Medicine: Pavlov Rides Again

At a mental-health congress in Vienna last week, before psychiatrists from 41 nations, Professor Nikolai Oserezski laid down the Soviet line: the brain operation known as lobotomy "is an anti-physiological method that violates the principles of humanity."

Russian psychiatrists have long frowned on lobotomy, a drastic operation developed in Portugal and the U.S. but by no means approved by all Western specialists (TIME, June 22). For a generation, Russia's doctors have been conditioned to follow, sheeplike, the late Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, of conditioned-reflex fame. Following his patterns, they believe that if any part of the physical brain is damaged or destroyed, the mind is damaged beyond repair. Lobotomy, argued Oserezski, damages the high brain centers and turns a human being into a vegetable. He quoted a Soviet colleague as saying that it "makes idiots out of madmen." He also put it in ideological terms: "By performing a lobotomy, the surgeon is guilty of propagating a therapeutic nihilism . . ."