Word: brokendown
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Recent experience should not be forgotten. In the late '40s, with brokendown soldiers crowding the psychiatric wards of Veterans' Administration hospitals, psychosurgery's crude predecessor, lobotomy, became surgically fashionable as a means for quickly and efficiently pacifying violent veterans. Lobotomy, now in disrepute, involved the use of an instrument much like an ice pick to sever the connection between the frontal lobes of the brain. But while the technique generally pacified patients for a while, it also frequently left them with new and unpredictable mental disorders. The crest of enthusiasm for lobotomies left behind thousands of human tragedies...