When was the first lobotomy performed?
Lobotomy
Robert Penn Warren's 1946 novel All the King's Men describes a lobotomy as making "a Comanche brave look like a tyro with a scalping knife," and portrays the surgeon as a repressed man who cannot change others with love, so he instead resorts to "high-grade carpentry work".[162]

Tennessee Williams criticized lobotomy in his play Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) because it was sometimes inflicted on homosexuals—to render them "morally sane".[5] In the play a wealthy matriarch offers the local mental hospital a substantial donation if the hospital will give her niece a lobotomy, which she hopes will stop the niece's shocking revelations about the matriarch's son.[163] Warned that a lobotomy might not stop her niece's "babbling," she responds, "That may be, maybe not, but after the operation who would believe her, Doctor?"[164]

In Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and its 1975 film adaptation, lobotomy is described as "frontal-lobe castration", a form of punishment and control after which "There's nothin' in the face. Just like one of those store dummies." In one patient, "You can see by his eyes how they burned him out over there; his eyes are all smoked up and gray and deserted inside."[162]

In Sylvia Plath's 1963 novel The Bell Jar, the protagonist reacts with horror to the "perpetual marble calm" of a lobotomized young woman.[162]

Elliott Baker's 1964 novel and 1966 film version, A Fine Madness, portrays the dehumanizing lobotomy of a womanizing, quarrelsome poet who, afterwards, is just as aggressive as ever. The surgeon is depicted as an inhumane crackpot.[165]

The 1982 biopic film Frances depicts actress Frances Farmer (the subject of the film) undergoing transorbital lobotomy (though the idea[166] that a lobotomy was performed on Farmer, and that Freeman performed it, has been criticized as having little or no factual foundation).[167]