Overview

In 1935, lobotomy, one of the most infamous procedures in the history of medicine, was heralded as a “miracle cure” by newspapers and magazines, as they hoped that this “soul surgery” would empty the nation’s perennially blighted asylums. But the practice soon fell from favor, as the operation became characterized as a cruel practice with suspiciously authoritarian overtones. Only twenty years after the first operation, lobotomists once praised for “therapeutic courage” were condemned for their barbarity. American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History studies representations of lobotomy in a wide variety of cultural texts to offer a rhetorical and cultural history of the infamous procedure and its continued effect on American medicine. Author Jenell Johnson has uncovered previously discarded texts including science fiction, horror films, political polemics, and conspiracy theories that illustrate lobotomy’s entanglement with social and political narratives and how they contributed to a powerful image of the operation that persists to this day. In a provocative challenge to the history of medicine, American Lobotomy argues that lobotomy’s rhetorical history is crucial to understanding lobotomy’s medical history, offering a case study of how medicine accumulates meaning as it circulates in public culture, and it stands as an argument for the need to understand biomedicine as a culturally situated practice.

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Reviews

Johnson expertly intertwines history and detailed biographical information from and about medical professionals and their patients, and contextualizes it all with media and cultural artifacts to synthesize a project that is both entertaining and understandable by readers with little to no prior knowledge of psychiatry, psychosurgery, or public perceptions of the two. ---Somatosphere--Somatosphere While Johnson's rhetorical analysis focuses on lobotomies, she also shows how popular representations of medicine draw as much on circulating cultural ideas as on the specifics of operations and experiments. Rejecting the outdated 'influence' model in which information flows just from science to the public, Johnson demonstrates how lay responses to lobotomies influenced the ways that neurologists presented their procedures...A highly original, conscientiously researched, engagingly written study. --Laura Otis, Emory University American Lobotomy also reveals a surprising amount about the value of attending to individual embodied experiences and emotional responses. Johnson not only consistently explicates how bodies and emotions are never detached from scientific discourses, but more so, she presents a strong case that attention to conflicting and various emotions can and should inform scholars interested in medical rhetorics and medical histories. --Configurations -- (07/26/2016) Eminently readable, smart, and above all, original. --Stephen T. Casper, Literature & History -- (12/04/2015) An excellent study that draws on many sources - medical, historical, cultural - to tell an original story... --T.P. Gariepy, Choice Reviews Online -- (12/04/2015) What is a lobotomy? ... [Johnson] works from the basic assumption that lobotomy has no single definition. It has no substance, no essence. Historically speaking, it consists only in an incredibly long list of associations with other things such as sciences, brains, and communism... The principle may be simple, but it is also revolutionary... Johnson's ontology holds the potential to remap the field of rhetoric. - Quarterly Journal of Speech

Johnson expertly intertwines history and detailed biographical information from and about medical professionals and their patients, and contextualizes it all with media and cultural artifacts to synthesize a project that is both entertaining and understandable by readers with little to no prior knowledge of psychiatry, psychosurgery, or public perceptions of the two. ---Somatosphere--Somatosphere American Lobotomy also reveals a surprising amount about the value of attending to individual embodied experiences and emotional responses. Johnson not only consistently explicates how bodies and emotions are never detached from scientific discourses, but more so, she presents a strong case that attention to conflicting and various emotions can and should inform scholars interested in medical rhetorics and medical histories. --Configurations -- (07/26/2016) Eminently readable, smart, and above all, original. --Stephen T. Casper, Literature & History -- (12/04/2015) An excellent study that draws on many sources - medical, historical, cultural - to tell an original story... --T.P. Gariepy, Choice Reviews Online -- (12/04/2015) What is a lobotomy? ... [Johnson] works from the basic assumption that lobotomy has no single definition. It has no substance, no essence. Historically speaking, it consists only in an incredibly long list of associations with other things such as sciences, brains, and communism... The principle may be simple, but it is also revolutionary... Johnson's ontology holds the potential to remap the field of rhetoric. - Quarterly Journal of Speech While Johnson's rhetorical analysis focuses on lobotomies, she also shows how popular representations of medicine draw as much on circulating cultural ideas as on the specifics of operations and experiments. Rejecting the outdated 'influence' model in which information flows just from science to the public, Johnson demonstrates how lay responses to lobotomies influenced the ways that neurologists presented their procedures...A highly original, conscientiously researched, engagingly written study. --Laura Otis, Emory University

Author Information

Jenell Johnson is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

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