Ontario's Leucotomy Program: The Roles of Patient, Physician, and Profession
Date
2012-10-03
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Abstract
Psychosurgery has a long, colourful, and often tumultuous history in which it has been viewed as both a panacea and a horror-show. Although research on the topic has been conducted in the United States and Europe, very little research exists on psychosurgery in Canada. Where scholars have examined Canada, only a cursory overview of Ontario’s experience has been provided. As a result, many questions remain unanswered including how the program was administrated, how patients were chosen as candidates for the procedure, and who the leucotomized were. In order to address the gap in the literature, this thesis presents a detailed account of psychosurgery in Ontario by investigating the roles of profession, physician, and patient. The leucotomy program in Ontario began in 1941 and continued into the mid-1960s, the process used to administer the treatment was bureaucratically organized and streamlined, and over 1,400 patients were leucotomized during this controversial era.
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Canadian, History of Science, Medicine and Surgery
Citation
Collins, B. (2012). Ontario's Leucotomy Program: The Roles of Patient, Physician, and Profession (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27189