In this link, a writer has gone into the history of lobotomies (first performed in the 1930s) and the social environment that meant literally stabbing into patients' brains with icepicks became a clinically accepted treatment and pointed out the parallels with today. It's well worth a read, and one of the issues seems to be that once something is accepted, the fact that it is accepted is a reason to continue to accept it! Remind you of anything?
4thwavenow.com/2017/02/10/lobotomy-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-miracle-cure/
Now, how long did it carry on for? This is an interview with a woman from earlier this year, about lobotomies being performed on lesbians, for being lesbians, in 1960s Britain.
extract
Luchia Fitzgerald, 74, is a renowned lesbian activist and credited with creating the first women’s refuge outside ofLondon.
But during the late 1960s, she was almost forced into having a lobotomy to ‘cure’ her sexuality following a run in with the police.
Just a teenager at the time, she had been living homeless inManchesterafter arriving in the city in 1961. She had come across a stolen bicycle and used it to get home, resulting in her being stopped by the police.
Due to her young age, she was assigned a social worker, who noted that she was suffering from severe depression. Their conversations led to Luchia revealing her sexuality, and the woman told her it was likely her ‘lesbianism’ was the root of her problems.
Luchia said: ‘She sent me to a doctor. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me, but I thought if anybody can help me, that’d be great.
‘I thought there was nothing wrong with me to me. I was natural, but these people seemed to think I wasn’t. They were the professionals, and you listen to them at that early age.’
Luchia went to a hospital which would later become North Manchester General, where, unbeknownst to her, a number of experimental treatments were taking place with the aim of ‘curing’ homosexual behaviour.
A doctor then asked her ‘terrible’ intrusive questions about her body and sex life, which appalled her as a practicing Catholic at the time.
He told her he would send her for a ‘little operation’ to cure the feelings she was having – which immediately signalled to her that something was very wrong.
Luchia said: ‘I knew I was about to be sucked into something I couldn’t get out of. I was sat in front of this massive mahogany table between us and his back was against the wall.
‘I just thought, if I can get my little legs up on this table at the front I can pin that fecker to the wall and get out the door. And I did.
‘I ran through all these corridors, the sweat was pouring off me, I was frightened to death. I was nearly weeing myself. Eventually I found a door that let me outside and I got out.’
Luchia managed to reach a friend’s house and stayed there while the police hunted for her. Two officers later turned up at the door and asked if she was Luchia Fitzgerald, which she denied.
She believes the officers knew she was lying – particularly as they noted her distinctive Irish accent – but they chose to accept her claims and eventually walk away.
‘I’ve always wondered if one of them was gay, or if they knew what was happening at the hospitals,’ Luchia said.
‘They saved my life. Months later, I was washing glasses behind a bar and I met someone who’d had a lobotomy in Belfast. She told me, if I come in tomorrow and I don’t know who you are it’s because I’ve had an operation and it’s ruined my memory.
‘She then explained how it happened, and I realised that was what they were trying to do to me. I was thanking my lucky stars.
‘Other older lesbians I spoke to told me I should never go back there again. They all knew people it’d happened to. We were guinea pigs back then, they had free rein on anybody outside the norm.’
Continues: metro.co.uk/2021/02/23/lgbt-history-week-i-was-sent-for-a-lobotomy-to-cure-my-sexuality-14106930/