Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   5

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114
S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
ness until the 19th century. Mental hospitals began using 
hot mineral-water baths to relax anxious patients and cold 
baths to invigorate depressed ones. But we’re not talking 
about an evening alone with champagne and Mr. Bubble. Th
 e 
“water  cure,”  as  it  was  known,  often  involved  hours-long 
baths at frigid or near-scalding temperatures. Still, it was 
better than getting, say, malaria.
✖  ✖  ✖
Before the advent of antibiotics, syphilis was basically un-
treatable, and late-stage syphilitics often suff ered from a 
neurological condition somewhere between bipolar disease 
and schizophrenia. So how 
to  cure  it?  Why,  with  ma-
laria, of course. Beginning 
in 1917, Austrian neurolo-
gist Julius von Jauregg in-
jected his syphilitic patients 
with malaria (how he got the 
idea to do this we can only imagine). After a series of terri-
ble  
fevers (which seemed to eradicate the syphilis), the 
treatment managed to calm patients down. Malarial ther-
apy spread like—well, like malaria—and in 1927, von Jau-
regg received a Nobel Prize. 
For intentionally giving crazy 
people malaria
. Remarkably, malarial fever therapy remained 
in use until the late 1960s.
✖  ✖  ✖
In 1927, Polish psychologist Manfred Sakel observed that 
people in insulin comas tended to be a lot less agitated than 
schizophrenics. Why, he wondered, don’t we inject massive 
doses of insulin into schizophrenic people? And so he did. 
Some  scholars  have  argued  that 
everyone from Abraham Lincoln 
(unlikely) to Ivan the Terrible (very 
possible) to Al Capone (defi nitely 
died of it) suffered from syphilis.

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115
Indeed, insulin shock therapy calmed the schizophrenics 
down considerably—and only killed them about 1 percent of 
the time—but its long-term effi
    cacy was questionable. Sakel’s 
therapy is still used in parts of Eastern Europe, but it was re-
placed in the United States by the now rarely used (yet equally 
questionable) electric shock therapy.
Trepanation
It’s a surgery you quite literally need like a hole in your head. 
Trepanation (which sounds like 
trepidation
 for a reason) is a form 
of surgery that drills a hole in the skull without (hopefully!) piercing 
the brain’s membrane. Evidence of trepanation has been found 
everywhere from ancient Greece to pre-European South America.
Modern psychosurgery got its start with it in 1935, when Egas 
Moniz invented the prefrontal lobotomy. Although the surgery had 
a death rate of 6 percent and a brain damage rate of 100 per-
cent, Moniz somehow managed to win the Nobel Prize in Medi-
cine for it in 1949. Perhaps he gave prefrontal lobotomies to 
members of the nominating committee.
But Moniz was a veritable Dr. Salk compared to Walter Freeman, 
an American whose no-frills lobotomy led to the lobotomization of 
almost 50,000 people (including John F. Kennedy’s sister Rosemary). 
Freeman’s lobotomy involved exactly two tools: an ice pick and a 
mallet. He would pound the ice pick into the skull above the tear duct 
and wiggle it around until the brain damage was done. Frankly, it’s 
enough to give us tomophobia (i.e., a morbid fear of surgical opera-
tions). And speaking of long words ending in 
phobia . . .