In the 1930s, a handful of aspiring medical luminaries imagined that mental illness could be fixed by cutting into the brain. In this month's history exploration, Carrie and Ben seek to understand why this seemed like a good idea at the time and what led to the procedure being banned a few decades later. When the awarding of a Nobel Prize is subsequently considered "an astounding error of judgment," bad things probably happened.

Show Notes:

• Violence, mental illness, and the brain - A brief history of psychosurgery: Part 1 - From trephination to lobotomy

• Frontal leukotomy and related psychosurgical procedures in the era before antipsychotics (1935-1954): A historical overview.

• The Extraction of the Stone of Madness

• Open Dialogue: A New Approach to Mental Healthcare

• A Systematic Review of the Soteria Paradigm for the Treatment of People Diagnosed With Schizophrenia

• NPR: My Lobotomy (Podcast)

• Lobotomy (Wikipedia)

• Trepanning (Wikipedia)