Psychosurgery involves severing or otherwise disabling areas of the brain to treat a personality disorder, behavior disorder, or other mental illness. Modern psychosurgical techniques target the pathways between the limbic system (the portion of the...

A term to describe a range of neurosurgical procedures conducted with the intention of minimizing or alleviating disabling psychological and emotional symptoms. Although crude behaviour modifying brain operations have been performed throughout human...

Psychosurgery is a term for surgeries of the brain involving procedures that modulate the performance of the brain, and thus effect changes in cognition, with the intent to treat or alleviate severe mental illness. It was originally thought that by...

The use of surgical procedures to alter mental states raises many issues. Surgery on the brain has been known for thousands of years, but procedures developed in the 1930s,'40s and '50s, and the reasons for them, raised many ethical issues that remain with us...

Jack D. Pressman. Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1998. 555 pp. $49.95. This is a comprehensive history of the era of psychosurgery (roughly the 1940s and 1950s), when tens of thousands of patients in...