In May 1951, a 35-year-old Boston woman who had been treated for years for ulcerative colitis and a variety of mental disorders — with little success — was given a
lobotomy by doctors affiliated with the Lahey Clinic, then in Boston. Her doctors drilled two holes into her skull and cut or melted away two wedges of her brain’s cerebral cortex using a technique developed by James Poppen, a Lahey neurosurgeon.
By August, according to Walter I. Tucker, a Lahey psychiatrist, she was largely free of her physical and mental ailments. By December, after a period of confusion and “laziness,” she was socially active and going to dances, Tucker wrote
in the Lahey Clinic Bulletin. She was also gaining weight and working regularly, and was free of “inappropriate worries, phobias, obsessions, and compulsions.” There was no sign of colitis. Her mother, with whom she lived, “was amazed at the change and thinks that the patient is better than she has ever been in her life,” Tucker wrote.
Like most patients in medical history, we don’t know her name. And we have no idea whether she went on to live a normal life — many people who had a lobotomy did not.
I’ve been searching for years for that woman, whom I call “patient zero.” She was the first person to have a lobotomy to treat
ulcerative colitis. That barbaric operation helped cement the now-discredited notion that this painful and debilitating disease, which I developed as a boy, is a condition that we bring on ourselves.
For more than half a century, I believed that something in my character or emotions was responsible for the pain in my gut and my bloody diarrhea. I now know that’s not true, thanks to my doctors and to my deep dive into the history of this disease.
