James W. Watts

[2] After completing medical school in 1928, Watts worked as a research fellow at Yale before joining the faculty of the Department of Neurosurgery and Neurological Surgery at The George Washington University Hospital in 1935.

Watts was recruited into a medical partnership by his colleague Walter Freeman, who needed the collaboration of a trained surgeon in order to practice the leucotomy, a technique pioneered by the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz.

Inspired by the work of the Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti, Freeman developed, without the knowledge or participation of Watts, a procedure for reaching the frontal lobes by inserting a probe under the eyelid and above the tear duct, then hammering it through the thin bone of the eye socket.

The whole operation took only minutes under local anesthesia or by using an electroshock machine to render the patient unconscious by passing a large electrical current through the brain, inducing a seizure, then leading to a brief period of post-seizure coma, which was when the procedure would be carried out.

Watts, unlike Freeman, was a trained neurosurgeon and adamantly believed lobotomy should be performed only by a proper surgeon.

This, combined with a growing discomfort among the medical profession and general public regarding lobotomy, led to a sharp decline in the use of the procedure.