James W. Watts
| James W. Watts | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 19, 1904 Lynchburg, Virginia, United States |
| Died | November 15, 1994 (age 90) |
| Education |
Virginia Military Institute University of Virginia School of Medicine |
| Known for | Worked as Walter Freeman's surgeon contributing to the popularization of Lobotomy in The United States. |
| Medical career | |
| Profession | neurosurgery, psychosurgery |
James Winston Watts (January 19, 1904 – November 15, 1994) was a neurosurgeon, born in Lynchburg, Virginia and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Watts is noteworthy for his professional partnership with the neurologist and psychiatrist Walter Freeman. The two became advocates and prolific practitioners of psychosurgery, specifically the lobotomy. Watts wrote two books on lobotomies with Dr. Freeman: "Psychosurgery, Intelligence, Emotion and Social Behavior Following Prefrontal Lobotomy for Medical Disorders" in 1942 and "Psychosurgery in the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain" in 1950.
He is also known for carrying out the lobotomy of Rose Marie Kennedy under the supervision of Freeman. Kennedy's mental capacity diminished to that of a two-year-old child. She could not walk or speak intelligibly and was considered incontinent.
After completing medical school in 1928, Watts worked as a research fellow at Yale before joining the faculty of the Department of Neurosurgery and Neurological Surgery at The George Washington University Hospital in 1935. He remained in this position until his retirement in 1969.
Watts was recruited into a medical partnership by his colleague Walter Freeman, who needed the collaboration of a trained surgeon in order to practice the leucotomy, a technique pioneered by the Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz. In the procedure developed by Moniz, the "white matter" in the frontal lobes was severed using a leucotome, an instrument Moniz designed specifically for the procedure. Freeman and Watts acquired several of the instruments and performed their first operation in 1936. They eventually modified the procedure to sever more of the white matter, and renamed it lobotomy in order to distinguish it from the earlier procedure developed by Moniz. Their technique soon became the standard form of the operation, and was known as the "Freeman-Watts Procedure".
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