Who developed the leucotomy (lobotomy) procedure?

The first significant foray into psychosurgery in the 20th century was conducted by the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz who during the mid-1930s developed the operation known as leucotomy.

The practice was enthusiastically taken up in the United States by the neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman and the neurosurgeon James W. Watts who devised what became the standard prefrontal procedure and named their operative technique lobotomy, although the operation was called leucotomy in the United Kingdom. In spite of the award of the Nobel prize to Moniz in 1949, the use of psychosurgery declined during the 1950s.

By the 1970s the standard Freeman-Watts type of operation was very rare, but other forms of psychosurgery, although used on a much smaller scale, survived.

Moniz was born in 29 of November of 1874 in Avanca, Estarreja, Portugal, as António Caetano de Abreu Freire de Resende. He attended Escola do Padre José Ramos and the Jesuit-run College of Saint Fidelis and studied medicine at the University of Coimbra, graduating in 1899. For the next 12 years, he served as a lecturer for basic medical courses at Coimbra. In 1911, he became a neurology professor at the University of Lisbon, where he worked until his retirement in 1944.

In 1939, Moniz was shot multiple times by a patient suffering from schizophrenia and subsequently used a wheelchair. He continued in private practice until 1955. Moniz died from an internal haemorrhage on 13 December 1955.