1941 American Weekly article CARVING CHARACTER WITH THE
SURGEON'S KNIFE by Robert D. Potter, Science Editor:
By a delicate brain operation that sabotages the intricate
"telephone" switchboard of the mind and blacks-out the worry
center, just back of the forehead, surgeons are now restoring
to a normal world many hopeless mental patients who formerly
dwelt in a realm of terrible fantasy.
Carving character by surgical sculpture might be one way of
describing this new and remarkable brain operation which in
some cases fashions completely new personalities. Doctors
call the operation prefrontal lobectomy.
Since the term "ectomy" comes from the ancient Greek meaning
excision, or to cut out, this medical term is not really as
tough as it looks. It means to cut out the prefrontal lobes
of the brain, just as appendectomy means to cut out the
appendix or tonsillectomy means to take out the tonsils.
Actually this newest feat of the surgeon's knife - although
the tools used are not knives in any ordinary sense - does
not remove the prefrontal worry centers of the brain.
Rather, the operation is as if some spy or sabotage agent
crept into the information center at Army headquarters and
snipped telephone wires with a pair of pliers.
In man - perhaps alone in man among all the animals - worry
is a good thing and so is a conscience, for they prevent you
from doing many things you may later be sorry for.
Suppose you are driving along a road and some stupid, dumb,
arrogant and thoughtless driver cuts in ahead of you and you
nearly have an accident. Your first impulse is to do murder,
or at least mayhem.
What stops you is your worry center, your conscience.
What led you to have the homicidal impulse in the first place
is a part of your brain, called the thalamus. This is a
very old part, handed down through countless ages. Your
rage, then, is a hangover from all the ancestors of Homo
Sapiens from time immemorial. It is in essence the killing
urge so common to the jungle beasts and the lower animals.
What makes you civilized are your prefrontal lobes. With
their conscience and reasoning powers they can normally push
back into their ancient graves your brutal impulses.
In many forms of insanity this normal balancing of the parts
of the brain are missing. Maniacs, with their driving urge
to kill without thought of the consequences, seem to be
dominated by their thalamus - this primitive, emotional,
hot-headed region of their brains.
Maniacs have the drive of the brute in their minds and they
act accordingly - sometimes cleverly and sometimes stupidly -
but never with a thought of what society and the law may do
to them for what they do. These people are the dangerously
criminal insane.
But there are other types of people whose lives are dominated
by the worry center, just as the maniac is dominated by the
thalamus. These are the schizophrenics.
These people retreat from the world of reality and dwell only
in a realm inhabited by their fears, worries and anxieties.
Sometimes they have hallucinations, like the woman who spent
years in bed because she thought she would die if anyone
touched her.
Or the woman who could not sleep at night because she had to
stay awake to see if her heart was beating; otherwise, she
thought, she would die.
The symptoms of these kind of mental cases seem endless but
they all have one common attribute. They all are obsessed by
worry and their conscience, and worries dominate their entire
lives.
In the last five years three different treatments have been
used on such patients with considerable success in some
cases.
1. The drug shock therapy in which insulin, or the drug named
metrazol, are used to produce controlled convulsions
resembling those of an epileptic fit which shock the patient
back into the world of reality.
2. Electric "fits"; convulsions produced by the shock of
electric currents passed through the brain.
3. The prefrontal lobectomy, the operation severing the worry
centers from the rest of the mind.
People who have undergone any of these three treatments often
find relief, and they undergo personality changes, sometimes
to a marked degree.
From silent individuals, sitting in the corner of a mental
hospital, wrapped in a world of their own, and brooding,
they become happy and often boisterous people.
Patients who have gone through the brain operation still
retain reasoning powers. They understand cause and effect.
But they see this cause and effect as if it did not concern
them or affect their lives. They stop worrying about the
effect from some cause.
Perhaps this is not an ideal way to live. It is too much
like the "grasshopper" existence of the old Aesop's Fables.
But it is a vast improvement over the past way of life of
these patients, for they are no longer pursued by imaginary
spiders or snakes, or non-existent diseases; or contemplated
suicide, nor countless other fantasies of the insane mind.
To a brilliant and daring Portuguese doctor, Dr. Egas Moniz,
goes major credit for the pioneering development of this
operation which carves out character.
From the similarity of behavior of many of his mental
patients, Dr. Moniz reasoned that their thoughts must be
following the same nerve pathways in the brain.
So often they had the same delusions, the same fits of
weeping, the fears, hallucinations and the obsessions.
Since all ordinary treatment had been tried for years on
these patients without success, Dr. Moniz decided to take the
chance and see what would happen if the brain pathways could
be cut.
First, Dr. Moniz turned inventor and devised a tiny cutting
tool for work inside the brain which operates about like an
old-fashioned apple corer.
Next he turned salesman and sold his surgical colleague, Dr.
Almeida Lima, on the idea of doing the operation on
fear-bound patients with hallucinations.
In a manner somewhat similar to the way the telephone company
disconnects a customer's telephone when he doesn't pay his
bill, they proceeded to cut the connection to worry centers
in their patient's brains.
