leucotome

Moniz soon refined his technique by designing a "leucotome," an instrument with a retractable wire loop and later replaced with a steel band, which he used to cut six cores in the white matter of each hemisphere.

Controversial Psychosurgery Resulted in a Nobel Prize 1998

Watts first used Moniz's leucotome technique, but they soon developed a procedure designed to more completely ablate the white matter tracts to and from the prefrontal lobes.

Controversial Psychosurgery Resulted in a Nobel Prize 1998

All the doctor has to do is knock the patient out with electroshock, saving the expense of an anesthesiologist; lift up the eyelid and insert the icepick (sometimes a "transorbital leucotome," which is an icepick with centimeter markings) and pound on it until the orbital plate fractures and the point jabs through into the brain.

1968 Haldeman, Joe & Fields, Trinity 1984