Part Two: The Bastard Who Invented The Lobotomy

I'm here as with in part one with Daniel van Kirk. Daniel, how are you? How are you? How are you? How are you? How are you doing today? I am great. I'm so glad to be back for the conclusion of this story about a horrific man who justified his means. Yep, he's a bad man. And speaking of bad men, were about to talk about a president. Although a president most people like, um, so I may be pissing some people off. John and Robert Kennedy are probably the two most famous

brothers in American history. One was the president until he got shot, another would have been the president if he hadn't been shot. Both men have come to symbolize fairly or unfairly, an era of just in decent governance in the United States of America, one that will probably never come again. But the Kennedy brothers had a sister as well as another brother named Ted, who we don't talk

about much because of that lady he drunkenly killed. This woman's name was Rosemary Kennedy, and her life was stolen by Dr Watts, Dr Freeman, and wild unchecked misogyny. Now, Rosemary's birth was, in the words of the Irish Times, complicated by medical misadventure. Depending on which source you read, you will hear different things about the exact extent of her intellectual disabilities. Some articles I've read say she was severely mentally handicapped and unable to lead a normal life.

Others argue she had learning disabilities but was otherwise bright and capable. I'm not a doctor, but I did teach special ed once, and it seems fair for me to say, whatever the precise extent of her issues, Rosemary Kennedy would have been capable of living a real, satively independent life with some specific help. Now you get very different versions of Rosemary story depending on which right up you read.

For example, here's people. As Rosemary entered her late teens, her parents saw less of the affectionate, dutiful and eager to please young woman they knew and loved, and more of her violent outbursts. She began screaming and yelling and throwing things. She was violent and throwing vases across the room.

She was out of control. One person says now that article paints Rosemary is a deeply disturbed young woman, and her lobotomy is tragic, but purely the result of her parents not having better options to care for such a disabled child in a more primitive era. Another Irish Times article I found, which interviewed one of her biographers, a man named Irvine, takes a different route. Irvine has a more filled out picture in his head. He sees her as stunningly beautiful. It was often said she was the

most beautiful of the Kennedy's, beautiful and poetic. She did have learning disabilities, It's hard to say how much, but she wrote letters, she kept a diary. She became a Montessori teacher for a while, and she taught young children. Her favorite book was Winnie the Pooh, and she could read that to children. So yeah, yeah, great book. He has the sense of a fairly normal, deeply loving young woman.

Every letter that she wrote a show drenched in this want for her father to acknowledge her and love her. Every one of those letters is heartbreaking. It's all about I'm doing my best and I hope this pleases you. She would send reports about her weight because wait was a huge thing in the Kennedy family, monitoring the weight of all the children. There's so much correspondence where Joe and Rose are just talking about the weight of their children.

So yeah. Meanwhile, an Irish Central article I found on her describes her this way. By kindergarten, Rosemary was called retarded in the lingo of the times, and such children were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image, it was a disaster. Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third or fourth grade intelligence, and she was packed off to a boarding school for misfits. From there, she wrote her father a heartbreaking letter, Darling, Daddy, I hate to disappoint

you in any way. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome every day now. Rosemary finally caught a break when her father became ambassador to Britain, and she thrived in a London convent school. But back in the States, Rosemary, who again was very attractive, began attracting admirers at twenties. She was a picturesque young woman, a snow princess with flushed cheeks, gleaming, smile, plump figure in

a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met. Uh. And of course, as Larson writes, her parents found her sexuality dangerous. And I think this gets to the core of kennedy family issues with Rosemary more than anything, um. And it seems to me, based on what I've read, that the argument that she was mentally retarded is very oversold. I think she had learning disabilities. I think she was

someone who had difficulty thriving in a normal school. But I think she was basically it seems like she was basically a functional, intelligent person UM who was a young, attractive woman and people wanted to fuck her, and she wanted to funk them, and this was not okay with Joe Kennedy. So I think that's the core of the issue. Um. The Kennedy's were a powerful, wealthy, high society family just got to stay in line on that family got to stay in line, in line. She has some learning disabilities,

and she's promiscuous and a woman. We can't we gotta can't take out this part of it too. Yeah, she maybe having some mood disorders. So maybe she like flies off the handle and gets like yelly and stuff and like that. They'd assume, like, well, she's not happy in the family, so she must be broken. Yeah, that's and she's a woman's here to disregard her exactly, Like that's

going to carry on the name, Yeah, exactly. I think she was a strong willed young woman who wanted to live a life that would have been inconvenient to the family goals. And it's my opinion that this, more than anything else, sealed her fate. And before we go any further, I want you to take a look at this picture of Rosemary. Will be on our website too, Sophie, can you show that to Daniel. Oh she looks like fun. Yeah, she looks fun. She looks like a normal, healthy young woman.

