(1) Some medical experts claim that a leukotomy can help treat anorexia and suicidal depression.(2) In other patients, however, the operation had no success, and Moniz was cautious to propose that leukotomy should be used only when the case was so hopeless as to warrant it.(3) At that time there did not exist any effective treatment whatsoever for schizophrenia, and the leukotomy managed at least to make life more endurable for the patients and their surroundings.(4) During the next ten years various methods of frontal leukotomy were developed by Moniz, Freeman and Watts.(5) Solms discovered that patients who had had a prefrontal leukotomy , a common surgical procedure for mental illness in the 1950s and 60s, reported loss of dreaming.(6) While neurosurgeons cut their teeth performing leukotomies to hold the frontal lobes in check, psychoanalysis flourished in North America in the 1950s and 1960s.(7) In America, Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist, read an article Moniz published about the leukotomies he had performed.(8) This case highlights the focal nature of central pain mechanisms and the possible value of selective subparietal leukotomies in the management of central pain.
