27 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
  2. Feb 2023
    1. 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.

      Walter Freeman's barbaric obsession and fervent practice of the miracle cure for mental illness that is the "transorbital lobotomy"

  3. Aug 2022
  4. Mar 2022
    1. Russia also produces enormous amounts of nutrients, like potash and phosphate - key ingredients in fertilisers, which enable plants and crops to grow. "Half the world's population gets food as a result of fertilisers... and if that's removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%," Mr Holsether said.

      Geopolitical vulnerability of the existing dependency on Russian fertilizer.

  5. Aug 2020
  6. Jul 2020
    1. Rojas, F. L., Jiang, X., Montenovo, L., Simon, K. I., Weinberg, B. A., & Wing, C. (2020). Is the Cure Worse than the Problem Itself? Immediate Labor Market Effects of COVID-19 Case Rates and School Closures in the U.S. (Working Paper No. 27127; Working Paper Series). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w27127

    1. Acknowledgments

      ”Blasphemy” and “irony” are mentioned--and continued through Kafer--to connote less math and masculinity and more--frankly--code, spoken from reclaimed empowerment. I couldn’t digest Haraway’s prose--within the coming Information Age she concentrates a lot of terms like machine parts herself--”Star Wars,” “Magic Mountain,” even “goddess” (Haraway 57). I wished for her own Dictionary.com to identify what these references meant to her.

      Did she mean to confound us for shock-factor’s sake? Because within her text that I could decipher I felt a postgendered, post-species, colorblind coalition that I couldn’t fully find affinity within, as much as the vague image of the Cyborg tantalizes me. For unity did she mean to catalyze divisiveness through language?

  7. Apr 2020
    1. In severe cases, COVID-19 may present as pneumonia, the acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), with or without both distributive and cardiogenic shock, to which elderly populations with preexisting medical comorbidities are the most vulnerable
  8. Dec 2019
  9. Apr 2019
    1. evidence of a racial transfer gap for historically underrepresented minority students

      Is this "racial transfer gap" on top of the phenomenon of "transfer shock"?

  10. Oct 2014
    1. In the present study, the impact of PC on the activity and feedback regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) impaired in depression has been studied in the model of shock-induced depression in rats.

      Shock induced depression