I would describe her as looking playful and lively and coy, like a willful young woman with a spirit behind her. Yeah, she falls into uh like fun girl. Winter, Yeah, fun girl fall. Now, within mere months of this photograph, she would be reduced to a shambling ruin of herself by

the treatments of doctor's Freeman and Watts. But the final decision on whether or not to perform the lobotomy on Rosemary was up to the family patriarch Joseph from People Quote, Without his wife's knowledge, he took Rosemary to see Dr Walter Freeman, a controversial neurologist, psychiatrist and professor at George Washington University who had gained fame for popularizing lobotomies in America.

He took her to the best at the time, and at the time time readers, Digest, Newsweek, everybody was touting the best thing for mental illness, the lobotomy. It was the cure. All people were so eager for some help that they just grabbed onto it. You see, that's Freedman from the last episode being smart about just playing into the press. He did. He'd gotten this ship into the press, and fucking Joe Kennedy reads this in a Newsweek as he's sipping fucking Manhattan's and his his his can of

Bunkport retreat or wherever the funk it is. And if you need to wonder about how much you Kennedy cared about the like agency or um agency. She's a girl, exactly, writes of a woman. Not only is he taking his daughter to get her brain carved out, he's not telling his own wife that he's doing it. No, why would he? Exactly? Yeah,

this is all double it's a double smack. Yeah. Now, Freeman diagnosed Rosemary with agitated depression and promised Joe that a lobotomy would put an into her rages and render her happy and content. What did he diagnose her with agitated depression? This sounds like that ship where they're like, Oh, what do you want me to call it? What do you want here? Joe? Yeah, she's not she's not happy

and that's a problem. That means she's broken, right, But the agitated is why we have to do something about it, because it's just getting worse. The family's got money and she's not happy. So the only thing to do was to break a brain us, okay, sorry. In the file of Dr Freeman assisted by Dr James Watts for him to prefrontal lobotomy and Rosemary at George Washington University Hospital rather than curing her. The lobotomy essentially erased Rosemary Kennedy.

The procedure itself literally involved Dr Watts scraping away at her brain tissue while Dr Freeman asked her to repeat stories from her childhood and lists the month of the year. When she could no longer answer, the procedure was pronounced a success. Whoa yeah, tell us when we've taken enough you tell us, yeah, tell us when you don't remember who you are, and then we'll be like, part we got it perfect, We got her Because I wondered that too,

like if somebody got their lobotomy right. And then they were still like the in the last episode, the doctor who went out and got drunk. Still like what they were like, well, we gotta go in and dig a little deeper. I guess they often did that. Not always. We'll talk about some other cases later, um, but yeah, that was not uncommon. For the one. They were like, let's get it all, just keep talking it all. Just get the whole girl out of there. Yeah, just make

her a shell now. Rosemary spent the rest of her life completely dependent on a small handful of caretakers until her father's stroke. She lived isolated and hidden from the rest of the family at St. Koleta's, a Catholic facility in wisconsant for inconveniently disabled members of which families. When Joe finally stroked out, her nieces and nephews attempted to reintegrate her back into the family, but any hope she'd ever had of an independent life of forging in existence

for herself was obliterated by doctors Freeman and Watts. Unice Kennedy would eventually create the Special Olympics in honor of Rosemary, and in nineteen eighties seven story in the Saturday Evening Post brought the whole sordid tale to light, but that was far too late to stop the career of Walter

Freeman from reaping an unspeakable toll in human lives. By nineteen forty five, at the end of Freeman and Watts's collaboration, around a hundred fifty lobotomies were being performed annually nationwide. But in nineteen forty six, Walter Freeman introduced his revolutionary transorbital lobotomy technique and started teaching it to surgeons and non surgeons all around this glorious land. By nineteen forty nine, some five of thousand lobotomies were being performed annually, so

that's great. Many of those were performed by Dr Freeman himself, who started traveling the nation showing off his skills to rooms full of doctors in the press. And I'm going to quote now from the book The Lobotomist. Patricia Darien, a student nurse at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville, watched Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy at a nearby state hospital.

