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...

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...