It would be entirely too tacky to use a pink sink to perform a lobotomy. Besides, this procedure could be done in a doctor's office - you didn't need a surgical center or surgical sink (a pink surgical sink? Ooog!). It's a grotesquely simple procedure, actually - anesthetize the person, poke a small leucotome (or ice pick if you don't have access to a leucotome) in the roof of one of his or her eye orbits, swish it back and forth through the frontal lobes a few times, and voila! A perfect transorbital leucotomy (or lobotomy, as they were later called). No need for trepanning or other invasive surgical procedures.
People have this late night TV vision of crazed physicians running around taking off the tops of people's heads and removing large chunks of their brain, when the reality was more that they used a very small metal tool and scrambled the person's frontal lobes and took away their executive functions. That's actually scarier because it's so simple. However, it shows you how easy it is to give a human being severe brain damage and is one of the main reasons that all you people need to wear your seatbelts in the car and helmets when you motorbike and I am not kidding - this is your mother speaking - put on your gosh-darned seatbelts, people, or you'll wish the worst I did to you was give you a boring lecture about lobotomies. >:-(
Rachel, I believe this report was for one ward, which I would assume to be a single floor of a single wing of the hospital. If there were 18 patients in this ward, then one suicidal patient would be a very realistic number.
Decca made 78's too -- they are slightly bigger than 45s, and rigid. It was a really popular company in the early part of the 20th century, 30s and 40s, I think, were their heyday.
I'm not sure, but I would think that there would be a lot more than one person a day feeling suicidal, especially in a place this big (though I don't know how many patients it had at a time, I'm guessing quite a few.) I'd imagine that some of the patients here would feel suicidal pretty much every day. But who knows. Maye they were out of touch with reality enough that their craziness manifested itself in other ways.
For those of who who think the renovation was done by some dillusional architect..maybe. More often than not, this is the kind of stuff that happens when an architect is NOT involved.
People have this late night TV vision of crazed physicians running around taking off the tops of people's heads and removing large chunks of their brain, when the reality was more that they used a very small metal tool and scrambled the person's frontal lobes and took away their executive functions. That's actually scarier because it's so simple. However, it shows you how easy it is to give a human being severe brain damage and is one of the main reasons that all you people need to wear your seatbelts in the car and helmets when you motorbike and I am not kidding - this is your mother speaking - put on your gosh-darned seatbelts, people, or you'll wish the worst I did to you was give you a boring lecture about lobotomies. >:-(