Medicine: Gunshot Surgery

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The major had always been a somber, selfish man. But after his retirement from the British army in 1942, he also became moody, bad-tempered and depressed. At 55, he was deep in debt and drinking too much. He had delusions that he was being persecuted, and talked of suicide.

One morning last year, the major's wife got up and found her husband already fully dressed, with his hair neatly brushed, eating the breakfast he had cooked for himself. Then she noticed a trickle of blood running down each side of his face; each trickle came from a hole in his head. Horrified, she called a doctor, who found that the major had a half-inch, circular hole with blackened edges in his right temple, and a star-shaped hole higher up in the left temple. During the night he had shot himself with his .38-cal. revolver. But instead of taking his life, he had accidentally performed a crude kind of bilateral frontal lobotomy,* a tricky piece of neurosurgery sometimes used to relieve paranoid depression and other psychoses (TIME, May 28). At the hospital, surgeons could only clean up the wounds, remove some small bone fragments and wait to see what would happen.

At first, the major was obviously unbalanced. He had lost his sense of time and place, and insisted that he was living on the roof of his house. He had trouble finding words for things, and described the white-clad nurses as "sugar-iced people." He still thought he was being persecuted, and for a time he was hard to handle. But his wounds healed and he soon settled down. After three months, the major was alert and rational again, and reading the daily papers. He denied that he had ever suffered from a suicidal mania and refused to believe that he had shot himself.

After two more months in the hospital, reported Dr. John Slorach last week in London's medical journal, the Lancet, the major was sent home. His wife reports that he is no longer tense or depressed, but just as bad-tempered and hard to live with as ever.