Doctors treated mental illness with an ice pick through the eye socket
About 10,000 Americans received a procedure that took less than ten minutes, done without anesthesia, during that era.
Astral Codex Ten · Your Book Review: Great And Desperate CuresIn the 1940s, one common form of lobotomy in the United States involved driving an eight-inch, ice-pick-like tool through the eye socket and into the brain.
The transorbital lobotomy took less than ten minutes and used no anesthesia and no gloves. The doctor first used electric shock to knock the patient unconscious, then forced the sharp instrument through the thin bone above the eye, often with a mallet. Once inside the frontal lobes, he swept the tool side to side in an unproven guess about how it might work, aiming to sever nerve fibers that some thought sustained fixed, distorted thoughts, though practitioners disagreed about why it worked. The crack of bone breaking was enough to make at least one experienced clinician faint.
Its proponents billed it for schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, and it frequently went to individuals without serious illness who had not tried milder treatments. About 10,000 of the 50,000 American lobotomies during the 1940s and just after used this method.
Questions people ask
Why go in through the eye?
The eye offered a shortcut. The bone above the eye is thin enough to be broken through with force, so the doctor could reach the frontal lobes without drilling holes in the skull, using a surgeon, or working in a hospital.
Did it cure mental illness?
Rarely as advertised. Some patients became calmer and returned to work, especially those with strong emotions tied to depression. Most were left apathetic, impaired in judgment and planning, or profoundly incapacitated.
Why did doctors stop doing it?
A drug replaced it. Chlorpromazine, approved by federal regulators in 1954, calmed psychosis without surgery and required far less skill, time, and money. Lobotomy use collapsed within a few years.