Freeman selected the patients for operations, she reported, by twisting their joints to determine their flexibility, not by reading or taking histories. After a special luncheon honor of the occasion of his visit, he occupied a conference room and had each patient shocked and photographed. When all was ready, he would plunge the lucatom in. Darien noted he wore no gown, mask, or gloves. Afterwards, he would sit the patients up and

have them walked out of the room. He was very proud of the fact that the people walked in and walked out, none had to be carried, although one or two of them sagged badly on the way out. She remembered. After several operations, Freeman enlivened the demonstration by cutting nerve fibers on both sides of the brain simultaneously. Then he looked up at us, smiling. I thought I was seeing a circus act. He moved both hands back and forth

in unison, cutting the brain identically behind each eye. It astonished me that he was so gay, so high, so up. Darien recalled the sequence of events as a living nightmare, a deeply disturbing performance. He's reached his final form. Yeah now. Frank Freeman, Walter's son, was occasionally enlisted to help his father in these lobotomy exhibitions. They would spend weeks at a time on the road, crossing thousands of miles, visiting

numerous hospitals, and lobotomizing huge numbers of people. In nineteen fifty two, Frank helped his father perform a lobotomy. The process started when Walter immobilized the patient with a series of powerful electro shocks, and then, as Frank recalled, I was there to hold the person's legs down. We all went for a ride when he threw the switch. When the patient stopped seizing, Walter would lift the eyelid, jam his ice pick inside and shattered the bone that separated

it from the brain. He would carefully hammer away at gray matter until both sides of the frontal lobe had been disconnected. Frank recalled, I was kind of impressed. He made it look so easy. That's good, right, Well, I mean, yeah, it's so easy because he loves it. He's so you know, like you were saying, do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life of hammering into

people's brains with a nice pet. But he also seems obsessed with the celebrity of it, like he wants to like be the guy and come to your town and put on his brain show. He wants to put on a show. He wants to do it with both hands. That you're really impressed. And see they all walked out of here. Did you see him all walk out like well to be carried himself. But yeah, he was lazy

when he came in. Yeah. Now, over the course of a very long career, Walter would perform more than three thousand, four hundred and thirty nine lobotomies in fifty five hospitals in twenty three states. The entire time he believed himself to be something of a heroic medical radical, pulling his discipline forward into the future. His motto was lobotomy gets them home, which meant in effect that lobotomizing people allowed them to exist comfortably and without complaint in Americans Itty.

It is impossible to know how many of Freeman's patients truly benefited from his treatment. His summaries of his results were always very biased, and it's never possible to analyze them outside of the lens of his own opinions. Objective scientific analysis of the results of lobotomies in this period are essentially impossible to find. We know that at least four hundred and ninety of his patients died as a result of his services. We also know that lobotomizing human

beings was not simply a matter of medical necessity. The longer Freeman worked as a solo lobotomist, the more he leaned into the performance art side of the field. And I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post now, shocking his colleagues, for instance, grew into a great source of pleasure. Once, during a lobotomy demonstration at a nursing home in Baltimore before a group of surgeons who replaced his surgical hammer

with a carpenter's mallet. He delighted in reporting how other lobotomy demonstrations made a Columbia University professor emeritus of neurology weakened with faintness, sickened students in England, and so outraged a German neurologist that Freeman said, I almost had to push him out of the way in order to perform the operation. Several times he shut off his virtuosity with the Luca toome by performing two handed lobotomies, working both

eye sockets simultaneously on people. That's forget that there's a person on the other end of this hammer and pick yeah, yeah, yeah. His cross country trips in pursuit of lobotomy patients and his self appointment as the Transorbital Procedures International Ambassador only heightened Freeman's sense of professional solitude and caused him to commit serious erras of judgment. More than once, he worked the luke toome forcefully enough to break it inside a

patient's brain at Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa. He accidentally killed a patient when he stepped back to take a photo during the surgery, and allowed the lucatome to sink deep into the patient's mid brain. That's all from jack al High. Yeah that's pretty fucked up. Huh yeah. Yeah. Also we don't know what his scale is. It still might have been deemed a success by him. The guy's

not complaining anymore now. Many of Walter's patients were unable to walk away or really think after his ministrations, but this caused less of an issue than you might think. The bulk of his clientele were inmates at asylums, and the folks paying for surgeries didn't so much want those folks healed as they wanted them quieter. People in charge of hospitals often welcomed Freemen into their institutions because the

lobotomized patients. Some of them, you know, would go home because they'd actually be helped by the procedure, and the others were generally easier to manage. Freeman himself wrote, the noise level of the ward went down, incidents were fewer, cooperation improved, and the ward could be brightened when curtains and flower pots were no longer in danger of being

