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SUMMARY: This article examines how lobotomy came to be banned in the Soviet Union in 1950. The author finds that Soviet psychiatrists viewed lobotomy as a treatment of "last resort," and justified its use on the grounds that it helped make patients more manageable in hospitals and allowed some to return to work. Lobotomy was challenged by psychiatrists who saw mental illness as a "whole body" process and believed that injuries caused by lobotomy were therefore more significant than changes to behavior. Between 1947 and 1949, these theoretical and ethical debates within Soviet psychiatry became politicized. Psychiatrists competing for institutional control attacked their rivals' ideas using slogans drawn from Communist Party ideological campaigns. Party authorities intervened in psychiatry in 1949 and 1950, persecuting Jewish psychiatrists and demanding adherence to Ivan Pavlov's theories. Psychiatrists' existing conflict over lobotomy was adopted as part of the party's own campaign against harmful Western influence in Soviet society.
KEYWORDS: psychiatry, lobotomy, psychosurgery, Soviet Union, Pavlov, medical ethics
On December 9,1950, the Soviet Minister of Health signed a decree banning lobotomy in the Soviet Union. According to the decree, the radical psychiatric treatment did not meet the standards of Soviet medical practice because it was "theoretically unjustified" and "contradicts the fundamental principles of I. P. Pavlov's physiological theory."1 In 1950 the Soviet Union was virtually alone in banning lobotomy. This was the heyday of lobotomy in the United States, Great Britain, and Scandinavia; lobotomy inventor Egaz Moniz had just been awarded the Noble Prize in Physiology or Medicine.2 Why then was lobotomy banned in the Soviet Union? This article explores how Soviet authorities came to the conclusion that lobotomy ought to be banned. It asks what this can tell us about mid-twentieth-century medical ethics and the evaluation of psychiatric therapies. And it seeks to understand what the ban on lobotomy can tell us about the way psychiatry functioned as a profession in the context of Late Stalinism.
Prefrontal leucotomy was first reported in 1936 by Portuguese psychiatrist Egaz Moniz.3 In the operation, Moniz and his assistant severed some of the fibers that connected the prefrontal cortex to the frontal lobes. Moniz reported remarkable results in his first twenty patients: 70 percent (fourteen cases) were either "healed" or "improved"; the...