Science Evangelists are not new

In 1949 Egas Moniz was awarded a Nobel Prize for destroying the prefrontal region of his patients' brains!
Between 1930 to 1970 an estimated 50,000 people were "lobotomized" by having portions of their brains destroyed in what is now an unthinkable practice.

What makes this even more unthinkable is the "the fact that there was extensive evidence that psychosurgery was not therapeutic, yet operations continued unabated for decades."
It was considered unprofessional to criticize another physician in public, so many doctors who knew that psychosurgery was a farce did not make their opinions known.

I guess they did not want to be viewed as a "SKEPTIC."

Here is Dr. Freeman inserting an ice pick into the eye socket of a mental patient.
The hammer would tap the pick until it pierced the skull and destroyed the frontal lobe of the brain.


Freeman performed nearly 3500 lobotomies including 19 children, one as young as 4 years old. A neurologist without surgical training, he initially used ice picks hammered into each frontal lobe through the back of each eye socket ("ice pick lobotomy").

One historian said: "The “ice pick lobotomy” was performed by Freeman “with a recklessness bordering on lunacy, touring the country like a traveling evangelist.

Hmmm... Where have we recently seen a "traveling evangelist" without scientific training promoting today's "pop science"?

Will it take 40 years for the current "pop science" to be discredited?
The "skeptic" scientists are speaking up but they are silenced by the establishment.

Paris scraps carbon tax plan
By Ben Hall in Paris
Published: March 23 2010
The French government on Wednesday said it would abandon its plan to introduce a carbon tax on domestic energy and road fuels unless there was agreement for a European Union-wide levy.

The U-turn on the controversial environmental tax come two days after the governing UMP party of President Nicolas Sarkozy suffered a heavy defeat in regional elections. Senior UMP politicians have blamed the defeat in part on the proposed tax, which was due to come into effect on July.

The original tax would have added up to 4.5 cents to a litre of petrol and would have raised domestic gas bills by 7 per cent.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 23 March 2010 - 11:47 PM.

A fascinating and horrifyingly true bit of medical history

This review is from: The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness

Walter Freeman almost single-handedly created the craze for psychosurgery that was in vogue from the late 1930s until the
mid 1960s. This was a time when "psychosurgery" meant "lobotomy". While lobotomies were invented by Egas Moniz it was Freeman who advanced the research and tirelessly publicised it as the solution to almost all psychological ills.

It would be all too easy for an author to write Freeman off as an uncaring villain of the first order, a Josef Mengele like figure who mutilated the brains of his victims/patients in an attempt to make them conform to societal norms by amputating their personalities. However Jack El Hai presents Freeman as a man desperate to improve the lives of his patients, a self-promoting man, but nonetheless someone who cared. It is this portrayal by El Hai that makes Freeman an even more horrible character. When El Hai describes how Freeman almost obsessively kept in touch with his patients you have to contrast this caring image with that of Freeman performing lobotomies in his office with an ice-pick and then sending the patients home in a taxi. Freeman doesn't come off as a two-dimensional monster, instead he is revealed to be an all to real three-dimensional, deeply and desperately flawed man.
El Hai avoids scrutinizing larger questions such as to what degree lobotomy was used as an instrument of societal control of troublesome individuals, but others have speculated on that question, instead he provides new enlightenment on that issue by examining Walter Freeman and his times.

http://www.amazon.co...-...9863&sr=1-1

Haunting before-and-after pictures reveal how notorious medic tried to sell the procedure that ruined life of JFK's sister  https://www.dailymai...led-images.html

• Lobotomy specialist Walter Freeman took pictures of his patients before and after cutting into their brains
• He showed his patients smiling and apparently recovering but some appeared to have suffered damage
• Rosemary Kennedy had a lobotomy which ruined her youthful good looks and left her incapacitated 
•  
• During the surgery a metal tool was inserted through the eye socket into the skull cavity, and wrenched around to sever the connections of the pre-frontal cortex from the rest of the brain.  

  Almost 50,000 people received lobotomies during the 1940s and 1950s in the United States alone. 

  Some survivors were left with no noticeable differences, but others were physically damaged for life or lived in a persistent vegetative state.