Ronald Senator

The Pulitzer prize nominated British composer Ronald Senator underwent a leucotomy in St Andrew's hospital, Northampton, England, in 1950.

He described his experience in his 1996 book Requiem Letters:

"I might have been, throughout all these forty long years, a Sleeping Ugly imprisoned within the vegetative sleep of one of the failed leucotomies, the great majority. I would never be awakened, so I would never know I had been deprived of my forty years of life.Forty irreplaceable personal years, of loving and tasting and knowing that I loved and tasted, interwoven with forty irreplaceable years of public human history! In Oliver Sacks' Awakenings , Leonard comes to himself after forty years of unawareness caused by encaphalitis lethargica. He is shocked and sad to rcognize the lined middle-aged face which has replaced the boy's face he once knew. Poignantly he realizes he dos not know what year it is. He can never know what he might have been and done. But he has a simple gratitude for the gift of his returned awareness, for life itself...I am one of the survivors of the St. Andrew's leucotomies, School of 1950, as the other poor specters, ambling vacuously around the locked and barred hospital wards or their lawns, are not. I am grateful too. But I have also been very angry.

There is a thin line which separates everyday reality from the world of the imagination--that other reality, super- or sub-reality. It is a hairline, a line built of ghostly particles, of nanoseconds. For the heightened sensitivity, for the original and exploring, uually an outsider in society, for the poet and artist who lives by meta-phor, by meta-phrase, by marrying two realities, that line is easily crossed. For him those realities may be not merely fused, but sometimes confused. And that is madness.

...... But I am also a pygmy among many other giants who entered in and out of madness at some time: from Robert Schumann to Frederick Nietzsche, Dean Swift to Percy Shelley, Ben Johnson to Lord Byron, Cowper, Goldsmith, Blake, Melville, Coleridge, Rousseau, Pascal, Ta sso, Nijinsky, Virginia Woolf, Robert Lowell... Perhaps their brains, like my own to some degree, inherited a more complex wiring than is ordinary, and were therefore exraordinary in synthesizing unexpected connections, in experiencing a gamut of emotional extremes. Perhaps their brains, like mine, were periodically flooded with the volcanic energy of manic storms, leaving behind a flotsam of original ideas...If you imagine them all transported to St. Andrew's Hospital in 1950, the majority, no doubt, would have had their brains bored and sliced against their will, and would still perhaps be shuffling among the other human ghosts across the green lawns.

......I needed ears to listen, to understand the threat of that other world which had opened up inside myself, so that I would know it was understood...But there was hardly any attempt at communications. The nurses remained perfunctory:...their job was simply to keep their cool and leave judgements and treatments to the doctors. As for these, the demigods of the system, they made only brief and routine rounds of the wards (in some state hospitals, I hear, these could be six months apart) with impersonal formulae of few words: 'Improving, I see?' and 'Did you enjoy your breakfast?' without caring much about my answer, or anybody else's. After all, their faith now lay in so-called objective diagnoses which jam-packed all mental disturbances, in all their human compexity and variety, into some neatly labelled compartments: and in the new physical techniques, which were themselves impersonal, often speedy, and comparatively cheap. Almost a conveyor-belt process back into some social norm, without the need to delve into a person's latent conflicts--or treasures. St. Andrew's has a record from that time of one patient receiving almost one hundred insulin treatments--nor was that so unusual. From being merely prisons or places of confinement, mental hospitals had now become centers of technology where humanitarian intercourse was incidental. Humanity had to take its chance."