The Blog

Don’t Use Ice Picks for Brain Surgery

September 22, 2022
The first time I ever heard of a lobotomy was in the early 1980s. I was a medical student, but I didn’t learn about it in class. Instead, I was in a darkened room with a bunch of other family members, watching a family home movie filmed 30 years earlier. The scene was some kind of a garden party, and in the midst of the lively antics of my parents, their siblings and my great-aunts and great-uncles, there was a late middle-aged woman who just…stood there. Eventually someone took her arm and led her to a chair where she just…sat ...