used as weapons, so it mainem easier to deal with. Yeah, no more biting no more biting, no more problems at all, because they can't do anything anymore because he just erased them basically in a lot of cases, and we don't have to like technically say we killed them. Yeah yeah, I mean hundreds of people were improved by his work, hundreds more it's less clear, and of course hundreds and hundreds died. But this in part one, it's almost seems

like though they're using the exception to prove the rule. Yeah, so it's like it's there's some people that's benefited, so we should do this for everyone. We think we needs it, Like exactly, they don't. Those the numbers don't really match up. If the people are benefited from you're like, well five of these people five percent, it might not work out for I'm still not favor for it, but I get

what your logic is. But being like, oh, a few percentage of people, this really small group, this really helps, well, then that doesn't mean we should be doing it for everyone. Also, when I was I keep thinking, I was like, I'm sure this happened to people who are autistic, right, oh god, yeah yeah, because but that wasn't even like they didn't even know. I didn't was autism even diagnosed in the seventies. No, no, no, no,

I don't think at this point. I I think it was even after that that they really had a handle on it. But like it's possible that's what was going on with Rosemary. She may have had like aspergers or something like that. I really don't know. I don't think anybody does. I'm gonna guess a lot of his patients were aught histic and they just got written down as imbeciles or retarded, which is like the lingo they would

have used at the time. And you know, because they required different means to like reach and teach and like work with you know, because they had a different sort of brain. Uh, they just sort of hammered into their brain until they weren't a problem anymore. Right, How many women wouldn't have gotten a lobotomy if they hadn't been married.

That's a scary question, because they was a man saying, well, you're the problem, you aren't making the food, you fight with me, you have your own thoughts, which I'm sick of hearing. But if they had just never if they had become a to use it, the lingo of the of the era a Spinster, they would have never gotten a lobotomy because they would have had an oppressive man in their life to be like, I'm sick of you. Yep, yep. Marriage doomed them. Yeah, that's fair to say, probably hundreds

of cases at at least. Yeah, Now, Freemen had plenty of problems with Oh. Actually, before before we get into Freeman's problems, you know what's not a problem our advertisers. Great, you know, who won't lobotomize their wives? Who the products and services that advertise on this show. Great? Then I then I want to hear about him, because now I'm

interested products. We're back and we're talking about Walter Freeman, and of course the issues that came as a result of him hammering ice picks into the brains of thousands of people. Uh. In ninety seven, Freeman operated on a Washington cop after the brain ice picking, said cop hemorrhaged on both sides of his brain, and, in Freeman's words, was never able to do more than the simplest tasks around the house. Even so, Freeman did a brisk business

in Washington State. In the late nineteen forties. He met the actress Francis Farmer at Western State Hospital. She'd been a patient there for five years, largely as a result of behaved your her parents considered wild and unconventional, but we today would probably just call being a human. We don't know for sure if Freeman lobotomized her, but some reports say he did, and Frank Freeman says his father did. There's a picture that is almost certainly of miss Farmer's operation.

It shows a man Walter in a sleeveless shirt with hairy arms and ungloved hams, hammering a lucatom, the surgical device he invented to replace his ice pick into a woman's eye. As a crowd watches and there goes what would have been my Halloween costume. Yep, yep, tragic sleeveless Harry ice pick m hmm. By ten fifty four, tranquilizers like chlorpromazine replaced lobotomies as the preferred treatment for agitated

people in asylums. Freeman left Washington for Los Altos, California, and for the next eighteen years he split his time between lobotomizing people and hiking. Actual medical science gradually left him behind, but Freeman continued his research on transorbital lobotomies because he loves it. He loves he loves it. In nineteen sixty four, he conducted an experiment meant on fourteen

disturbed mental defectives, mostly young schizophrenics. In a letter to a colleague, he explained that this experiment tested the efficacy of injecting hot water into the brain after stabbing it with an ice pick. I was prepared to accept two fatalities, but fortunately all the patients survived, and he invited to return next May. What is he new, tiede. He's just trying to come. He's like, well, but now we do this thing like that would just shoot some water in there.

