| A Waking Nightmare - A Living Hell
What Price A Life….. The flashbacks come late at night. First comes the recollection of intense physical pain, as if the bones in his arms are being snapped like twigs. Then he hears the voice of the neurosurgeon applying an electric current to metal pins implanted in the tissue of his brain. "How do you feel, Derek?" the surgeon Arthur E Wall asks, while peering into Derek Hutchinson's eyes to see if his pupils have yet dilated with fear. When Hutchinson swears at the surgeon, Wall administers another electric shock to nerve centres located in the hypothalamus at the centre of his patient's brain. At this, Hutchinson's pupils dilate and he screams: "You're going to kill me, you bastard!" Hutchinson's medical records, written by Wall over 30 years ago, confirm that his patient "felt funny - as if he was dying". But as he screamed, Hutchinson recalls Wall leaning in close to his face and leering: "And I thought you were a bit of a tough guy." His next recollection is of Wall giving orders for surgical implements to be passed. Hutchinson feels the metal pins inserted through nylon balls lodged in cavities bored into the front of his skull being replaced by thicker electrodes he says felt like "broom handles". "After that I started, I start to feel warm all over and quickly feel as if I have fallen into a vat of molten metal, as if I am, quite literally, frying," says Hutchinson, tellingly confusing tenses as he describes the brain surgery he underwent in 1974 yet still relives up to a dozen times a day and in frequent nightmares. Throughout the surgery in 1974, Hutchinson was kept conscious; his head held in a brace, his hands and feet strapped to the operating table. Hutchinson, a 27-year-old father of three at the time of the operation, says he had not given his written consent to the operation being performed; neither had his wife - his next of kin. Instead his mother, an alcoholic, had been visited at home, in the late evening, after she had been drinking, and had been asked to sign the form. "My mother thought doctors were gods," Hutchinson says. "She'd have signed anything they asked." DEREK HUTCHINSON – SURGERY WITHOUT CONSENT IN BREACH OF PART 1V SECTION 49 OF MENTAL HEALTH ACT 1959 Part iv Section 49 – Definition of Relative and Nearest Relative Functions of relative: of patient Definition of 49—(I) In this Part of this Act "relative ". means any of the relative and following, that is to say— (a) husband or wife; (b) son or daughter; (c) father; (d) mother; (e) brother or sister; (I) grandparent; (g) grandchild; (h) uncle or aunt; (i) nephew or niece. (3) In this Part of this Act, subject to the provisions of this section and to the following provisions of this Part of this Act, the "nearest relative" means the person first described in subsection (1) of this section who is for the time being surviving, relatives of the whole blood being preferred to relatives of the same description of the half-blood.. Section 52 Appointment By Court of Acting Nearest Relative – Not Followed (3) An application for an order under this section may be made upon any of the following grounds, that is to say— (a) that the patient has no nearest relative within the meaning of this Act, or that it is not reasonably practicable to ascertain whether he has such a relative, or who that relative is; (b) that the nearest relative of the patient is INCAPABLE OF ACTING as such by reason of mental disorder or other illness; BREACH Derek’s former wife (his nearest relative, (a) withdrew consent for the operation to destroy his hypothalamus. In breach of two terms regarding nearest relative, permission to proceed was obtained from Derek’s alcoholic mother, (d) herself a former patient at Roundhay, clearly ‘incapable’ (b). ) THE CONSENT RULE Under an established common law rule ("the consent rule") it is both tortious and criminal to perform acts such as surgical operations on the body of an adult without his or her consent, the tort or offence being that form of trespass to the person known as battery Hutchinson's excruciatingly detailed recollections are a rare testimony of someone still lucid and intensely angry about a type of brain surgery to which he was subjected. (You can watch this harrowing operation Stereotaxic Hypothalamotomy, perfomed by his surgeon Arthur E.Wall, filmed live in 1976 by selecting the link on the front page ‘It’s A Bit Frightening’). The Hypothalamotomy - An Experimental Treatment For Aggression. In most psychosurgical operations the intention is to destroy tissue in the frontal lobes, but a few operations have been done on the temporal lobes. Amygdalotomy, which destroys the amygdala, has been performed on small numbers of people in Britain. A group of Scottish doctors in the early 1970s EXPERIMENTED with the operation in the treatment of aggressive behaviour. Their patients included one as young as eight, and several others aged under 20. IN ENGLAND A FEW HYPOTHALAMOTOMIES, WHERE THE HYPOTHALMUS IS THE TARGET, WERE PERFORMED FOR THE SAME REASON. i.e. Experimental, for aggression. ” Around the same time (1976) the World Health Organisation defined psychosurgery