Between 1936 and 1967 a neurologist with no surgical training drove across America in a camper van he called the lobotomobile, performing lobotomies in state hospitals at twenty-five dollars a head with an ice pick from his own kitchen drawer, and the newspapers, the hospitals and the American Psychiatric Association cheered him the whole way.
Walter Freeman had the look of a great man: the beard, the cane, the wide-brimmed hat, the professorship at George Washington University. In 1936 he and a surgeon called James Watts drilled into the skulls of their first patients and cut the fibres to the frontal lobes, and Freeman, who understood publicity better than any doctor of his generation, went straight to the press. The Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times ran it as a miracle of the age: the surgery of the soul, worry cut out with a knife. Patients who had howled in the back wards sat quietly. The journals printed the series. The Nobel committee gave the inventor of the operation the prize for medicine in 1949, and Freeman wrote to congratulate him.
Then he dispensed with the surgeon. In 1946 he took an ice pick, slid it under the eyelid of a patient on his office table, tapped it through the orbital bone with a mallet and swept it side to side through the frontal lobe, both eyes, ten minutes, no theatre, no anaesthetic but a jolt from an electroshock box. He called it transorbital, and it meant any doctor in any asylum could do a dozen before lunch. He took it on the road. The state hospitals were drowning in patients and begged him to come, and he came, in the van, with the picks in a case, doing them in rows: twenty-five women in one afternoon in Nebraska, a four-year-old boy, nineteen children in all, patients lined up on trolleys while he worked both hands at once for the photographers. He kept a scrapbook of the press cuttings and a count. Three and a half thousand by the end.
The profession never stopped him. The mortality on his own figures was one in seven. The results, when anyone went back and looked, were a population of quiet, incontinent, affectless people who had been returned to their families as cured, and he wrote that he had turned society's misfits into good American citizens. Nobody at the association that had elected him to its council asked for the evidence, because the hospitals wanted the beds and the families wanted the quiet.
It ended in 1967 when a patient he was operating on for the third time bled to death on the table and the hospital took his privileges. He spent his last years driving the van again, state to state, calling on his old patients with a camera to prove they had been improved. He died in 1972. Rosemary Kennedy outlived him by thirty-three years.
A profession that could not cure anyone decided a man who could make people quiet was the same thing, and put him on the cover.
Mike
Walter Freeman had the look of a great man: the beard, the cane, the wide-brimmed hat, the professorship at George Washington University. In 1936 he and a surgeon called James Watts drilled into the skulls of their first patients and cut the fibres to the frontal lobes, and Freeman, who understood publicity better than any doctor of his generation, went straight to the press. The Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times ran it as a miracle of the age: the surgery of the soul, worry cut out with a knife. Patients who had howled in the back wards sat quietly. The journals printed the series. The Nobel committee gave the inventor of the operation the prize for medicine in 1949, and Freeman wrote to congratulate him.
Then he dispensed with the surgeon. In 1946 he took an ice pick, slid it under the eyelid of a patient on his office table, tapped it through the orbital bone with a mallet and swept it side to side through the frontal lobe, both eyes, ten minutes, no theatre, no anaesthetic but a jolt from an electroshock box. He called it transorbital, and it meant any doctor in any asylum could do a dozen before lunch. He took it on the road. The state hospitals were drowning in patients and begged him to come, and he came, in the van, with the picks in a case, doing them in rows: twenty-five women in one afternoon in Nebraska, a four-year-old boy, nineteen children in all, patients lined up on trolleys while he worked both hands at once for the photographers. He kept a scrapbook of the press cuttings and a count. Three and a half thousand by the end.
The profession never stopped him. The mortality on his own figures was one in seven. The results, when anyone went back and looked, were a population of quiet, incontinent, affectless people who had been returned to their families as cured, and he wrote that he had turned society's misfits into good American citizens. Nobody at the association that had elected him to its council asked for the evidence, because the hospitals wanted the beds and the families wanted the quiet.
It ended in 1967 when a patient he was operating on for the third time bled to death on the table and the hospital took his privileges. He spent his last years driving the van again, state to state, calling on his old patients with a camera to prove they had been improved. He died in 1972. Rosemary Kennedy outlived him by thirty-three years.
A profession that could not cure anyone decided a man who could make people quiet was the same thing, and put him on the cover.
Mike
