These days we tend to look at the past and surgeons performance of lobotomies with horror. But is this an accurate view? Or is it merely looking at a few shocking cases and generalising from that?
For example, I know psychiatric medicines weren't really around back then. So while today most people would be given drugs, in the past this wasn't an option. Even today, surgery is still performed in cases where other treatment doesn't work.
In the past, I believe it was often the case that those with serious mental issues would be hospitalised, and with little hope of treatment, would basically just be warehoused in institutions.
Surgery would enable these people to live in the regular world and ultimatley improve their quality of life.
So could lobotomies, while not good by today's standards, still have been the best available option at the time?
This is highly debatable. Certainly those who performed the procedures thought they were doing good. But the main method of lobotomy of the time basically involved slipping, in essence, an ice pick behind the eye and scrambling the brain around. This often led to a much more sedate individual. But not always. One example can be seen in Howard Dulley's "My Lobotomy." He went on to have even worse behavioral problems and was often institutionalized. It can be debated whether this was a result of his lobotomy or of pre-existing behavioral problems.