as “…the selective surgical removal or destruction…of neural pathways…with a view to influencing behaviour”. A similar description, two years earlier, was:“selective destruction of areas of the brain for the primary purpose of altering thoughts, emotional reactions, personality characteristics of social response patterns” (Chorover, 1974). DEREK HUTCHINSON – DIAGNOSIS "NO GROSS PSYCHIATRIC ABNORMALITY” Derek Hutchinson’s medical papers record in a letter between Psychiatrist J Todd, (member of The Eugenics Society) and Surgeon Arthur E. Wall, that Derek would be a good subject for this operation as he had ‘no gross psychiatric abnormality’. WHY then, go to such extremes and drill into his brain? Surgeon Arthur Wall says in the TV documentary quoted that he would like to perform this surgery if it is successful, to cure aggression on prisoners! Use of neurosurgery for psychological disorder in The British Isles 1974-6 as follows:- TABLE 11-Lesions used by units performing functional neurosurgery during 1974-6 and estimated proportions of patients subjected to each type .................................................................................% patients ............................................................No. of units Lower medial quadrant.............................10 (32) 16 Rostral........................................................9 (29) 7 Bimedial......................................................8 (26) 6 Cingulectomy,/cingulumotomy....................8 (26) 10 Stereotactic limbic......................................4 (13) 13 Standard....................................................3 (10) 3 Stereotactic subcaudate.............................2 (6) 30 Amygdalotomy.............................................1 (3) <1 Bilateral lesions in fundus striae terminalis.1 (3) <1 Combined stereotactic lesions in cingulum and subcaudate regions....................................1 (3) <1 Division of fornix..........................................1 (3) <1 Hypothalamotomy -....................................1 (3) <1 Derek’s-less than 1% Of patients Lower-quadrant prefrontal and paramedian prefrontal...................................................1 (3) <1 Multifocal leucocoagulation by acute and chronic indwelling electrodes of rostral, standard limbic, and subcaudate sites......1 (3) 6 Orbital leucotomy......................................1 (3) <1 Temporal lobotomy...................................1 (3) 3 JM Barraclough and NA Mitchell-Heggs 1978 DEREK’S HYPOTHALAMOTOMY SURGERY WAS LESS THAN 1% OF ALL TYPES OF BRAIN SURGERY CARRIED OUT BETWEEN 1974-76, AND THE FACT IT WAS TRIED TO CURB AGGRESSION MAKES IT EVEN RARER. LOOK EXPERIMENTAL TO YOU? Norway Takes The Lead ‘Sandra Goldbeck-Wood reports that Norway has offered compensation to all patients who have had a lobotomy in Norway in the past.1 Her article seems to leave the opponents of psychosurgery on a high moral ground. What the Norwegian fiscal administration chooses to do with presumably surplus money is its own decision, but Goldbeck-Wood's use of the word "victims" implies that patients who had a leucotomy in the past were the subjects of medical misjudgement’. Dr R P Snaith (another of Derek's psychiatrists) We Couldn’t Agree More… DEREK'S LIFE WAS DESTROYED AND HE LOST HIS FAMILY WAS THIS A EUGENIC EXPERIMENT?… With many of those who have undergone such surgery unable to speak for themselves and few of those subjected to the cruder forms of surgery still alive, Derek Hutchinson's is the rare voice of experience. His story serves as a chilling reinforcement of the adage that a society be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable. As Hutchinson sits talking in the cramped living room of his small terrace house in Leeds, he frequently stretches out his arms to hug his two-year-old grandson, one of 17 grandchildren. While the boy giggles with delight, Hutchinson, 59, talks a little of his own childhood. He recalls how his mother would often lock him, the middle of three brothers, in a coal shed overnight. "Glass were all broken. I'd have to sleep in coal sack, night after night. It went on for years," he says. But he prefers not to dwell on it. "That's all done now, in the past." On his own admission, Hutchinson grew into a troubled youngster. Though he channelled his aggression into amateur boxing and other sports, he was, he admits, "always in trouble as a lad" and would often get into fights. After a spate of joyriding cars as a teenager, he was sent to a series of borstal schools, then remand homes. Eventually he found work as a welder, married and had three children. When he was 27, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown. After being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, he was given ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) and prescribed strong sedatives. His psychiatrist then recommended that he undergo psychosurgery. According to Hutchinson, the psychiatrist tried to persuade him such surgery was necessary to curb his aggressive tendencies after asking him how he would feel if Hutchinson were ever to kill one of his own children. "I'd never