Lobotomy in 2018 by Tiana Y. If doctors switched over to the 1930s, the medical world now would be in risk. Mental illnesses would not be treated the same; lobotomies would still be at its peak of popularity; people’s lives would be reaching an end or finding itself at a beginning. Lobotomy is a procedure that originated back in the 1930s. It was used because doctors believed it could help with mental illness. As time moves you will be informed on a lobotomy is, what it was supposed to help with, the well and bad results of what it has done, and what it has evolved into today. The definition for lobotomy is “The operation of cutting into a lobe, as of the brain or lung”(Dictionary.com). In the 1930’s doctors figured out that by separating parts of the frontal lobe of the brain, they could alter a …show more content…
In the United States lobotomies are very rare to perform today but are still in fact legal in the U.S. If a doctor were to ever suggest it, every single ounce of medication they tried on the patient must have failed, which is extremely rare. But if it ever were to resort to that it would not be doing all of the things Freeman did, like an ice pick wouldn’t be practical. You would be going in and removing nothing but only specific brain areas, otherwise a surgery known as ‘psychosurgery’(Lewis). In the late 1940’s to early 50’s 40,000 to 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States alone. Now knowing that it is banned in other countries, Britain, Scandinavia, and a few other western European countries allowed it but only on a limited scale just like the United States certained until the 1980’s(“Psychotropic Drugs”). It was said that Freeman was more of a showman, he would perform lobotomies left and right just to impress. He once performed 25 lobotomies in one single day. That’s 4 hours and 10 minutes of work(Tartakovsky). In the 1950’s the Soviet union banned lobotomies and said