Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz (Photo/Beijing News)

Award: The development of lobotomy

How could an operation leading to dementia win the award?

Antonio Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist and neurosurgeon, was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his development of lobotomy.

This is a horrific form of surgery. Surgeons had to perforate the patient’s brain and cut away most of the white substance from the frontal lobes

Under the instructions of Moniz, surgeons completed the first lobotomy in 1935. In the next year, Moniz published the results of his experiment in a paper. Subsequently, based on clinical trials on 40 patients, Moniz claimed that lobotomy was “a simple and credible surgery that can be widely applied to treat mental disorder.”

The jury agreed by a majority to award Moniz the Nobel Prize for Medicine in recognition of his special contribution to the treatment of mental illness.

However, patients tended to lose mental functions after the surgery and seemed to become retarded, and there was also a risk of death.

In the same year as he won his award, Moniz was shot by one of his patients and was afterwards confined to a wheelchair. Moniz died in 1955, as his theory began to fall out of favor. The surgery was largely abandoned in the 1960s. .

Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Moniz did make a contribution to the field of medicine. Cerebral angiography, developed by Moniz, is still widely practiced.