harmed any of my children. I never would. But when he put it like that, I was scared." Still, Hutchinson was considered incapable of giving consent, as ?he was so heavily sedated. At first his wife agreed to the operation. But after seeing the sizable holes that had been drilled into her husband's skull in preparation for the second part of the operation a week later, she withdrew her consent. It was then that his mother was approached. In the 1976 TV documentary (linked on front page – ‘it’s a bit frightening’) on the same operation as Hutchinson underwent, being performed on a mother-of-five called Margaret Chapman, the neurosurgeon Wall, who has since died, describes the operation as "quite simple, really". He then casually admits knowledge of psychiatry is "something you pick up as you go along". But far from curing Hutchinson's aggression, which he describes as "within his control" before the operation, the surgery he underwent left him so traumatised that he walked out on his first wife, Ruth, who had recently given birth to twins, fearing he might do his children harm. He subsequently attempted to physically attack the psychiatrist who had referred him to Wall, and several years later tried to commit suicide. Though he eventually resumed work and remarried, he has suffered vivid flashbacks of the operation ever since, and in recent years has been diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In a mountain of meaningless correspondence from faceless individuals in various Departments of the NHS Derek has received, NO Appology, NO Compassion, and NO Compensation. (Historically medical intervention were both invasive and ineffective. Surgical techniques have also been used including castration and brain surgery (stereotaxic hypothalamotomy), but while these have had a direct impact on underlying sex drive, they are permanently damaging. The long-term effects of such treatment often contributes to the offender committing suicide or committing violent crime.) nota.co.uk ……..But the fight continues……momentum and support is increasing…… A wasted life, destroyed health, lost family, and protracted suffering and trauma must be addressed, will be addressed and shame on those that make the process any longer. Dr P K Bridges (Psychosurgery Unit, Regional Neurosurgical Centre, Brook General Hospital, London SE18) Psychosurgery Today (1970s): Psychiatric Aspects A leading article in the British Medical Journal (1971) reviewed some lately published studies on the results of psychosurgery and concluded that the assessment of these operations leaves us 'in a state of uncertainty'. The writer suggested that the way out of the dilemma might be for the Royal Colleges of Psychiatrists and of Surgeons to arrange a prospective controlled trial. This would, of course, be desirable but the problems involved in the formulation of such an investigation are formidable. Quite apart from decisions about the types of operation to be included, assigning patients to the modes of treatment, and the diagnostic and historical comparison of patients, there is the problem of the complexity of attitudes involved in the referral of a patient for psychosurgery. As the leading article pointed out, 'a certain rigid extremity of opinion can be predicted' in the present ambivalent climate, both clinical and popular, regarding psychosurgery. The attitudes, positive or negative, to be considered include those of the patient, his psychiatrist, his general practitioner and his relatives. Any one of these may object strongly to the suggestion of a brain operation and attempt to veto the Possibility put forward by one of the others. It should be realized that psychiatrists are not the only original source of referral and sometimes the initiative comes from others. For example, in a series to be considered later, 3 of the 50 cases reviewed came directly from family doctors. This is not accepted as the most satisfactory mode of referral but there were in each of these cases special reasons for it. Derek Perkins, Sean Hammond, Dawn Coles, Darren Bishopp Department of Psychology Broadmoor Hospital Prepared for the High Security Psychiatric Services Commissioning Board (HSPSCB) 1998 http://www.ramas.co.uk/report4.pdf Another surgical technique that has been RARELY USED is stereotaxic hypothalamotomy although this has been roundly criticised both for the credibility of the underlying scientific model and on the poor ethical grounds upon which the technique was usually carried out (Rieber and Seigush 1979). Derek Hutchinson NEWS: Select the link on the front page - "A Bit Frightening" to see a documentary from 1976 which shows the actual surgery that Derek experienced but in his case he was strapped down and the operation was performed against his will. The BT Mind Champion of the Year 2007 The Mind Champion of the Year award is given to the person or people who have made a major contribution to challenging discrimination in mental health. Last year’s winner was survivor and mental health activist Peter Campbell. Winner announced Stephen Fry *Winner* Through his television programmes Stephen has challenged the stigma surrounding bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) while introducing it with humour, gentleness, great understanding, and optimism to a wider public. Also nominated: Derek Hutchinson A survivor of psychosurgery, Derek has been an activist around the issue since the 1980s. He formed the group SCALPS, and is known internationally as well as in his home town of Leeds. In the last year Derek has been campaigning for a suitable monument for the 2,800 plus people who died and are buried in unmarked graves at the site of the old High Royds Asylum near Leeds. Derek Hutchinson's mother was an alcoholic and used to lock him in the coalhouse overnight. His father was a bare-knuckle boxer. They had Derek in 1946, and he grew up in Leeds, developing a reputation for being a tearaway, the boy who'd always do the naughty thing. 'If you think what kids get up to, I used to get up to it, because I didn't know any better, basically.' His parents had no control over him - 'All they did for us really was bring us into the world' - and, from the age of 10, he was in and out of approved schools. He had a high IQ and he was talented at football, rugby and boxing, 'but those places, they knocked violence, embedded it into you'. In his late teens, when he was working as a welder, Derek had a motorbike accident that left him with one leg shorter than the other and killed off his chances of becoming a professional sportsman. It was a terrible disappointment. It did mean, though, that he met his wife, Ruth, a nurse. 'I'd never met anybody, never been involved with anybody, who'd cared about me, who'd had my welfare - or thought about me, and she did, for some reason.' They married in 1967, and had three children. 'We were happy. She went to church and I went to the pub.' But, in 1973, Derek was followed by the police when he was driving a mini-van without a licence. He can't precisely remember what happened after that, but recollections of Borstal flooded back and he suffered some sort of black-out. 'Ruth says I came in like a zombie. I couldn't speak, couldn't rationalise.' He thinks now that he was suffering from mild depression, triggered by memories of his adolescence. But he visited his GP, who sent him to High Royds, the local psychiatric hospital. 'All I remember is waking up in that place. Once those people have got you, there's not much you can do: you're powerless.' Derek was given 10 sessions of ECT and prescribed Largactil and other psychotropic drugs. His psychiatrist, Dr Todd, suggested that it was time something was done to control his aggression. Derek objected that his aggression had never been irrational, 'but this Todd said, "How would you like to be responsible for the death of one of your children?" I told him there was no possibility of that, but he said that violence was self-progressing, and I could hit one of my kids and they could die afterwards. I couldn't allow that to happen, no matter what. So then he said that there was this operation.' This operation - 'the stimulation and destruction of the posteromedial hypothalamic nuclei in restless and aggressive behaviour' - had been pioneered in Japan by a neurosurgeon called Kajo Sanno. Only much later did Derek discover that Sanno had been struck off when all the patients on whom he tried it had died. He was told at the time that 12 people had had the operation in the UK; he has tried subsequently to track them down. 'I've only found one. He's in a private nursing home and can't speak.' The neurosurgeon who was to carry out the operation, a Mr Wall, had worked - presumably with Sanno - in Japan. He explained that the procedure involved inserting, under anaesthetic, two nylon balls into the scalp and guiding rods through them into the brain to burn out the areas that were 'responsible for aggression'. After the insertion of the balls - 'which involved pinning back a flap of my forehead' - Ruth was so horrified by Derek's appearance that she refused consent for the second part of the operation. Dr Todd himself went to visit Derek's mother. 'He went at 8pm. He knew she was an alcoholic, and by then she'd be out of it. Even though she didn't care about me a lot, she wouldn't have put me in that sort of danger if she'd known what she was doing.' But she signed the forms, and, for eight-and-a-half hours, Derek was operated on while awake. (Knowing how far to go with the procedure apparently required the surgeons to watch the dilatation of his pupils). 'The only thing I can liken it to is having a tooth out without anaesthetic, putting a needle in to the nerve, wiggling it around and then burning it. I felt I'd been hit on the head with a sledgehammer, and then as if I was cooking.' The operation did not make Derek less violent. One of his first actions after returning home was to storm into High Royds and physically attack Dr Todd. The hospital did not press charges. 'Previously, I might have got into a fight, but now I would plan violence. There was stuff going through my brain that's not the stuff people normally think about. I can't say what, without making myself seem a monster.' He came close to shooting somebody, and almost firebombed a house. 