(via TEDEd) In 1935, researchers found that after removing the frontal lobes of two chimps, they no longer experienced frustration or anxiety. Neurologist Egas Moniz believed that replicating this in ...

My friend Jesper Vaczy Kragh has recently published an excellent book on the history of lobotomy in Denmark. Lobotomy was a psychosurgical treatment for mental illness that became popular during the ...

The lobotomy, once a widely used method for treating mental illness, epilepsy and even chronic headaches, is generating fresh controversy 30 years after doctors stopped performing the procedure now ...

It's true that more than 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the U.S. in the late 1940s and early 1950s by inserting a medical instrument resembling an ice pick through patients' eye sockets and into ...

The lobotomy has taken on mythical qualities in American popular culture. For a time in the postwar period, the procedure — which in its best-known form involved inserting a pick-like instrument ...

In the early 20th century we had very little understanding of mental illness and how to treat it. Into this knowledge vacuum stepped Walter Freeman, a charismatic American neurologist with a bold ...

This week on the podcast, we remember Howard Dully, who died earlier this year. He was given a lobotomy in 1960 when he was just 12 years old. In this documentary, he goes in search of the story ...