Joanna David's mother

Joanna David, the British TV actress and mother of Emilia Fox, spoke about her mother's leucotomy in an interview with the Independent newspaper a few years ago.

Joanna's early years were spent in relative comfort in Hale, near Manchester. But when she was eleven her father went bankrupt, moved the family to London and then left them. Joanna's mother brought up the three children on her own in the East End of London, finally having a breakdown when they were grown up. She was treated with a leucotomy:

Did the leucotomy work? "Yes, because it took away the obsessional thing, but didn't change her sweetness of nature. They had said that she could end up vegetable-like, but she didn't. It made her docile, and she just sat in a chair smoking fags all day, whereas before she had been very highly charged. She'd been under such strain, you see, getting us all educated. As soon as we were all on our feet, when I was about 19, she suddenly keeled over and had this ghastly breakdown."

The operation was carried out in the late 1960s by which time only a few hundred operations a year were being done in the UK.

The interview with Joanna David can be read here