Tangent: your user name is excellent.
On track: it's difficult to think of medical scandals over history that weren't dismissed, then ridiculed as unfounded panic, then slowly but accelerating, 'something everybody knew and nobody knows why it took so long to fix'.
Tangential again:
"This would all be rather touching if it weren’t taken from “The Lobotomist,” Jack El-Hai’s biography of Freeman, who was America’s foremost practitioner of the procedure. The patients he visited were people whose brains he had mutilated — inserting a “picklike instrument” through the eye socket, piercing the thin bone, and jamming it into the delicate tissue of the prefrontal lobes, leaving permanent scars on the very seat of personality and consciousness.
Today, we rightly view this procedure with horror. Even within Freeman’s lifetime, it fell into disrepute, a fact of which Freeman seems to have been acutely conscious. He must have hoped that he could find evidence for lobotomy’s benefits, enough to salvage his legacy."
I can’t help feeling sad for that broken old man, at the end riddled with cancer and missing a significant chunk of his colon, yet still clinging to the wheel of his camper bus as though one more mile, one more case history, might somehow turn an atrocity into a triumph. In his desperation to become a medical hero, he had become a hero out of Greek tragedy: consigned to ignominy by his own hubris, and doomed to struggle against a fate that was inevitable.
archive version of What the world can learn from a lobotomy surgeon’s horrible mistake - The Washington Post
https://archive.ph/HjXYo