In a First Opinion featured story for STAT, Mona Gable tells the story of her mother, who had a lobotomy at age 33 as a wife and a mother of four children. “I never knew my mother when she was well, but I do know that after the lobotomy, she was never the same. She developed grand mal epilepsy. She could not taste or smell. She drank like a fish and cursed like a sailor. Her short-term memory was shot, her vocabulary frozen in the 1950s. She had what we now call ‘poor impulse control,’ meaning she said and did whatever sailed into her head.”
