Since the introduction of Thorazine in 1954 psychiatry and drug companies have rolled out a never ending stream of psychotropic drugs to replace the dramatic surgical procedures known as lobotomies. These so-called psychotropic medications have been called “chemical lobotomies” and proven to be just that.
But what is a lobotomy?
In the 1930’s neurologists got the idea that mental health could be improved by psychosurgery. Antonio Egas Moniz in Portugal and Gottlieb Burckhardt in Switzerland experimented with drilling holes in a patient’s skulls and injecting pure alcohol to destroy brain tissue thus adjusting mental conditions.
Psychiatrist Walter Freeman working in the US invented a quicker and more profitable method and named it the lobotomy.
Freeman believed that an overload of emotions led to mental illness and “that cutting certain nerves in the brain could eliminate excess emotion and stabilize a personality.”
His technique went like this – “As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. Freeman would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient’s eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face.”
Freeman toured the country’s mental hospitals with great media attention and performed about 2,500 lobotomies in his career, once performing the operation on 25 women in a single day. Something like 40,000 to 50,000 lobotomies were done in the United States in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.
The Soviet Union banned the surgery in 1950, arguing that it was “contrary to the principles of humanity.” Other countries, including Germany and Japan, banned it, too, but lobotomies continued to be performed on a limited scale in the United States, Britain, Scandinavia and several western European countries well into the 1980’s.
Freeman eventually lost his license when one of his patients came back for her third lobotomy. Freeman did the surgery and severed a blood vessel in her brain. Three days later she died. The hospital then revoked Freeman’s surgical privileges and he went into retirement, soon to die of cancer.
In 2005 National Public Radio did a show featuring Howard Dully a man who had been lobotomized at the age of 12 by Walter Freeman.
Dully said, “If you saw me you’d never know I’d had a lobotomy. The only thing you’d notice is that I’m very tall and weigh about 350 pounds. But I’ve always felt different — wondered if something’s missing from my soul. I have no memory of the operation, and never had the courage to ask my family about it. So two years ago I set out on a journey to learn everything I could about my lobotomy.”
The radio program uncovered Freeman’s notes and files on the case and helped to reveal what happened to Howard Dully and why it was done.
Howard Dully’s mother had died of cancer when he was 5. Dully says, “My stepmother hated me. I never understood why, but it was clear she’d do anything to get rid of me.”
Freeman wrote in his notes that the step-mother feared Howard and called him defiant and savage, stating that the 12 year old boy …”Doesn’t react either to love or to punishment. He objects to going to bed but then sleeps well. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says ‘I don’t know.’ He turns the room’s lights on when there is broad sunlight outside. He hates to wash.”
Sounds like good reason for a lobotomy!
Sure enough, Freeman then writes on Nov. 30, 1960, “Mrs. Dully came in for a talk about Howard. Things have gotten much worse and she can barely endure it. I explained to Mrs. Dully that the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard’s personality by means of transorbital lobotomy.”
Two and a half weeks after the boy’s lobotomy, Freeman wrote: “I told Howard what I’d done to him… and he took it without a quiver. He sits quietly, grinning most of the time and offering nothing.”
Howard Dully says that when his step-mother realized the operation “didn’t turn me into a vegetable, she got me out of the house. I was made a ward of the state.”
But isn’t this just ancient psychiatric treatment history and longer in use?
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