Opinion: Lobotomies were once used to treat this gut disease, part of a shameful medical history

In May 1951, a 35-year-old Boston woman who had been treated for years for ulcerative colitis and a variety of mental disorders — with little success — entered the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., to have a lobotomy. Her doctors drilled two holes into her skull and cut or melted away two wedges of her brain’s cerebral cortex using a technique developed by James Poppen, a Lahey neurosurgeon.

By August, according to Walter I. Tucker, a Lahey psychiatrist, she was largely free of her physical and mental ailments. By December, after a period of confusion and “laziness,” she was socially active and going to dances, Tucker wrote in the Lahey Clinic Bulletin. She was also gaining weight and working regularly, and was free of “inappropriate worries, phobias, obsessions, and compulsions.” There was no sign of colitis. Her mother, with whom she lived, “was amazed at the change and thinks that the patient is better than she has ever been in her life,” Tucker wrote.

Like most patients in medical history, we don’t know her name. And we have no idea whether she went on to live