Classic lobotomy peaked in the 1940s and 1950s and had faded by the 1960s, as antipsychotic drugs arrived.

Image-guided surgery for severe, treatment-resistant OCD exists today as a distant descendant of lobotomy.

Modern procedures are targeted and tightly screened, but the evidence base is still small.

The history is a lesson in how desperation, thin evidence, and weak oversight can combine.

Say "lobotomy" and most people picture a patient on a gurney, a dimly lit operating room at the end of a long, empty hallway, and a doctor holding something resembling an ice pick. Surgeons still operate on the brain to treat psychiatric illness, but things are a little different today. It isn't the lobotomy of the 1940s, but it isn't entirely unrelated either. So, are lobotomies still performed today? Sort of.

What a Lobotomy Actually Was

In late 1935, Portuguese neurologists began destroying connections between the frontal lobes and deeper brain structures in patients with severe mental illness. The 1949 Nobel Prize was awarded to one of them for this work. Walter Freeman, an American neurologist, later popularized a faster "transorbital" version that reached the brain through the eye socket, and tens of thousands of lobotomies were eventually........

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