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Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine)
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 610
EAN: 9780521524599
ISBN: 0521524598
Label: Cambridge University Press
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 574
Publication Date: August 08, 2002
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Studio: Cambridge University Press
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Editorial Review:
During the 1940s and 1950s, tens of thousands of Americans underwent some form of psychosurgery; that is, their brains were operated upon for the putative purpose of treating mental illness. From today's perspective, such medical practices appear foolhardy at best, perhaps even barbaric; most commentators thus have seen in the story of lobotomy an important warning about the kinds of hazards that society will face whenever incompetent or malicious physicians are allowed to overstep the boundaries of valid medical science. Last Resort challenges the previously accepted psychosurgery story and raises new questions about what we should consider its important lessons.
This book revisits the heyday of psychosurgery in America in the 1940s and 1950s when tens of thousands of patients were given brain operations in the hope of relieving mental illness. By exploring the history of psychiatry as a discipline and a medical specialty, the book accounts for why so many trusted and caring physicians could reasonably believe that the procedure benefited their patients. The book uses the story of psychosurgery to challenge our usual models of how physicians decide that a treatment works.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Brilliant, gifted inquiry into the 'why' of psychosurgery.
This is not a lightly undertaken book to read. It is an exemplary work on the social, political and medical trends which led to neuro/psychiatric surgery being tried, accepted, and then discarded after research found it to be severely lacking in moral and therapeutic worth. Pressman did an outstanding job of research into the advancement of lobotomies in psychiatry as a means to control patients, who up til that time, had no resort or cure with which to treat these patients. The drugs which are used ... Read More
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