Egas Moniz does not win the Nobel Prize?

Egas Monizhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egas_Moniz, pioneer of the lobotomy, was awarded the Nobel prize for Medicine in 1949, greatly boosting the practice of that infamous procedure.
If he had had not been so honored, would treatment of the mentally ill have developed in a more humane direction, or simply more slowly?
 
I suspect it would simply spread more slowly. The inventor of ECT, to my knowledge, won no such prize, and that also caught on very well. The mid-twentieth cenntury is basically the age of mechanistic thinking. If you want an idea of what people thought basically plausible, look at Brave New World. Huxley was a scientifically literate SF writer in his time. People wanted to go in and fix things, and wherever they found a method that allowed them to do that, they were happy to try it. Lobotomy was thought of as the beginning of as great age of discovery, not a dead end; come time, surgeons would open up the brain and excise diseased emotions, misdeveloped thought patterns, and troubling memories. Of course people would go for it, doubly so since it was such a simple, quick and cheap operation.
 
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