Oh my god. I don't see how any of these patients could improve, but at least one can now be cared for at home again. His his concern is that they be easy to care for now that they get better. Really, if we you know what else, you remove the whole head. You can do whatever you want with that. But real fucking easy, to be real easy. They don't complain. There's

you don't even have to feed him. M hmm. Now, since Walter worked at a variety of different hospitals during this period, he enlisted a number of different nurses to help him in his thousands of procedures. One of these people was Helen Comer, a nurse in West Virginia for thirty four years. I found her account in an article written by Story Corps in nineteen fifty four. I assisted Dr Freeman and doing a transorbital lobotomy. I was a new nurse at the time and I was drafted to

work in there with him. Had no idea about what I was getting into, but I was curious and I wanted to see it. And I saw it. Oh my, The room was full of people. Everyone wanted to see what was going on. People from town and everywhere else came up to witness the occasion. He came and I held the patient's head and he did the lobotomy. He had an instrument. To me, it looked like a nail,

a great big nail. It had a sharp point, and he inserted this in the corner of the individual's eye and banged it with a mallet I guess it was. And then he pulled from one side and pulled to the other. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to watch. I know that day we lost one patient because they couldn't stop the bleeding, and I can't remember if any others died. It wasn't what I thought it might be. To me, it was cruel, but that was just my opinion.

I was just doing the job I was employed to do. Remember, I've seen all kinds of things in my line of work, so if I stopped and dwelled on each little thing, I'd be hurting. I remember he was relaxed. He was very calm while he was operating. He made it look easy to do. I think he just had an extremely high, self confident person anality. He didn't have any qualms. He wanted to prove that he was right. He was convinced that he was right. I thought, how can a man

be relaxed just going blindly into a brain. But of course I didn't have the authority to say stop. That. These patients were not young ones. I think they were all about thirty or forty years old. I knew two of them. After the operation, I found that they had changed in their personality. My impression, which I remember still, was that they didn't ask any questions. Expression of deep turmoil in their heart or in their soul was subdued.

There was something missing emotions. I would say, you know, if you were to converse with somebody, there's always emotion with it. Just take all of your emotion out of a conversation with somebody and what's left. Uh yeah, when they're like, oh, I can't believe he just kept doing it? And how I mean, and I know you've probably covered this, just the amount of people who had some sort of like like they were a sociopath and the medical field

gave them that outlet. I mean, it happens in the military. I I feel like Freeman might have been a sociopath, like he's he's described as having a lot of difficulty like necting to people, a shallow affect, like yeah, he kept trophies like I do think he thought he was helping people, But I think his understanding of what helping people was was helping the people who had to care for these folks. I don't think he actually cared about the patients because he's broken anyway. You just don't care.

You just don't give a You lack empathy, and if anything, you do these things to people to like sponge off of their emotion and their feelings and their reaction. Yeah. Yeah, Now, the most common diagnosis for which Freeman prescribed brain scraping with schizophrenia. This does not mean that most of his patients were actually schizophrenic, just that he hastily declared them to be schizophrenic before jamming in ice pick through based on how well they could bend their joints. Yeah. Yeah.

Other common ailments treated via ice picking were chronic pain and suicidal depression. In seven New York Times article listed the various symptoms for which lobotomies were often prescribed. Tension, apprehension, anxiety, depression, insomnia, suicidal ideas, delusions, hallucinations, crying spells, melancholia, obsessions, panic states, disorientation, psycholesia,

pains of psychic origin, nervous indigestion, and hysterical paralysis. Nervous indigestion. Yeah. Now, if you know anything about the fifties and sixties c i A, you know that nobody fucked around with human brains in new and exciting ways without drawing their attention. In nineteen fifty two, the agency hired Henley Laughlin, a psychiatrist, to report on the potential of lobotomies to help the god fearing American government disabled communists. I'm going to quote

from the book Lobotomist. Again in his classified report titled some Areas of Psychiatric Interest, Laughlin commented that the procedure would be adaptable to intelligence work, and noted that he watched Dr Freeman performed twenty two transorbital lobotomies with an average of about six minutes per operation. This included time for before and after photographs, as well as the keeping

of notes and records. From an empiric standpoint, the operative procedure is relatively simple and could be learned in a brief period of time by almost any intelligent person. In addition, he wrote, there is not great outward evidence of injury or damage to the patient. Besides the behavior changes in the black eyes, the average pathologist performing an autopsy would have to be a keen and careful observer to detect

changes in the brain substance made by the operator. Because I felt unable to disclose to Dr Freeman the real basis of my interest, Laughlin notes he could not solicit the lobotomy expert's opinions as to how the procedure might be modified for use by the CIA. Laughlin, who also professed an interest in the possibilities of taking him not at control of patients during the period of unconsciousness following electroshock therapy. Formed his own opinions on the potential lobotomy

presented as an intelligence tool. To date, there has been considerable discussion relative to the possible use of the lobotomy type operation by this agency as a neutralizing weapon, Laughlin wrote in prefacing his conclusions, he described the role of the frontal lobes as one that allowed a person to pursue a cause and feel devotion to it. Certainly, any

crusading spirit is apt to be quenched. He reported, community enterprise and activities in the way of social uplift, leadership, and executive abilities and activities are apt to be lessened after operation. On this basis, a zealous and fanatic communist, if lobotomized, might retain his interest in communism, but his drive, zeal and ability to organize or direct would be substantially reduced.

