James W. Watts

James Winston Watts was an American neurosurgeon, born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1904 and died in Washington, D.C., in 1994. He graduated from the Virginia Military Institute and the University of Virginia School of Medicine, worked as a research fellow at Yale, and in 1935 joined the neurosurgery faculty of The George Washington University Hospital, where he stayed until he retired in 1969. He is remembered for his partnership with the neurologist and psychiatrist Walter Freeman, who needed a trained surgeon to carry out the leucotomy pioneered by the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz. Together they began operating in 1936, modified the procedure to cut more white matter, renamed it lobotomy, and wrote two books on psychosurgery. Their method became known as the Freeman-Watts procedure. Watts also performed the lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy under Freeman's supervision, with grave results. He broke with Freeman after Freeman began doing the transorbital 'ice pick' lobotomy alone, because Watts held that only a trained surgeon should operate. The record of his work is now read as a cautionary chapter in the history of psychosurgery.