Strange, Weird & Bizarre Medical Cases & Facts

What do Gottlieb Burckhardt, Egas Moniz, and Walter Freeman have in common?  Other than the fact that I had never heard of them before researching this topic, it turns out that they were all dudes who lobotomized their patients.

photo by OpenSkyMedia

A lobotomy is a brain surgery that cuts the connectors between the front bits and the back bits of the brain.  European doctors started performing the procedure on mental patients in the early 20th century, along with other radical therapies for extreme mental illness and insanity.  Other procedures included electroshock (or electroconvulsive) therapy, drug-induced deep sleep therapy, and more.

I am not, by any means, denouncing the entire psychiatric community for coming up with risky, damaging, and invasive radical treatments to try out on helpless mental patients.  Nope.  Not me.  Anyway…

Gottlieb Burckhardt was a psychiatrist in the late 1800′s and he performed lobotomies on six patients with varied diagnoses.  Two of the patients simply became more subdued, one died shortly after surgery, two were unaffected altogether, and one seemed to improve but then later committed suicide.

Egas Moniz was a Portuguese neurologist changed the surgery a bit – he drilled holes into the heads and injected alcohol to kill the frontal lobes.  I guess that didn’t work, because he came up with a tool called a leucotome that was really just a wire loop that scrambled stuff around in the patient’s heads.  This work, which took place in the mid-thirties, had better success rates than one would expect, earned Moniz the 1949 Nobel Prize for medicine.

Walter Freeman studied Moniz’s work and along with a guy named James Watts altered the practice and created their own procedure.  Called the Freeman-Watts procedure, they would drill into the scalp, and then later would go in through the eye socket.

1949 was the big year for lobotomies, with more than 18608 lobotomies taking place in the United States by 1951.  JFK’s sister had a lobotomy when she was 23 and she was never OK after that.  Same with Tennessee Williams’ sister Rose.  Other people, like Howard Dully and Alys Robi turned out just fine, but at the same time lots of people died.

That’s probably why they don’t do them anymore.

As a follow-up to my last post about art implants and body modification, I submit to you the bagel forehead – a craze sweeping the trendier clubs in Japan.

There is one encouraging thing about this practice.  If you don’t like it, at least it’s not permanent.  It is, however, probably painful.  The bulges like the ones you see above are created by the insertion of a needle under the skin through which saline drips to create the bump.  Once the selected part is inflated, the person who has been inflated can poke and prod the bulbous part.  A popular look is to press a dent into the center, creating the bagel look.

People choose all different types of body parts to inflate, but the forehead is popular because it is so obvious.  One drawback is that frequent inflation of one’s forehead can lead to a saggy forehead.  The skin can get stretched permanently.

But hey, there’s always Botox, right?

J.M. Barrie once said “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”  Can you imagine remembering ALL the roses EVERY December?  Can you imagine remembering pretty much everything?  That’s what it is like for people who having Piking, or Hyperthymestic Syndrome.

photo by gutter

In an article for the Wisconsin Medical Society, Dr. Darold Treffert talks about the different forms of extremely good memory.  He talks about memory where people memorize facts, music, geographic details automatically.  He says that they are mainly the result of savant memory, though he does qualify this in bringing up cases where the people with extraordinary memories were not savants, but mnemonists – people who retain images but can “turn off” and force themselves to forget the huge amount of data their brain collects and stores.

Then he tells us about Brad Williams, who has hyperthymestic syndrome.  Brad has been interviewed by Good Morning America, who calls him “the Human Google.”  His brother, Eric, has made a biography on Brad.  Called “Unforgettable,” the documentary is due out soon.

Brad is one of only a handful of people considered for study under the diagnosis of hyperthymestic syndrome.  The subjects are able to recall the day of the week for any given date, and are able to tell researchers all about what happened to them that day – what they were wearing, who they saw, and what public events happened that day.  Of the three people studied, two are left-handed, but scientists are not sure if there is correlation there, because so few people are actually diagnosed with this syndrome.

Do you know more about this?  Do you have additional information to share?  Please comment below!

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