Small Peculiar

Oh, Egas Moniz. (No, not that Egas Moniz, the neurosurgeon.) I have feelings about Egas Moniz. Yes, he did things that were wildly unethical by modern sensibilities, and it’s not like he was doing them like five hundred years ago, they gave him the Nobel in 1949 for the technique he’d developed by stabbing people’s naked brains with an apple corer and pouring grain alcohol into their skulls and whatnot. But he did get shot by a disgruntled patient once—not someone he’d lobotomized, someone he’d been treating with hormones, as I recall—and when he was found bleeding on the floor he said, “It was a poor lunatic. Call my wife, I want to see her before I die.” As it turned out, Dr. Moniz survived that attack, but I think those are very dignified things to say when one is found weltering in one’s own blood. I would probably just produce a string of obscenities, but then I wouldn’t drill a hole in someone’s head and pour grain alcohol in there either.

Actually, I just recalled that eleven years ago I drew a comic inspired by this incident. Our old pal Walter was hampered neither by dignity nor by regard for his wife.