In their recently revised study “Gordon Tullock Meets Phineas Gage: The Political Economy of Lobotomies in the United States”, published on the Social Sciences Research Network, Raymond J. March and Vincent Geloso track the complicated relationship between state funding and the “lobotomy boom” of the 1940s and 50s. Their findings show that despite a scientific consensus that lobotomies were ineffective, the use of the controversial procedure proliferated due to expanded government and provision for mental health hospitals and asylums during that period.
There is a long, sad history in America of delays in the application of scientific discoveries due to misaligned institutional factors that negatively affect the health of patients sometimes for decades. For example, the link between smoking and increased risk for cancer had reached a scientific consensus in the 1930s, but the Surgeon General did not release a report on it until 1964, and it took a tobacco company whistleblower to finally push public opinion away from the tobacco industry in the 1990s.
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