In no moral way, can you blame a physician? Right. Just like the therapist. You couldn't blame a physician who killed his patients inadvertently. But it was still impossible to contemplate. The agreeable people just do what the other people are doing. They don't study the thing that is going to make their colleagues feel bad. We're adept at fitting ourselves in as a species. It often takes the older generation like dying and leaving science so that the new thing can come in.
When physician Walter Freeman died in 1972, he still believed that lobotomies were the best treatment for mental illness. A pioneer in the method, he was a deeply confident and charismatic man who eagerly spread the technique in America, long after the rise of alternative treatments that were less destructive. Listen as journalist Megan McArdle and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss what McArdle calls the "Oedipus Trap": mistakes that no one can live with, even if they were innocently made, and how admitting such mistakes to ourselves is nearly impossible. They also discuss the complexity of the credo, "follow the science."