labotomy

Noun

lobotomy (plural lobotomies)

1. (historical) A surgical operation involving cutting into a lobe of a body organ, specifically (neurosurgery), a procedure, now largely disused, involving severing connections between the prefrontal cortex and the thalamic region of the frontal lobe of the brain to treat certain mental illnesses.
   • Old psychiatric hospitals are even more frightening. They existed at a time in history when shock therapy, brain tissue manipulation, implants, drug experimentation and lobotomies were treatments de jour.2007 April, Julie Albrecht Royce, “Ghosts and Monsters of Lake Michigan—Haunting and Stalking the Sunset Coast”, in Traveling Michigan’s Sunset Coast: Exploring Michigan’s West Coat Beach Towns from...

   Synonyms:

   leucotomy

   1. (historical) An operation involving the severing of the sympathetic nerve trunk.
2. (figuratively) An act of removing or separating, and often disregarding or forgetting, something.
   • As [Anthony] Magistrale has noted, evil in the fiction of Stephen King "can establish dominion only at the expense of the individual's moral conscience". Yet this conscience is a deep part of the soul; to silence it, characters must perform a kind of moral lobotomy, excising the best parts of...1992, Bernadette Lynn Bosky, “Choice, Sacrifice, Destiny, and Nature in The Stand”, in Anthony Magistrale, editor, A Casebook on The Stand (Studies in Literary Criticism; 38), Mercer Island, Wash....