Lobotomy Article

[Guest guest]

Note the 11th paragraph:

Undaunted by his failures, Freeman's pitch that lobotomy cured mental

illness was seized on by the press -- the Washington Star called it

among " the greatest innovations of this generation, " and the New York

Times pronounced it " history-making. "

Sounds a lot like the way the press talks about mass vaccination

today...

'Lobotomist' Serves as a Warning

Documentary Shows Damage Done When Medicine Goes Awry

By G. Boodman

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, January 15, 2008; HE01

One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was

carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical

establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital

or " ice pick " lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling

operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the

1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness.

Its prosaic name comes from the instrument initially used to perform

it: an ice pick plucked from the kitchen drawer of the procedure's

tireless proselytizer, Walter J. Freeman, who pioneered the operation

in 1936 while at Washington University Hospital.

The story of how Freeman sold his procedure to credulous colleagues,

assiduously courted the press and convinced desperate families that

sticking an ice pick through a patient's upper eye sockets and

twirling it like a swizzle stick through brain matter would cure

psychosis, depression or troublesome behavior is the ultimate in

cautionary medical tales.

As the riveting hour-long " American Experience " documentary " The

Lobotomist " (scheduled to air Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. on WETA and other PBS

stations) makes clear, Freeman's operation reflected the

neurologist's peculiar combination of zealotry, talent, hubris and,

as one of his trainees noted, craziness. Sometimes Freeman, who

relished putting on a show, used a carpenter's mallet instead of a

surgical hammer during demonstrations of his operation. At other

times, he would operate left-handed rather than right-handed.

Based in part on the much-praised 2005 biography " The Lobotomist " by

medical writer Jack El-Hai, who appears in the film and served as a

consultant, the film by Barak Goodman and Maggio features

chilling black-and-white home movies as well as haunting photographs

of patients before and sometimes after their lobotomies. Many of the

movies are narrated by a gravel-voiced Freeman demonstrating the

procedure he performed on more than 2,900 people, the youngest of

whom was 4.

As the filmmakers note, lobotomy flourished in a therapeutic vacuum:

Until the mid-1950s when the groundbreaking tranquilizer Thorazine

swept through mental hospitals, ushering in the era of

psychopharmacology, medicine had virtually nothing to offer

psychiatric patients.

State hospitals were teeming, squalid warehouses that had become

permanent homes to thousands who had little hope of ever leaving. One

of the most notorious was Washington's St. s Hospital, where

Freeman began his career in the 1920s and was struck by the sight of

5,000 patients " whose lives were going nowhere, would go nowhere, " in

the words of El-Hai.

The solution, Freeman believed, lay in a radical experimental

procedure invented by a Portuguese neurologist who in 1949 would win

the Nobel Prize in medicine. He claimed the drastic brain operation

had cured a substantial number of people with mental illness.

The scion of a distinguished Philadelphia medical family who had a

burning desire for fame, Freeman began experimenting and developed

the ice pick procedure. His operation severed the frontal lobe from

the thalamus, the repository of emotions and the site where Freeman

believed mental illness originated.

A few patients and their families claimed lobotomy was beneficial,

especially in reducing agitation, which was Freeman's measure of

success. But others died on the table or were left irreparably

damaged: childlike, docile, vacant and incontinent. Among them was

Rosemary Kennedy, the 23-year-old mildly retarded sister of F.

Kennedy, who spent 56 years of her life in an institution after

Freeman operated on her in 1941.

Undaunted by his failures, Freeman's pitch that lobotomy cured mental

illness was seized on by the press -- the Washington Star called it

among " the greatest innovations of this generation, " and the New York

Times pronounced it " history-making. " Many doctors embraced it as a

10-minute operation that promised to empty mental hospitals and

return patients to their families. Opponents, mostly psychiatrists

who practiced Freudian talk therapy, didn't matter much: In those

days public criticism of a doctor by his peers was regarded as

unethical.

By the early 1960s lobotomy had fallen out of favor, in part because

of its low success rate and the disastrous harm it inflicted on many

patients.

Freeman, who died in 1972, performed his last lobotomy in 1967; his

privileges at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley, Calif., were revoked

after the patient died.

While several of his relatives appear on camera, one of the most

affecting interviews is with Berkeley bus driver Dully, who

was lobotomized by Freeman at age 12 after his stepmother complained

he was difficult.

The issue at the heart of this powerful and unsettling film is not,

as one writer puts it, " how a man could go off the rails, but how

science could go off the rails. "

It's a question well worth pondering. ¿

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