"A commendable act of humility"

John Sutherland writing in the British newspaper The Independent last month:

"We should be humble in assuming that our therapies, whatever stage scientific knowledge may have reached, can do what we think they can do. It is to me strange, for example, that Stockholm has never seen fit to withdraw, retroactively, the Nobel Prize it awarded Egas Moniz, in 1949. Moniz invented prefrontal lobotomy. He was, the committee said, "a wonderful man". Many, then, might have agreed. Now, few would.
The operation, which involved scooping lumps out of the brain, as if it were ice-cream, was subsequently popularised in the US by Walter Freeman who trundled round in his "lobotomobile", demonstrating his "ice pick and hammer technique" to any hospital that would let him in, and knocking off 10 ops a day in hotel rooms. Nothing could stop his campaign to make America mentally "healthier".
It would be a commendable act of humility, and an admission that mental health is difficult to define and fiendishly difficult to manufacture, were Stockholm to respectfully rescind that award to Moniz." (more...)