Las lobotomías practicadas en 1946 por Humberto Fernández-Morán en Maracaibo, Venezuela, o cómo un joven médico decidió dedicarse a la investigación científica básica

Abstract

Humberto Fernández-Morán (1924-1999 was one of the Venezuelan researchers with greater international projection during the second half of the twentieth century, especially because of his studies on the cellular ultrastructure, particularly of the nervous tissue, and for his contributions to development of electron microscopy. In this article we discuss a little-known period of Fernández-Morán, from mid-1944, when he returned to Venezuela after completing his medical studies in Germany, until he marched to Sweden at the end of 1946, where he completed his scientific training. We propose that during this period, Fernández-Morán became interested in neuropsychiatry under the influence of Carlos Ottolina in Caracas. After completing a training in Washington under the direction of Walter Freeman, who was the "champion" of transorbital lobotomy for the treatment of mental illnesses, Fernández-Morán returned to Maracaibo where he practiced, with great dexterity, 25 transorbital lobotomies in the Psychiatric Hospital of Maracaibo. He then traveled to Stockholm, Sweden, as a "Research Fellow" in one of the best neurosurgery centers in the world, under the direction of Hebert Olivecrona. It is then that Fernández-Morán, moved by the absolute futility of seeing patients die with brain tumors, and incentivized by Olivecrona, decides to devote himself to basic research. He then joined the group of Manne Siegbahn, who was the director of the Nobel Institute of Physics and who had designed an electronic microscope of his own invention. In that laboratory and with that electron microscope, Fernández-Morán began his research career.