The prefrontal leukotomy procedure developed by Moniz and Lima was modified in 1936 by American neurologists Walter J. Freeman II and James W. Watts. Freeman preferred the use of the term lobotomy and therefore renamed the procedure “prefrontal lobotomy.” The American team soon developed the Freeman-Watts standard lobotomy, which laid out an exact protocol for how a leukotome (in this case, a spatula) was to be inserted and manipulated during the surgery. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now lobotomyThe use of lobotomy in the United States was resisted and criticized heavily by American neurosurgeons. However, because Freeman managed to promote the success of the surgery through the media, lobotomy became touted as a miracle procedure, capturing the attention of the public and leading to an overwhelming demand for the operation. In 1945 Freeman streamlined the procedure, replacing it with transorbital lobotomy, in which a picklike instrument was forced through the back of the eye sockets to pierce the thin bone that separates the eye sockets from the frontal lobes. The pick’s point was then inserted into the frontal lobe and used to sever connections in the brain (presumably between the prefrontal cortex and thalamus). In 1946 Freeman performed this procedure for the first time on a patient, who was subdued prior to the operation with electroshock treatment.The transorbital lobotomy procedure, which Freeman performed very quickly, sometimes in less than 10 minutes, was used on many patients with relatively minor mental disorders that Freeman believed did not warrant traditional lobotomy surgery, in which the skull itself was opened. A large proportion of such lobotomized patients exhibited reduced tension or agitation, but many also showed other effects, such as apathy, passivity, lack of initiative, poor ability to concentrate, and a generally decreased depth and intensity of their emotional response to life. Some died as a result of the procedure. However, those effects were not widely reported in the 1940s, and at that time the long-term effects were largely unknown. Because the procedure met with seemingly widespread success, Moniz was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (along with Swiss physiologist Walter Rudolf Hess). Lobotomies were performed on a wide scale during the 1940s; Freeman himself performed or supervised more than 3,500 lobotomies by the late 1960s. The practice gradually fell out of favour beginning in the mid-1950s, when antipsychotics, antidepressants, and other medications that were much more effective in treating and alleviating the distress of mentally disturbed patients came into use. Today lobotomy is rarely performed; however, shock therapy and psychosurgery (the surgical removal of specific regions of the brain) occasionally are used to treat patients whose symptoms have resisted all other treatments.

Blu-menberg’s first collection of note cards dates back to the early 1940s butwas lost during the war; the Marbach collection contains cards from 1947onwards. 18

Since 1941 New South Wales has had continuous Labour government, under which extensions of public enterprise have been few in number, but in some cases important. The Walsh Island Dockyard had been allowed to run down during the late ’twenties, and after accumulating a El million loss during the Depression, had been closed by the Stevens Government in 1933 and its remnants of machinery sold by auction, virtually at scrap prices. The McKell Government, in accord with a 1941 election promise to improve employment opportunities in Newcastle, used the wartime need of ships and engineering services as a reason for establishing in 1942, with some of the old facilities but on a more suitable site in Newcastle harbour, the N.S.W. Government Engineering and Shipbuilding Undertaking. With initial financial help from the Commonwealth Government, this proved an effective enterprise both during and after the war, and at present employs about 1,800 people. It has undertaken shipbuilding for the Commonwealth, dredge repairs and other services for the Public Works Department, merchant ship repairs and general engineering, and it operates a floating dock. As some earnest of further intentions, the 1942 bill for the Dockyard at first contained a general clause authorizing the Governor-in-Council to set up other industrial undertakings, as the Minister-in-Charge, Mr. J. J. Cahill, said the Govern- ment was committed to consider, “at the appropriate time, the re-establishment of such State enterprises as the needs of the people demand”. However, the Legislative Council removed this clause, and a separate statute was used in 1946 to re-establish a State Brickworks. The original works had been sold by the Stevens Government in 1936 under circumstances to be described shortly. The profits of the new Brick- works had by 1951 covered the initial losses of the establishment years. The financial operations of both of these restored undertakings are conducted on the same principles as those of their predecessors, that is, by means of a special deposit account in the Treasury.

That summer was the first time he rented an inexpensive cottage on Gotts, a remote island off the coast of Maine; it lacked running water and electricity but was covered in pine forests and romantic mists. There, he wrote Levin, he was “reading nothing more frivolous than Plotinus and Husserl,” and Harry was welcome to join him “if Wellfleet becomes too worldly.”