Icepicks, Brains, and Nobel Prizes: The History of Lobotomies in Sweden
Drilling a hole into a patient’s skull and inserting a thin metal rod to destroy large parts of the frontal lobe seems an unbelievably cruel form of medical intervention. Yet in 1949 Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize in medicine for inventing this procedure, now known as lobotomy. At the time, with psychopharmacology still in its infancy, hardly any treatment was available for severe mental illnesses. Still, psychosurgery was controversial from the very beginning as many patients experienced devastating postoperative effects.
Karolinska Institutet was at the forefront of these developments: besides awarding the Nobel Prize for the procedure, its closely associated hospital, Karolinska Sjukhuset, served as one of the main centres that carried out this type of surgery in Sweden. However, it was also at Karolinska Institutet where Lars Leksell, professor of neurosurgery, invented procedures that greatly reduced the damage of brain interventions.
Drawing on the collections held at the Hagströmer Library, I retrace the development of psychosurgery and uncover the motives behind its initial emphatic reception and sudden abandonment in Sweden and beyond.
Lukas J. Meier is a fellow at the Harvard Center for Ethics – specialising in artificial intelligence, medical ethics, and neurophilosophy – and the 2025 Hagströmer Fellow. Previously, he was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at the at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Lukas studied philosophy at the University of Oxford and political science at the University of Göttingen. His doctoral thesis, completed at the Universities of St Andrews and Heidelberg, linked the topic of brain death to the debate on personal identity. Lukas teaches in ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and medical ethics.
ONSDAGEN 4 JUNI KL. 18.00
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