I have been fortunate in having the opportunity of studying several of the 15 patients treated by prefrontal leucotomy in connection with the Burden Neurological Institute. I do not propose to discuss the clinical results; it is much too early as yet for any authoritative opinion to be given, and a brief review of the literature and of the early results of the first 8 cases in this series was recently published in the Lancet. It may be mentioned, however, that the results are such as to justify the cautious adoption of this operation for therapeutic purposes. Although obviously any procedure of this kind is only justifiable on therapeutic grounds, its value for psychological medicine is far more than the mere addition of another effective therapeutic method, since for the first time in history an opportunity has been presented for the study of changes in personality produced by a relatively standardized local lesion of the brain, enabling us to investigate as never before the role of the frontal lobe in normal and abnormal mental states. This investigation involves the study and correlation of both neurological and psychological data, and encounters all the difficulties inherent in such correlation.

I am only too well aware of the extremely hypothetical nature of much that follows, and of the crying need for experimental evidence to confirm or refute the view here propounded, but I believe that our knowledge of mental disorders would be immeasurably advanced could we but discover the rationale underlying our present empirical methods of therapy.