'I was meticulous about planning it. I came close to killing that man.' Derek and Ruth had two more children, twins. But in 1978, while the rest of the family was out at church, 'I just walked out. I couldn't bear the thought that I might hurt one of my kiddies. But it didn't make sense. We'd been married 13 years and had five kids.' He is still close to tears when he talks about it. For a couple of years, Derek lived with his mother. Then he met Carol, a single parent, and married her. 'She has looked after me for about 20 years. No one could have done it better.' She is evidently devoted to him: she explains that he is extremely sensitive to temperature and passes out if he gets too hot. He has no appetite and could happily go two weeks without eating. His short-term memory is terrible, and he often picks up the telephone, dials a number and forgets whom he is trying to call. His sleep patterns are disrupted: he naps throughout the day and wants to be up talking at 4am. He has had repeated flashbacks - which he now believes to be post-traumatic stress disorder - ever since the day of the operation. 'Sometimes I go through it 12 times a day. I know exactly which instrument Wall is going to ask for next.' Dr Todd and Mr Wall are both dead. Their attempts to control aggressive behaviour by removing parts of the hypothalamus seem to have ground to a halt shortly after Derek's operation. 'You can see why they wanted to believe in it. An operation to control behaviour would be a breakthrough. There are still neurosurgeons who believe they will be able to do this. But they don't know where the mind is located in the brain and, unless they know that, how can they judge what they're doing?' Derek has seen a letter in which Dr Todd advised Mr Wall that he would suitable for the operation because he had 'no gross psychological abnormality'. In which case, he asks, why did they butcher his brain? He has started an organisation called Scalps (Survivors' Campaign Against Lobotomy and Psychosurgery) and spoken at a conference in Germany. He has been invited to Paris, Japan, Holland and Australia. For the last year, he has received counselling for his PTSD, which seems to be helping. He helps out in the primary school along the road, and has 15 grandchildren, to whom he is devoted. He doesn't believe he was ever seriously mentally ill before the operation. 'But you can't put up a defence, if you're going to be mentally ill,' he says; 'because it just comes, and it can come to anybody.' From The Sunday Times February 19, 2006 Mental cruelty The lobotomy is deemed one of the worst crimes in medical history. But a modern form of it is still practised in Britain - and may soon be performed without the patient's consent. By Christine Toomey and Steven Young The flashbacks come late at night. First comes the recollection of intense physical pain, as if the bones in his arms are being snapped like twigs. Then he hears the voice of the neurosurgeon applying an electric current to metal pins implanted in the tissue of his brain. "How do you feel, Derek?" the surgeon Arthur E Wall asks, while peering into Derek Hutchinson's eyes to see if his pupils have yet dilated with fear. When Hutchinson swears at the surgeon, Wall administers another electric shock to nerve centres located in the hypothalamus at the centre of his patient's brain. At this, Hutchinson's pupils dilate and he screams: "You're going to kill me, you bastard!" Hutchinson's medical records, written by Wall over 30 years ago, confirm that his patient "felt funny - as if he was dying". But as he screamed, Hutchinson recalls Wall leaning in close to his face and leering: "And I thought you were a bit of a tough guy." His next recollection is of Wall giving orders for surgical implements to be passed. Hutchinson feels the metal pins inserted through nylon balls lodged in cavities bored into the front of his skull being replaced by thicker electrodes he says felt like "broom handles". "After that I started, I start to feel warm all over and quickly feel as if I have fallen into a vat of molten metal, as if I am, quite literally, frying," says Hutchinson, tellingly confusing tenses as he describes the brain surgery he underwent in 1974 yet still relives up to a dozen times a day and in frequent nightmares. Throughout the surgery, Hutchinson was kept conscious; his head held in a brace, his hands and feet strapped to the operating table. Hutchinson, a 27-year-old father of three at the time of the operation, says he had not given his written consent to the operation being performed; neither had his wife - his next of kin. Instead his mother, an alcoholic, had been visited at home, in the late evening, after she had been drinking, and had been asked to sign the form. "My mother thought doctors were gods," Hutchinson says. "She'd have signed anything they asked." Hutchinson's excruciatingly detailed recollections are a rare testimony of someone still lucid and intensely angry about a type of brain surgery to which he was subjected - he contends illegally - commonly referred to as a lobotomy. In strict medical terms, a lobotomy - or leucotomy, as the procedure became