Skip to main content
University of Michigan Press
Fulcrum logo

You can access this title through a library that has purchased it. More information about purchasing is available at our website.

Share the story of what Open Access means to you

a graphic of a lock that is open, the universal logo for open access

University of Michigan needs your feedback to better understand how readers are using openly available ebooks. You can help by taking a short, privacy-friendly survey.

  1. Home
  2. American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History

American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History

Jenell Johnson 2014
Restricted You do not have access to this book. How to get access.
American Lobotomy studies a wide variety of representations of lobotomy to offer a rhetorical history of one of the most infamous procedures in the history of medicine. The development of lobotomy in 1935 was heralded as a "miracle cure" that would empty the nation's perennially blighted asylums. However, only twenty years later, lobotomists initially praised for their "therapeutic courage" were condemned for their barbarity, an image that has only soured in subsequent decades.  Johnson employs previously abandoned texts like science fiction, horror film, political polemics, and conspiracy theory to show how lobotomy's entanglement with social and political narratives contributed to a powerful image of the operation that persists to this day. The book provocatively challenges the history of medicine, arguing that rhetorical history is crucial to understanding medical history. It offers a case study of how medicine accumulates meaning as it circulates in public culture and argues for the need to understand biomedicine as a culturally situated practice.
Read Book Buy Book
Series
  • Corporealities: Discourses of Disability
ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-12058-1 (ebook)
  • 978-0-472-11944-8 (hardcover)
  • 978-0-472-03665-3 (paper)
Subject
  • Health & Medicine
  • Cultural Studies
  • History
  • Disability Studies
  • American Studies
Citable Link
  • Table of Contents

  • Stats

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Dedication
  • Acknowledgments
  • Contents
  • INTRODUCTION: Marvelous History
  • CHAPTER 1: Thinking with the Thalamus: The Rhetoric of Emotional Impairment
  • CHAPTER 2: Domesticated Women and Docile Boys: Lobotomy and Gender in the Popular Press, 1936–1955
  • CHAPTER 3: Someone Else: The Cold War Politics of Personality Change
  • CHAPTER 4: The Rhetorical Return of Lobotomy: The Campaign against Psychosurgery, 1970–1973
  • CHAPTER 5: Not Our Father’s Lobotomy: Memories of Lobotomy in the New Age of Psychosurgery
  • CHAPTER 6: How Weston State Hospital Became the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum; or, The Birth of Dr. Monster
  • EPILOGUE: Haunted History
  • Notes
  • References
  • Index
86 views since November 16, 2018
University of Michigan Press logo

University of Michigan Press

Powered by Fulcrum logo

  • About
  • Blog
  • Feedback
  • Contact
  • Contribute
  • Accessibility
  • Preservation
  • Privacy
  • Terms of Service
  • Log In
© University of Michigan Press 2020
x This site requires cookies to function correctly.