A brief quote from a rapid search for "history of lobotomies":

It took a certain Antonio Egaz Moniz of the University of Lisbon Medical School to really put lobotomy on the map. A very productive medical researcher, he invented several significant improvements to brain x-ray techniques prior to his work with lobotomy. He also served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Ambassador to Spain. He was even one of the signers of the Treaty of Versailles, which marked the end of World War I.

He found that cutting the nerves that run from the frontal cortex to the thalamus in psychotic patients who suffered from repetitive thoughts "short-circuited" the problem. Together with his colleague Almeida Lima, he devised a technique involving drilling two small holes on either side of the forehead, inserting a special surgical knife, and severing the prefrontal cortex from the rest of the brain.   He called it leukotomy, but it would come to be known as lobotomy.

Some of his patients became calmer, some did not. Moniz advised extreme caution in using lobotomy, and felt it should only be used in cases where everything else had been tried. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on lobotomy in 1949. He retired early after a former patient paralyzed him by shooting him in the back.

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The ice-pick tradition came later, mostly promoted by one American surgeon who developed the technique and improved it to mass-production scale.

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