From the 1960s through the early 1970s, disenchantment with the widespread use of tranquilizers fostered interest in brain surgery as an alternative to “quiet” patients. University of Mississippi neurosurgeon Orlando J. Andy, M.D., capitalized on this trend, performing many types of brain ablations, including thalamotomies (destruction of the thalamus, which controls emotions and analyzes sensations), on African American children as young as six who, he decided, were “aggressive” and “hyperactive”…Today, Andy is revered as a neurosurgical pioneer, one whose work was never challenged in his lifetime and who never suffered any disciplinary action…brain destruction was employed not only for misbehaving black boys but to ensure the docility of prisoners and, in the 1960s, as a government-funded cure for urban rioters. Three American physicians proposed that such urban uprisings were caused by men who could be cured by psychosurgery. Dr. Vernon Mark, director of neurosurgery at Boston City Hospital, and his colleagues Drs. Frank Ervin and William Sweet swept aside social factors such as poverty, slum housing, and poor education in a 1967 proposal in the Journal of the American Medical Association: The obviousness of these causes may have blinded us to the more subtle role of other possible factors, including brain dysfunction…The National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration granted the three surgeons $600,000 for brain research on urban rioters.
–Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington
