Caruso, James P.; Sheehan, Jason P. (2017). “Psychosurgery, ethics, and media: a history of Walter Freeman and the lobotomy.”. Neurosurgical Focus43 (3): E6. doi:10.3171/2017.6.FOCUS17257. PMID28859561.
Caruso, James P.; Sheehan, Jason P. (2017). “Psychosurgery, ethics, and media: a history of Walter Freeman and the lobotomy.”. Neurosurgical Focus43 (3): E6. doi:10.3171/2017.6.FOCUS17257. PMID28859561.
Ugo Cerletti, the Italian psychiatrist and joint inventor with Lucio Bini（英語版） of electroconvulsive therapy, described psychiatry during the interwar period as a "funereal science".[23] Likewise Egas Moniz, the inventor of leucotomy, referred to the "impotência terapeutica" (therapeutic impotence) of existing therapeutic remedies during the 1930s.[24]
Professor of neurology at the University of Lisbon from 1911 to 1944, Moniz was also for several decades a prominent parliamentarian and diplomat. He was Portugal's ambassador to Spain during World War I and represented Portugal at the postwar Versailles Treaty negotiations,[53] but after the Portuguese coup d'état of 1926, which ushered in the Ditadura Nacional (National Dictatorship), the Republican Moniz, then 51 years old, devoted his considerable talents and energies to neurological research entirely. Throughout his career he published on topics as diverse as neurology, sexology, historical biography, and the history of card games.[54] For his 1927 development of cerebral angiography（英語版）, which allowed routine visualisation of the brain's peripheral blood vessels for the first time, he was twice nominated, unsuccessfully, for a Nobel Prize. Some have attributed his development of leucotomy to a determination on his part to win the Nobel after these disappointments.[55]
The American neuropsychiatrist Walter Freeman also attended the Congress where he presented his research findings on cerebral ventriculography. Freeman, who would later play a central role in the popularisation and practice of leucotomy in America, also had an interest in personality changes following frontal lobe surgery.[47]