So that's good. You take out the fight baby. Also, I wondered if for interrogation used like the CIA would be like, well, there's so much more agreeable. They'll tell you anything. We should lobotomize them then interview them. I will say, the good news is that even the CIA in this period had too many scruples to lobotomized people as a method of social control. What what what what

are we in the sixties by now? Yeah? Yeah, yeah yeah, the sixties the LSD, right is they're they're ghosting strangers with acid like like Gangbusters. Yeah. But Laughlin wound up recommending against lobotomies as a way to disabled communists h and his His main reason for doing so is that it would look really bad to scramble the opinions of people whose opinions differed from the US government, Like, if

that got out, it would be bad. Um. So it is here that I should note that on at least one point, Walter Freeman was on the somewhat defensible side of medical history. As I previously stated, there was a time when mental health professionals believe that all mental issues stemmed essentially from repressed memories and traumas and other things

that a therapist could work out. Freeman was on the vanguard of doctors who argued that many brain problems were physical or chemical in nature, um and based more on circumstances of biology than things that had happened to the patient. And Freeman and his fellows wound up being right. We know today that many mental health issues do stem from hormonal or chemical imbalances, things that can be corrected with medication or, in rare cases, surgery. Walter identified the problem

in mainstream medicine rather correctly. He was just very wrong about its solution, and because he was such an advocate for his solitary practice of lobotomizing people, he failed miserably to advance his theory of mental illness with the Times. In nineteen sixty he treated one Howard dully, On, eleven year old boy with what I would describe as mild to moderate behavioral issues. Howard fought with his brother, lied

to his parents, and occasionally stole candy. He was rather withdrawn and anti social, but certainly not someone a reasonable person would diagnose as in need of major brain surgery. His behavioral issues, such as they were, stemmed from understandable causes. His mother had died of cancer when he was five. His father had remarried a cold and demanding stepmother who

hated him. Howard was emotionally abused by her and ignored in favor of his stepmother's biological children, so he acted out more and more as he grew he's acting out. He wants attention someone exactly caring parenting. Yeah, And as he acted out, his stepmother responded by beating him and forcing him to eat alone. This made his behavioral problems worse, and his stepmother decided that meant there was something wrong with him. She started talking to psychiatrists and eventually wound

up preferred to doctor Walter Freeman. Now by this point, Walter was a thoroughly fringed figure. Lobotomy was still practiced far too widely, but most medical professionals no longer believed it was anything but a deeply flawed last resort measure. But Howard's stepmother didn't care about that. When Walter interviewed here steps on, he saw evidence of profound disturbance. Quote. He is clever at stealing, but always leaves something behind to show what he's done. Freeman records from Yeah He's

he's a yeah yeah. If it's a banana, he throws the peel at the window. If it's a candy bar, he leaves the rapper around someplace. He does a good deal of daydreaming, and when asked about it, he says, I don't know. He has defy at at times. You tell me to do this, and I'll do that. He has a vicious expression on his face some of the time. Now, based on a brief interview, Dr Freeman declared Howard to be schizophrenic and prescribed one dose of scrambled brain for

the young boy. When he met the famous doctor, Howard was struck by his round glasses, his suit and his stylish goatee and made him look a little like a beatnick. He was warm, personable and easy to get along with. Was I fearful? No? I had no idea what he was going to do with me. I'm gonna quote next from a right up in the Guardian. When Dully awoke the next day, his eyes were swollen and bruised and

he was running a high fever. He recalls a severe pain in his head and the discomfort of his hospital gown, which gave open at the back. He had no idea of what had happened. I was in a mental flog, Dully says. I was like a zombie. I had no awareness of what Freeman had done. Eight weeks after the doctor first saw him, Dully came around from his operation in a state of numbed confusion. The hospital reports stated

that he had been given a transorbital lobotomy. A sharp instrument was thrust through the orbital roof on both sides and moved so as to sever the brain pathways in the frontal lobes. Dr Freeman's bill came to two hundred dollars. Dully was his youngest ever patient. Extraordinarily, he survived. Now Howard would go on to live a full life eventually, but first he suffered three years of homelessness, mental illness, and a deep confusion as a result of the damage

