After leucotomy

A lobotomy (or leucotomy as it was called in Britain) wasn’t necessarily the last resort for patients in the 1940s. Doctors sometimes had other dangerous and bizarre treatments (as well as second or third leucotomies) in store for those who remained in hospital.
At Mapperley hospital in Nottingham, England, Paul Weil experimented with “regressive electroplexy” for the treatment of schizophrenia. Patients were given electroconvulsive treatments at half-hourly or hourly intervals (up to nine a day) on a daily basis until they were “in a state of complete confusion and utter apathy, mute, incontinent and unable to take food without assistance”. It took up to two weeks of treatment for patients to reach this state. Six of the eighteen patients subjected to this experimental treatment had already undergone leucotomy. One twenty-eight year old man who had had a leucotomy died three days after regressive electroplexy treatment. So did one of the patients who hadn’t had a leucotomy.
The surviving patients were described as somewhat more co-operative than before treatment but soon relapsed. Two who were discharged from hospital were readmitted within months. Paul Weil admitted that the results were “unfavourable” and decided not to repeat the experiment.