Psychosurgery

   The modern history of operating on the brain to relieve mental illness begins with Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burckhardt (1836–1907), who in 1882 became director of the private Préfargier Clinic in Marin, near Neuchâtel. Starting in December 1888, he operated on the brains of six patients to relieve the symptoms of schizophrenia. These largely unsuccessful operations, when reported at a medical congress in Berlin in 1890—and then in the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie in 1891—caused disquiet in German medical circles; no further psychosurgery was done in Central Europe until leukotomy in the late 1930s. (See Lobotomy.) Almost simultaneously, as historian German Berrios tells the story in 150 Years of British Psychiatry, in 1889 Thomas Claye Shaw (1841–1927), a psychiatrist in a London asylum and lecturer in psychological medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, asked surgeon Harrison Cripps (Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons [FRCS], Eng. 1875) to open the cranium and resect the dura of a patient suffering from neurosyphilis, in order to drain off fluid that was increasing intracranial pressure. Reported in the British Medical Journal in the same year, this operation stimulated a wave of similar procedures in neuosyphilis as well as in other mental diseases—on the grounds that "relieving intracranial pressure" was therapeutic—in Britain, France, and the United States; this boom in psychosurgery continued until about the mid-1890s. Thereafter, little more psychosurgery was performed until the first leukotomy in late 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal. (See Lobotomy.)