| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jack D. Pressman. Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine. (Cambridge History of Medicine.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xv, 555. $49.95.

This book by Jack D. Pressman is at once a valuable history of psychosurgery in the United States, an apt reminder of how easily medical history is misread, and an insightful analysis into the nature of medical science. Between 1936 and 1951, nearly 20,000 Americans had brain operations for the treatment of mental illness. Most of these operations were lobotomies, which severed the connections between the frontal lobes of the brain and its deeper centers. Today, the terms "psychosurgery" and "lobotomy" arouse outrage and tragic visions of patients reduced to an emotionless, zombie-like state. Moreover, we know, the operations did not meet the standards of "good" medical science: the doctors who performed them did not have a sound theoretical or experimental basis for what they were doing. Therefore, they must have been incompetent or malicious. The usual moral drawn from the story of psychosurgery is that we must never again allow such charlatans to violate the protocols of "good" medical science. . . .

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