A lobotomy is a surgical procedure performed on the brain to treat mental illnesses unresponsive to standard treatment. The procedure was pioneered during the 1940s and 1950s when treatments for psychiatric disorders were few, and psychiatric wards and mental asylums were full of suffering men and women. The surgery consisted of making holes in the skull, removing some brain tissue, and severing the connections between the frontal lobe and the thalamus. The frontal lobe was the part of the brain targeted in the standard lobotomy operations practiced in the 1940s and 1950s. The procedure was initially called prefrontal leucotomy and was modified in 1936 by American neurologists Walter J. Freeman II and James W. Watts, who renamed it 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.

Lobotomies were performed on a wide scale during the 1940s and 1950s, with tens of thousands of lobotomies carried out in some countries to treat schizophrenia, affective disturbance, and obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD). By todays standards, these surgeries were primitive and dangerous, but a large study in the U.S. found that 44% of patients were released from hospitals after the surgery, and similar good results were reported by studies in Canada (45%) and England and Wales (46%). However, the use of lobotomy in the United States was resisted and criticized heavily by American neurosurgeons.

Today, lobotomies are no longer performed and have largely been replaced by medications. The procedure has become a disparaged procedure, a byword for medical barbarism, and an exemplary instance of the medical trampling of patients rights.