known in this country - involved the removal of part of the frontal lobes of the brain or the severing of neural fibres connecting the frontal lobes to the limbic system - the part of the brain concerned with emotional response and functions not under conscious control. From the mid-1930s until the early 1960s this form of "psychosurgery" was heralded as a miracle cure for the mentally ill, before psychotherapy came into vogue and drugs to treat many mental-health problems became widely available. It was pioneered by a maverick Portuguese neurologist, Egas Moniz, who was awarded the Nobel prize in 1949 for developing and promoting the procedure. Lobotomies were seen as the solution to a wide range of mental disorders ranging from profound depression, schizophrenia and advanced neurosyphilis to mild retardation, at a time when half of all hospital beds in many countries were occupied by the mentally ill, and mental institutions were often places of humiliation and horror. At the height of its popularity in the 1940s and 50s, particularly in the US, some of the most enthusiastic proponents of the procedure promoted it as a way of controlling large numbers of those considered society's worst misfits, including communists and homosexuals. Neurologists, not just in the US but in Japan, Britain and elsewhere, carried out variations of the procedure on tens of thousands of patients - an estimated 50,000 in the UK alone. Little attention was paid to what happened to those subjected to lobotomies after surgery. John F Kennedy's temperamental sister Rose, who underwent the operation at the age of 23, for instance, spent the next 60 years of her life out of sight in a mental institution. Francis Farmer, the rebellious Hollywood actress and political activist whose outspoken behaviour was also "cured" by a lobotomy, quickly drifted into oblivion and ended her days as a hotel clerk. But as the number of lives wrecked by such surgery became more widely known, its effect was gradually exposed - most famously in Milos Forman's 1975 film, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. But also earlier, in the 1958 play Suddenly Last Summer, by Tennessee Williams. A close friend of Williams, whose sister Rose was lobotomised as a teenager, recalls how the playwright talked of his sister as "fragile and gentle", someone hurt by "the harshness of life". "Things alarmed Miss Rose that would not even be noticed by someone less sensitive. She was just awakening to sexuality and knew almost nothing about it… Rose came home from school one day and said the nuns were using altar candles for self-abuse. She told mother this," the playwright once confided to his biographer Dotson Rader. To the siblings' mother, known even to her children as "Miss Edwina", human sexuality was "the great unmentionable". She promptly took her daughter to the doctor, demanding the "filth" be cut out of her brain: "Cut it away! Miss Edwina ordered. "Make it clean!" "And he did," recalled the playwright, who said his mother never showed any remorse about reducing her daughter to a human vegetable. Some now consider such practices to be among the most egregious medical crimes of the last century and have called for Moniz, who was later shot in the back by a dissatisfied patient, to be posthumously stripped of his Nobel prize. The Nobel Foundation rules this out, maintaining that all of its awards can be justified within the historical context that they are given. By the time Hutchinson had his operation in 1974, the scale on which psychosurgery was being performed was drastically reduced, with more and more mental disorders being treated with drugs and psychotherapy. Crude frontal lobotomies, of the type Moniz promoted, had been phased out. Surgery became targeted at more specific parts of the brain as the neurobiology of emotion became better understood. The surgery performed by Wall on Hutchinson's hypothalamus, for instance, was intended to curb his aggression. Since then, psychosurgery has become even more refined, the parts of the brain targeted and destroyed to control behaviour ever smaller. Though the name lobotomy persists, the medical profession now refers to any such procedure as NMD (neurosurgery for mental disorder). But Britain is now one of the few countries where this sort of surgery is still permitted. Even here it is only performed for persistent severe depression and anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in two places: University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, and Ninewells hospital, Dundee. Patients must consent to the surgery and ethical and clinical standards committees subject each case to rigid scrutiny before it goes ahead. Derek has mounted a campaign to give the former patients buried by the Ambulance station a Decent memorial. See link on the front page. Hi My grandad suffered this barbaric procedure he was in stanley royds for fifteen years. He was in his fiftys when he died in 1973 . What a sad and unimaginable life he must of had i was five when he diedand only have a few memories of him thank god they banned this and the asylums. Julie All content copyright protected. |