done to him. He would grow into a school bus driving trainer and a living monument to the resilience of the human brain. But one cannot help it read his story and wonder how much less painful his life might have been if a ship heeled doctor hadn't driven an ice pick into his fucking brain gleefully, yeah with with panash and also the like, uh seems like schizophrenia to me. That work, So schizophrenia, I can definitely do this. And

he's still in the candy bar. And that bitch, that bitch of a step mom was like whatever, I don't care. I just brought him here to get his brain taken out. So yeah, and she's probably mad or long fucking dead hopefully, but she's mad that it seems to have been on the air, like the side of things, where somebody didn't lose all capacity for life. Yeah, he was still a person,

unfortunately for much of her I'm sure dismay. Now you know what won't declare you a schizophrenic for stealing a candy bar and scramble your brains with an ice pick? The products and services that support this show. Oh then I want to know about him? Oh yeah, absolutely, Here

we go and we're back. We're talking about Walter Freeman in the twilight of his career, you know, the sixties and ship as medical science starts to pull away from Freeman's practices and towards more humane methods of treating them mentally ill um and I I guess more humane methods includes literally everything that doesn't involve an ice pick. Um. So while this was all going on in his field, Walter doubled and tripled down on his claim to fame.

He spent increasing amounts of time doing what he called shrink baiting, essentially trying to trigger more respectable physicians and writing limericks about his professional enemies. He was known to declare that he would rather be wrong than boring. That's so true. That's on his tombstone. That's on his tombstone. Now. This desire to buck tradition led him to issue other basic aspects of professional medical niceties from The Guardian. He

had a buccaneering disregard for the usual medical formalities. He chewed gum while he operated, and displayed impatience with what he called all that germ crap, routinely failing to sterilize his hands or wear rubber gloves. Despite a fourteen percent fatality rate, Freeman performed three thousand and four hundred thirty nine lobotomies in his lifetime, and we haven't talked about

any mail practice suits at all. No on the sixties man. Now, in case you aren't aware, a fourteen percent fatality rate is essentially criminal. Any modern surgeon who killed that many patients with what they considered to be a routine operation would be investigated on the suspicion that they were some sort of serial killer. But of course Walter Freeman was not really a surgeon. He was just a doctor who found a lazier way to perform brain surgery using a

tool from his kitchen God Damnit. Walter's personal life was no prettier than his career. In six he watched his eleven year old son, the namesake of his grandfather, die horribly in Yosemite National Park. The boy was filling up a canteen in a stream when he fell over and was dashed to death upon the rocks. Walter's wife, Marjorie, was a chronic alcoholic, which is not surprising, and the

doctor cheated on her constantly. Still, his remaining children considered him to have been a good father and defend his legacy today as a medical trailblazer. I found this quote from his son, Frank, now a retired security guard, and I think it was meant to sound positive, but it's just an intentionally horrifying to me. He is a friendly giant of a man. This is talking about Frank. He's a friendly giant of a man. Dress smartly in a double breasted dark blue suit and a burgundy tie kept

in place by a thin gold clip. He was a marvelous father, Frank said, sitting in a room filled with crossword dictionaries and Dick France's novels. He loved a children and always made time for us out of his busy schedule, taking us camping every summer all across the country. Frank recalls being invited to observe a love botomy when he was twenty one, and vividly remembers having a little crack as the orbital plate fractured. It only took about six

or seven minutes, and Dad kept up a running commentary. Indeed, the original ice pick used for the first transorbital lobotomy came from the Freeman family kitchen drawer. We had several of them, says Frank, cheerfully. We're using the punch holes in our belts when we got bigger. I'm enormously proud of my father. I do think he's been unfairly treated.

He was an interventionalist surgeon, a pioneer, and that took guts apple tree fall, yeah for him to like, Oh you know, he did a good a good thing, and isn't that great? Look here, look I got a nice pick of my kids right now. We could go poke anybody's eye. We to poke holes in our belts, and my dad used to poke holes and brains. This is fine. Yeah,

this is fine, This is fine. Yeah. Now, thankfully he wound up a security guard rather than a brain surgeon, which I think would have been a better career for his dad too, in retrospect, when his dad was sick all the time. Yeah, yeah, he really should have stayed that way. Now. In nineteen sixty seven, Freeman was visited by Helen Mortenson, one of his earliest patients. She had received two lobotomies from Freeman, one in ninety six and

one in nineteen fifty six after a relapse. In nineteen sixty seven, she relapsed again, likely as a result of her brain repairing itself, and she went into Walter for a third lobotomy. This was conducted at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, California, and, unfortunately for Helen, Walter severed a blood vessel in her brain. She died three days later from the operation, and Freeman's surgical privileges were revoked. He lived for five more years, during which he performed no

