Bilateral prefrontal leucotomy: An ex post facto archival study of a complete hospital sample

Abstract

Extensive life history data were compiled on 377 psychiatric patients who underwent prefrontal leucotomy during the period 1952–1967. Equivalent data were compiled for (1) a group of 16 patients from the same population who were rejected for the operation, and (2) a group of 100 control patients matched to 100 randomly chosen leucotomized patients (random leucotomy group). There were no systematic differences indicated in the leucotomy versus random leucotomy, random leucotomy versus control, and combined leucotomy (n = 377) versus rejected-for-leucotomy group comparisons. In further analyses, 71 “successful” leucotomy patients were selected and compared to the remaining “unsuccessful” patients. The successful group was strikingly differentiated from the unsuccessful group on a number of good prognostic indicators. Overall, prefrontal leucotomy, as performed under the conditions of this study, was not effective generally in the treatment of psychiatric disease. However, with respect to the group of successful leucotomies, the data suggests that prefrontal leucotomy was effective in a considerable proportion of the affective disorders.