Adamo Mario "Amarro" Fiamberti[1] (10 September 1894 – 31 August 1970) was an Italian psychiatrist who was the first to perform a transorbital lobotomy (by accessing the frontal lobe of the brain through the orbits) in 1937.
Following his natural inclination for the clinic, he was soon appointed effective assistant in the Turin university's human anatomy institute, headed by G. Levi, but he soon turned to the study of nervous and mental diseases and to a career as a doctor.
After leaving the hospital's medical directorship, he was elected to the position of provincial councilor on the Italian Liberal Party's list in 1964, continuing to deal with psychiatric matters in a political capacity.
Fiamberti's proposal for using acetylcholinic acid to treat schizophrenia was part of a larger framework of confident time adherence to shock therapies.
Fiamberti was in charge of the hospital in Sondrio at the time, which was a long way from the main centers and lacked any neurosurgical collaborations or adequate facilities.
The needle was introduced into the frontal horn of the ventricle passing through the oval center of the prefrontal lobe and Fiamberti thought of using the same instruments for his operative purpose.
He inserted a guide needle into the cranial theca, sliding into the space between the supraorbital arch and the eyeball with a strong upward and backward obliquity, perforating the orbital vault about one centimeter behind the superciliary margin.
Because the transorbital intervention method did not require a skull trepanation, it had the significant benefit of being able to be used in any psychiatric facility and mastered by all psychiatrists, not just surgeons.
Fiamberti was aware of the intervention's theoretical flaws, but he valued the experience of positive outcomes above all else, especially given the paucity of the psychiatric therapeutic arsenal at the time.
It was presented at the seventh Réunion des Oto-Neuro-Ophtalmologues et Neuro-Chirurgiens de la Suisse Romande, and Freeman recognised his own autonomous placement among the most recommendable mental illness treatment strategies.
Many people saw these methods as the triumphal path towards successful intervention in mental diseases during those years, to the point where the Italian Society of Psychiatry chose psychosurgery as the first theme of the national congress report in Taormina in 1951.
Lobotomy, already denounced by many doctors as a cruel practice at the height of its success, fell into disrepute and disuse with the advent of Chlorpromazine, a neuroleptic drug.
"Il preteso corpo" is a hospital documentary about the testing of the drug (acetylcholine) produced by a well-known pharmaceutical company (Roche) on people considered psychiatrically calibrated that caused a "vascular storm" with horrible seizures.