📖 Today in History🇲🇾 Malaysia
The Cut Brain: The Dark Story of Lobotomies in Nusantara and World Asylums
Between the 1930s and 1970s, a radical neurosurgical procedure called lobotomy—cutting the connections of the prefrontal cortex—was systematically performed on patients with mental disorders in various countries, including colonial hospitals in Malaya and Dutch East Indies. Created by António Egas Moniz and popularized by Walter Freeman, this procedure was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize despite weak clinical evidence and often devastating effects on human identity. This story is important because it reveals the failure of medical institutions to balance power, ethics, and human dignity—a historical lesson still relevant in modern psychiatric discourse.
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