Lobotomy & young-earth creationists

My recent post on prefrontal lobotomy has been the most popular thing on this blog so far, and the comments on it are worth reading.

While searching for more information about lobotomies and the neuroleptic drugs that replaced them, I came across this fantastic webpage at NobelPrize.org, which contains more information about Egas Moniz, the Portugese surgeon who first performed the procedure.

That's where I found this diagram of the instrument designed by Moniz for the prefrontal leucotomies he performed with his colleague. From the diagram, one can see how the instrument (called a leucotome) was used: the open wire loop was retracted to cut the bundles of nerve fibers connecting the frontal cortex to the thalamus.

So what's the link between lobotomy and young-earth creationists? Well, it is tempting to suggest that creationists have been (or should be) lobotomized, but the link is actually rather tenuous.

In my post on lobotomy, I mentioned the case of Howard Dully, whose stepmother had him lobotomized when he was 12 years old. The post includes a link to this page on NPR; the MP3 on that page includes Dully himself talking about his lobotomy. 

I didn't mention the MP3 at all on my post, and Tiny Frog left a comment suggesting that I should have. Dully's is a heart-breaking story, and it's very interesting hearing him talking about it. The MP3 also includes recordings of Walter Freeman, the surgeon who performed the operation on Dully and some 3,500 others.

If a commenter has a blog, I always check it out, and on my first visit to the Tiny Frog blog, I read the About page with great interest:

I was born into a Christian fundamentalist, young-earth Creationist, die-hard Republican home. I grew up in a church where people spoke in tongues, had "faith healings", made "prophecies", and people were "slain in the spirit"...I went to a Christian school and Christian college. But, I am none of those things....I am a single 30-something evolutionist, agnostic/atheist, and moderate-democrat. 

Tiny Frog has been online since April of this year, so it's still relatively new. There are several other interesting blogs that I found via the comments on the lobotomy post:

• Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, by Ed Darrell, on "history,  accuracy and education";
  
  
• Inalienable Rights, by DuWayne Brayton, on human rights issues (something I'm very concerned with, not least of all because my father was tortured); and
  
  
• The Other 95%, by Kevin Z, a graduate student in marine biology at Pen State University.