Themes In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

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The treatment of mental patients has greatly improved since the 1960s, but it still is not perfect. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a novel written by Ken Kesey and published in 1962. Chief Bromden, a schizophrenic patient in an insane asylum who pretends to be dumb and deaf to avoid confrontation, narrates what happens in the ward. When authority hating Randle McMurphy is committed to the ward, he notices the head nurse, Nurse Ratched, manipulates her patients to keep her authority, rather than actually benefit the patients. Nurse Ratched clearly mistreats her patients and gives them unnecessary treatments. Therefore, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey shows the mistreatment of mental patients, which is still a problem in today’s society. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest takes place in an Oregon insane asylum in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement was in its prime during the time of this book. !! Setting. The central conflict of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the thirst of power leads …show more content…
Evidence of brain manipulation in order to calm down mental patients first became known in the 1880s by Swiss physician Gottlieb Burkhardt ("Lobotomy"). It was not until the 1930s when Egas Moniz, a Portuguese doctor had theorized mental illnesses become apparent in the frontal lobe when there is a problem with neurons. When this information came to America, American neurologist Walter J. Freeman II modified the procedure ("Lobotomy"). American neurosurgeons were against the lobotomy, but Freeman managed to publicize only his success stories when it came preforming the surgery, which led to a wild popularity of the use of lobotomies. During the mid 1950s, however, lobotomies soon began to lose popularity. It came apparent that patients were not necessarily calm, but more so brain dead, and they were not responding to the world around them

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