The Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1949 for his development of prefrontal leucotomy. In the United States, a modified version of this procedure, often referred to as the "ice pick lobotomy", was instituted in a highly unethical manner, and was performed somewhat indiscriminately. It was Dr. Walter Freeman, Moniz' American disciple, who gave it the name of lobotomy popularized in the press as far back as 1938 when The New York Times ran a headline "Surgery used on the Soul-Sick; Relief of Obsessions is Reported". Even Joseph Kennedy, the father of JFK, had his daughter Rosemary lobotomized when she was in her twenties. Dr. Walter Freeman, the American authority on the subject, performed the operation after having performed more than four thousand lobotomies. By the time Moniz was awarded the Prize in 1949, with the New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine on his side, lobotomy had become quite popular so that from 1949 to 1952 around five thousand lobotomies are said to have been performed in the United States alone. Moniz died in 1955 as his medical procedure faded into disuse. The procedure has fallen into disrepute and was later prohibited in many countries. It is rarely performed now.
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"Ice-pick" lobotomies actually used an ice-pick and mallet. The doctor would go in through the eye socket up to the brain so it would leave no visible scar, and drilling into the head was unnecessary.
Patients in mental hospitals where anesthesia equipment was unavailable would often be given electro-shock therapy to make them unconscious before the procedure.
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