Behavioral Medicine, September 22nd, 1999
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 the United States underwent brain surgery, most commonly lobotomy, in an effort to treat their mental illness. Lobotomies tell out of favor in the 1950s and are now generally viewed as worthless.
The central question of the book is this: How did a therapy so highly valued at one time later come to be seen as virtual quackery? Press...
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