Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Postcode lobotomies

I wonder which medical treatments we might, at some future date, be thankful that we missed out on because of the postcode lottery?

I was thinking about this after reading a review of Howard Dullys memoir about his lobotomy

Egas Moniz won a share of the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949 "for his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses", so it was a treatment with scientific respectability

It is unfair to his no doubt perfectly honourable Swiss co-winner to read anything in to the fact that his name was Walter Rudolf Hess, but some things you just could not make up