If there's one thing you can say about medical science, it's that we develop new treatments at an almost incomprehensibly fast pace. That being said, state-of-the-art medical treatments today might be considered brutal a few short decades from now.
For evidence of this axiom, we need only look back at how we used to treat diseases like epilepsy. Doctors used to opt for a type of brain surgery that involved severing the neural connection between the two hemispheres of the brain.
Fittingly, the procedure was known as split-brain surgery.
The process involved opening up a patient's brain and severing the corpus callosum, which is the main connection between the two hemispheres. With this connection gone, not only were symptoms of epilepsy reduced, but other strange things began to happen, like the development of split-brain syndrome.
Researchers Michael Gazzaniga and Roger W. Sperry were among the first physicians to study split-brain syndrome, and their findings were pretty disturbing.
What they found is that individuals with split-brain syndrome, because the different sides of the brain weren't communicating, developed what seemed like split personalities. The left side of the brain would give orders that reflected the person's rational goals, and the right side of the brain would issue conflicting orders that revealed the person's hidden desires
While these developments are rare, they do happen. Luckily, split-brain surgery is now only a last resort for treating epilepsy and it's safer than it used to be.
