Newspapers and magazines wrote glowing articles about this “miracle” of modern medicine, and, in 1949, fourteen years after its introduction, its inventor, Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, was awarded a Nobel Prize. That therapy, of course, was prefrontal lobotomy.
Society needed to be protected from the insane, and it was this second function—hospital as jail—that had taken precedence when the hospital opened in 1756.