Under an anesthetic, they drilled small holes in the skulls
of their patients and inserted the little "apple corer."
When they had it properly placed in the prefrontal lobes they
gave it a little twist. And that was that.
They made no attempt to remove the cores. It sufficed to
break the nerve connection to the parts they wished to
isolate.
Drs. Moniz and Lima had considerable success, and some
failure. They seemed unable to help dementia praecox cases
but they had some astounding success with some other kinds of
mental patients.
People whose whole lives had been governed by their fear of
having cancer, or some other grave disease, put their
anxieties back into proper perspective and did not let them
dominate their every act any longer.
People who had tried to commit suicide no longer sought to
take their own life.
People who had felt that the whole world had a conspiracy
against them, realized that their worries and obsessions were
only brain children of their own mind.
The sensational operations of Moniz and Lima were first
reported in 1935 and were received by the medical profession
with a mixture of two parts skepticism, one part credulity
and a dash of wonderment.
But the point was proved; that by brain operations fixed
ideas and obsessions could be overcome by disconnecting the
nerve circuits which carried them inside the brain.
Soon the new operation spread over the world. The American
pioneers in its use were two doctors from George Washington
University, Drs. Walter Freeman and James W. Watts.
In 1936 they began using Moniz' apple-corer tool. But soon
they devised their own surgical instrument and procedure.
Amongst other things they stopped going through the skull
from the top and made their incisions at two points, over
each temple.
Their cutting tool was a tiny hollow needle, blunt at the
tip, which they delicately inserted into the brain being ever
careful not to push it through tissue but along cracks and
crevices between different parts of the brain.
As carefully as a surveyor, they moved their needle to just
the correct spot inside the head. Then they pushed a fine
loop of wire through the needle, gave a twist and severed the
connection to the prefrontal lobes.
In many an operation the patient talked with them while this
was going on, for the job is done only under a local
anesthetic. Once the instrument is inside the brain, there
is no pain, because nervous tissue is not, itself, sensitive
to pain.
Following Freeman and Watts some ten or a dozen brain
surgeons in the United States have now taken up the
operation. More than two hundred people on whom this feat of
surgical skill has been performed are now living in this
country.
Of this total some eighty patients have passed through the
hands of Freeman and Watts. At the recent meeting of the
American Association in Cleveland these American pioneers
disclosed what had happened to their patients.
Of the eighty, some twenty are now back at work,
happily employed. Seven are studying, or are partly
employed. Twenty-two (presumably most of the women) are
contentedly engaged in housework.
Eight are "at home" and only six are left in mental
institutions. Seven patients have died, but only three of
these were operative deaths.
The greatest success of the operation seems to be in
relieving symptoms like introversion, preoccupation, nervous
tension, obsessive thinking, worry, anxiety, depression,
insomnia, crying spells and suicidal ideas which formerly
dominated the lives of these patients.
But just as the operation overcomes some symptoms, it
produces new ones.
About a third of the patients, after the operation, showed a
lack of initiative. Over half of them seemed to be tactless,
saying what they wanted, where and when they wanted to.
About a third of them suffered from procrastination and kept
putting off tasks they knew they ought to do. Perhaps a
quarter of them showed facetiousness.
Out of it all comes this picture of the changed
personalities; the development of quiet, non-aggressive
people who like to put off until tomorrow what they ought to
do today, cracking bad jokes and sometimes making
thoughtless, tactless remarks.
To a lot of us this is no outline of a mental case.
It could well be the personality portrait of many normal
people. Every town is full of the same kind of folks.
4/29/67 San Jose Mercury article 'EMOTION' SURGERY OUTLINED
Sydney, Australia (UPI) - An American neurosurgeon today
outlined details of a newly-developed, 50-minute brain
operation which can reportedly reshape emotionally
maladjusted personalities.
Dr. M. Hunter Brown of Santa Monica, Calif., told the second
congress of the Australasian Society of Neurological Surgeons
the operation has been performed 109 times, each time with
"unqualified success."
"Out of the tremendous amount of human misery we can now
create happiness, which to any brain surgeon is a great
source of personal satisfaction," he said.
"Obviously with all the subtle intangibles of the highest
levels of man's emotional life to do this with 100 per cent
accuracy would place one in the category of a god.
"Men are not God," Brown said.
He said the new operation differs entirely in concept and
execution from the frontal lobotomies of a generation ago,
now in disrepute because of moral questionability.
"A lobotomy is a mass, non-selective type of destructive
operation in a different part of the brain. Our point of
view was oriented exactly to the opposite," he said.
"This is a selective operation in the cingulum, small in
location and with none of the by-products" which affected
those who had had earlier operations, he added.
His 15-year research had convinced him, Brown said that as
much as a third of the world's emotional diseases - including
those causing sexual assaults and other criminal acts - could
be cured by such surgery.
"There seems no doubt that the cigulum is the central
controlling mechanism for the emotion life of man," he told
the gathering.
Edgar Cayce Readings © 1971, 1993, 1994, 1995 by the Edgar Cayce Foundation