@article{ref1,
title="The surgical elimination of violence? Conflicting attitudes towards technology and science during the psychosurgery controversy of the 1970s",
journal="Science in context",
year="2015",
author="Casey, Brian P.",
volume="28",
number="1",
pages="99-129",
abstract="Argument In the 1970s a public controversy erupted over the proposed use of brain operations to curtail violent behavior. Civil libertarians, civil rights and community activists, leaders of the anti-psychiatry movement, and some U.S. Congressmen charged psychosurgeons and the National Institute of Mental Health, with furthering a political project: the suppression of dissent. Several government-sponsored investigations into psychosurgery rebutted this charge and led to an official qualified endorsement of the practice while calling attention to the need for more &quot;scientific&quot; understanding and better ethical safeguards. This paper argues that the psychosurgery debate of the 1970s was more than a power struggle between members of the public and the psychiatric establishment. The debate represented a clash between a postmodern skepticism about science and renewed focus on ultimate ends, on the one hand, and a modern faith in standards and procedures, a preoccupation with means, on the other. These diverging commitments made the dispute ultimately irresolvable.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0269-8897",
doi="10.1017/S0269889714000349",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0269889714000349"
}