Of all professionals perhaps doctors are the most gullible; and psychiatrists are perhaps the most gullible of all doctors. Over the last hundred years they have treated mental illness with cold douches, removal of the ovaries or thyroid, castration, hysterectomy, cooling almost to the point of death (and at least once beyond it), extracting the teeth and tonsils, enucleating the cervix, drilling holes in the skull, inducing coma through insulin, using metrazol to cause convulsions and slashing through a large chunk of the frontal lobe. All these savage and useless treatments were praised by their inventors and most were acclaimed by other psychiatrists.

LRB 7 July 1994 | PDF Download