Forgotten lobotomies in Rome: new evidence of psychosurgery in postwar Italy

The history of psychosurgery, perhaps the most controversial venture in clinical neuroscience's past, has long been written without Rome. While leucotomies and lobotomies performed have been documented in northern and southern Italian centres, the Italian capital - despite being the birthplace of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and home to two major state psychiatric institutions - has remained largely absent from historical accounts. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials from Italy and the United States, and despite substantial gaps in the surviving documentation-including the inaccessibility of all but one patient record-, this study reconstructs psychosurgical activity in Rome between 1949 and the early 1950s, identifying interventions performed both at the University Neuropsychiatric Clinic and at the Santa Maria della Pietà Asylum. The Roman experience reveals an ambivalent attitude toward psychosurgery. Although new surgical modifications were proposed locally, growing scientific and ethical concerns soon emerged, leading, at least in one of the two institutions, if not both, to the eventual abandonment of the initiative. By restoring Rome to the history of psychosurgery, this study challenges established narratives of postwar Italian clinical neuroscience and highlights the early emergence of doubts surrounding lobotomy.