafness". Claiming a success rate of 50 percent, he presented the results at the Berlin Medical Congress and published a report, but the response from his medical peers was hostile and he did no further operations. In 1912, two physicians based in Saint Petersburg, the leading Russian neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev and his younger Estonian colleague, the neurosurgeon Ludvig Puusepp, published a paper reviewing a range of surgical interventions title: Lobotomy text: the technique had its true origination in his laboratory. Endorsing this version of events, in 1949, the Harvard neurologist Stanley Cobb remarked during his presidential address to the American Neurological Association that, "seldom in the history of medicine has a laboratory observation been so quickly and dramatically translated into a therapeutic procedure." Fulton's report, penned ten years after the events described, is, however, without corroboration in the historical record and bears little resemblance to an earlier unpublished account he wrote of the congress. In this previous narrative he mentioned an incidental, private exchange with Moniz, but it is likely that title: Lobotomy text: long-term institutionalisation. Lobotomy has always been controversial, but for a period of the medical mainstream, it was even feted and regarded as a legitimate if desperate remedy for categories of patients who were otherwise regarded as hopeless. Today, lobotomy has become a disparaged procedure, a byword for medical barbarism and an exemplary instance of the medical trampling of patients' rights. Before the 1930s, individual doctors had infrequently experimented with novel surgical operations on the brains of those deemed insane. Most notably in 1888, the Swiss psychiatrist, Gottlieb Burckhardt, initiated what is commonly considered the first systematic attempt at modern human