Two Solitudes: Wilder Penfield, Ewen Cameron, and the Search for a Better Lobotomy

Author:

Prkachin Yvan1

Affiliation:

1. Yvan Prkachin – History of Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Abstract

In the 1940s, Wilder Penfield carried out a series of experimental psychosurgeries with the psychiatrist D. Ewen Cameron. This article explores Penfield’s brief foray into psychosurgery and uses this episode to re-examine the emergence of his surgical enterprise. Penfield’s greatest achievement – the surgical treatment of epilepsy – grew from the same roots as psychosurgery, and the histories of these treatments overlap in surprising ways. Within the contexts of Rockefeller-funded neuropsychiatry and Adolf Meyer’s psychobiology, Penfield’s frontal lobe operations (including a key operation on his sister) played a crucial role in the development of lobotomy in the 1930s. The combination of ambiguous data and the desire to collaborate with a psychiatrist encouraged Penfield to try to develop a superior operation. However, unlike his collaboration with psychiatrists, Penfield’s productive working relationship with psychologists encouraged him to abandon the experimental “gyrectomy” procedure. The story of Penfield’s attempt to find a better lobotomy can help us to examine different forms of interdisciplinarity within biomedicine.

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Subject

General Medicine

Reference96 articles.

1. McGill University Archives, Herbert Jasper Fonds [H.J. Fonds], Box 1, Folder 11.

2. Linda Leith, Introducing Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes: A Reader’s Guide (Toronto: ECW Press, 1990).

3. For an overview, see Katja Guenther, Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Anne Harrington, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 32–106.

4. Jefferson Lewis, Something Hidden: A Biography of Wilder Penfield (Halifax, NS: Formac, 1983), 213–14; and Richard Leblanc, “Against the Current: Wilder Penfield, the Frontal Lobes and Psychosurgery,” Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences 46, no. 5 (2019): 585–90. The historiography of psychosurgery has been dominated by American historians but has recently opened up to other national and global perspectives. See esp. Brianne M. Collins and Henderikus J. Stam, “A Transnational Perspective on Psychosurgery: Beyond Portugal and the United States,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 23, no. 4 (2014): 335–54; Brianne Collins, “Ontario’s Leucotomy Program: The Roles of Patient, Physician, and Profession,” MA thesis, University of Calgary, 2012; and Collins, “Uncharted Territory: Psychosurgery in Western Canada, 1935–1970,” PhD thesis, University of Calgary, 2020. As Collins demonstrates, the only other neurosurgeon in Canada to take up psychosurgery initially was K.G. McKenzie of Toronto, who performed the first such operation in Canada in 1941. However, it is notable that McKenzie’s technique was mainly a variation of the traditional Moniz leucotomy operation.

5. According to Anne Collins, their relationship was rocky from the beginning and deteriorated quickly as Cameron set up his own institutional power base. Anne Collins, In the Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1997), 65-66, 104-8

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1. The First Resort;2023-01-16

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