American lobotomy
Subtitle: a rhetorical history
By: Jenell Johnson
Series: Corporealities: Discourses of disability; Corporealities
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 220
ISBN-13: 9780472119448
Copyright date: 2014
Subjects: Frontal lobotomy; Psychosurgery; History
Description: "American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History takes one of the most infamous procedures in the history of medicine as its subject. Through a close study of representations of lobotomy in a wide variety of cultural texts, American Lobotomy offers a rhetorical history of the infamous procedure and illustrates its continued effect on American medicine. The development of lobotomy in 1935 was heralded as a "miracle cure" by newspapers and magazines, which hoped openly that the "soul surgery" would empty the nation's perennially blighted asylums. However, the miracle cure soon began to fall from favor with the American public, as the operation became characterized as a barbaric practice with suspiciously authoritarian overtones. Only twenty years after the first operation, lobotomists initially praised for their "therapeutic courage" were condemned for their barbarity, an image that has only soured in subsequent decades. Taking on previously abandoned texts like science fiction, horror film, political polemics, and conspiracy theory, Johnson employs these discarded texts to write a rhetorical history of the operation, showing how lobotomy's entanglement with social and political narratives contributed to a powerful image of the operation that persists to this day. In a provocative challenge to the history of medicine, American Lobotomy argues that lobotomy's rhetorical history is crucial to understanding lobotomy's medical history, offering a case study of how medicine accumulates meaning as it circulates in public culture, and it stands as an argument for the need to understand biomedicine as a culturally situated practice." -- Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-213) and index.
Table of contents: title: Thinking with the thalamus : the rhetoric of emotional impairment; title: Domesticated women and docile boys : lobotomy and gender in the popular press; title: Someone else : the Cold War politics of personality change; title: The rhetorical return of lobotomy : the campaign against psychosurgery; title: Not our father's lobotomy : memories of lobotomy in the new age of psychosurgery; title: How Weston State Hospital became the trans-Allegheny lunatic asylum; or, the birth of Dr. Monster; title: Epilogue : haunted history.