Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine
Cambridge University Press: 1998. PP.555 £40.00, $49.95
But, as the late Jack Pressman shows in this impressive but flawed work, the story is much more complex. The generally accepted view, which is over-simplified, is that the idea stemmed from the experimental work in the early 1930s of John Fulton, professor of physiology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who had been a pupil of Sir Charles Sherrington. Fulton showed that cutting nerve tracts under the frontal lobes of monkeys relieved ‘experimental neuroses’. He reported these results at a conference in London in 1935, where the audience included Egas Moniz, who was not only an academic neurosurgeon (then a rare bird) but had also been Foreign Minister of Portugal. Moniz was inspired to apply the procedure to human subjects suffering from severe mental illness, and the first few cases suggested that this was a promising, perhaps revolutionary, method of treatment. He also invented X-ray examination of the cerebral circulation, and was eventually to be rewarded in 1949 with the Nobel prize for physiology or medicine.
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