Moniz’s leukotomy (or leucotomy, from the Greek for “cutting white,” in this case the brain’s white matter) soon became popularly known as the lobotomy. It was not, however, the surgical procedure now generally associated with lobotomies. Rather, Moniz drilled two holes in the patient’s skull and injected pure alcohol into the frontal lobes of the brain to destroy the tissue, in an effort to alter the patient’s behavior.
Within a year of Moniz’s procedure at Lisbon’s Santa Marta Hospital, American neurosurgeons Walter Freeman and James Watts had performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the United States. Their approach, which they would continue refining in subsequent surgeries, also involved drilling holes, but instead of using alcohol they surgically severed the nerves connecting the prefrontal cortex to the thalamus.
With various refinements, this became standard operating procedure for the prefrontal lobotomy.
Lobotomies were performed on patients suffering from severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia and clinical depression, although its use on people identified as having social disorders was not unknown. That the lobotomy succeeded in altering a person’s personality and behavior is beyond dispute, but the results were often drastic, and occasionally fatal.”
Read more at Wired
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