Sunday, September 17, 2006

Psychs like quiet patients

Psychs have found all the answers to their problems, one of them is the intelligence of the patient to run away and the other is the intelligence of the patient to talk. With a few twists of logic they solved this problem without a qualm:

The roots of psychosurgery can be traced to a medieval treatment called “trepanning” (cutting out circular sections of the skull). Ancient doctors believed this liberated demons and bad spirits from a person.

However, modern psychosurgery can be traced to an incident in 1848 when an explosion drove an iron rod through the cheek and out the top of the head of railway worker Phineas Gage. Before the accident, Gage had been a capable foreman, a religious man with a well-balanced mind and a shrewd business sense. After the rod was removed and he recovered, Gage became fitful, irreverent, grossly profane, impatient and obstinate.

That an alteration in behavior could be achieved by damaging parts of the brain without killing a person did not go unnoticed, and in 1882 Swiss asylum superintendent Gottlieb Burckhardt became the first known psychosurgeon. He removed cerebral tissue from six patients, hoping “the patient might be transformed from a disturbed to a quiet dement.” Although one died and others developed epilepsy, paralysis and aphasia (loss of ability to use or understand words), Burckhardt was pleased with his now quiet patients.
They find those iron rods rather pleasing surrounded by silent bodies don't they.

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