Lobotomy foes rally

Demonstrators in medical garb back Rep. Stokes' psychosurgery war

Ploin Dentar special

WASHINGTON-Demonstrators wearing doctors' robes chopped up raw cauliflowers with scalpels on Capitol Hill yesterday to show their support for Rep. Louis Stokes' proposed ban on psychosurgery, a brain operation that Stokes labeled "murder of the mind."

The demonstrators were drama-

tizing a procedure, commonly known as lobotomy, they contend is still used widely to destroy normal brain tissue to control aberrant or violent behavior. '

Stokes, D-21, of Cleveland, who joined the small band of protesters, said he is gravely concerned about the alleged abuse of psychosurgery in prisons and mental hospitals, as

well as proposals to use the operation as a tool against rioters in inner cities.

Psychiatric surgeons have per formed lobotomies since the 1940s

to extract brain tissue in an attempt to make mental patients and prisoners more docile.

Stokes and his supporters, known as the Citizens Committee on

Human Rights, charged the operation can cause irreversible brain damage, memory loss, paralysis and even death.

While several states and the U.S.

Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) have adopted some restrictions on psychosurgery, including lobotomies, Stokes' bill would completely ban the procedure at all federal institutions and

halt any federal grants to private physicians for psychosurgical experimentation.

Stokes and his supporters said psychosurgery was performed on roughly 40,000 people between 1940. and 1945. Use of the operation has dropped sharply since then.

Sylvia Stanard, spokeswoman for the demonstrators, said a Texas

woman was involuntarily lobotomized earlier this year by her own husband, a psychiatrist, and is now "completely docile, doesn't remember anything and looks like she is retarded."

A second psychosurgeon implanted electrodes, another form of psychosurgery, in the brain of a homosexual to try to change his sexual preference, she said.