John F. Dedek
T wo moral cases: Psychosurgery and behavior control; gross/y mal{ormed infants Where precisely do we locate the moral issues in these two thorny human problems? PSYCHOSURGERY AND BEHAVIOR CONTROL
ln the summer of 1935 at the Second International Neurology Congress in London Dr. Carlyle Jacobsen reported on the work being done by him and his colleague, Professor John F. Fulton, in their Yale University laboratory, where they were engaged in the modification of the behaviour of monkeys and chimpanzees by the surgical destruction of the prefrontal area of the cerebral cortex. After Jacobsen's presentation a Portuguese neuro-psychiatrist, Dr. Egas Moniz, arose to ask why these same surgical procedures could not be used to relieve anxiety states in man. . Both Jacobsen and Fulton were shocked at the thought. N onetheless Egas Moniz persuaded Almeida Lima to perform under his supervision a prefrontal lobotomy on a human being. The first operation was performed in Lisbon¡ on November 12, 1935 on a mental patient "who had proven refractory to other methods of treatment." Twenty more operations followed, and the results were mixed. Ali of the patients survived; seven were considered recovered and seven were said to have improved. In 1949 Moniz shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Walter Hess "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of prefrontal leucotomy in certain psychoses." In September, 1936 Drs. Walter Freeman and James Watts of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., intro19