additional lobotomies. He died from cancer on May thirty one, night, teen seventy two, at the right old age of seventy six. Between nineteen thirty six and the late nineteen fifties, the wave of lobotomies Walter ignited led to more than forty tho lobotomies and perhaps more than fifty. Some aspects of the techniques Dr Freeman pioneered are still in use, but only on a profoundly limited scale. Less than twenty brain operations per year on average are performed in the US

to treat psychiatric disorders. Most of these use lasers or radiation to lesion off small sections of a particular chunk of the brain, primarily to treat obsessive compulsitive disorder or Parkinson's. Transorbital lobotomies are no longer practiced, and most of the young men and women Dr Walter Freeman I spect have long since followed him to the grave. And that's the episode. Wow,

so there's still done. But I'm sure nowadays somebody washed into hands beforehand any sort of brain surgery to deal with any sort of psychosis. Some of the things he like pioneered are performed on a very limited basis um or are part of more humane treatments. But again, like twenty people a year received something vaguely similar, and they're not even that similar. It's just that they removed similar parts of the brain because it does help certain people.

But again, you look at how many thousands of operations he performed, and the actual needs seems to be somewhere like maybe a couple dozen people a year benefit really form of what he did, he liked it right. It's like when he was good to get an oil change and you can tell they just want to change breaks. They're like, new breaks, do you really, Well, that's what we do here as breaks, So that's what we're gonna say,

you need. I think a lot of it was that he um he was He was good at performing a lobotomy, and most people weren't. Most people couldn't do that sort of work without like breaking down because it was just horrifying to a normal human being to shove an ice pick into a skull um. And Freeman didn't give a ship, and he didn't like working with other people, so he's able to do this alone and he was the best stat it and that's all he wanted from his career.

So that's the only thing he really did right. And he didn't grow up with much of an affinity for the female gender, so he was more than happy to shut up a wife. Oh yeah, your wife's talking sounds like schizophrenia. Yeah, yeah, that's wild, that's horrific. Yeah, it's pretty bad, dude. The fact, when do you think, so it probably should have really ended by like sixty five, Yeah, I mean he stopped sixties seven was his last one. I think it probably should have stopped by the fifties.

I guess you understandable. You know, she was like the late forties. I think, oh she was, that's right. I keep thinking, so I was thinking of the person that was in sixty two, but yeah, she was in the forties.

That's right. They started in the late thirties. You could argue that there was maybe a decade there where, just if you assume medical science is going to have some really rough patches, just because it's hard to figure it out, maybe a decade where people would have done this before realizing oh, this actually is just turning people off and not fixing any problems. Um. But it went on for a long and most doctors by the fifties certainly were aware that like, oh, this is not the thing you

do for everybody who's got a mental illness. There's better treatments. But he kept right on rolling almost to the seventies, like he damn near made it to Disco. Well, thank god for that. Yeah, thank god that we stopped it before Disco. Yeah, yeah, that would have really tarnished America's brightest period. Also, I love when we get to give the CIA credit for things they didn't do. Yeah, the CIA was like, this seems real fucked up, which should

tell you all you need to know. We're just gonna abduct people off the street and give them toxic doses of LSD. That seems like the humane option. Oh man, Like in between assassinating democratically a elected leaders and running death squads, the CIA looks back at this and it's like, oh boy, that's gonna piss people off. If we do this, that's good. That's gonna really look bad. We're not looking to get into that ice pick game. Yeah, we don't want to. We don't want to be monsters. No, and

it's too much evidence. Yeah, LSD wears off. Yeah, So Daniel, Yeah, how you feeling well educated? First of all, so I appreciate that. I'm so surprised that some people went on to live normal lives. I love that Howard went on to yeah to actually like kind of be okay. Yeah, yeah, that's a horror story. Man. There's so many horror stories in this man's life. Yeah, he's a living, like a

living monument to how resilient human beings can be. He had like a family, he like lived it seems to have been a pretty happy life after he got you know, over some things, and it was like, you know, training school bus drivers. That's not an easy job, that's an important job. He was apparently good at it, so like, but it's like that's amazing. The brain repair can repair itself. Yeah, and it probably did the best to it could. Yeah, it seems like it did great in his case. Um

did Watts had up? Uh like really end up distancing himself then from Friedman? No, I think he you know, he had some major arguments with the man, but he always regarded him as a brilliant, pioneering doctor. Um just somebody who he think took things a little too far and was a little bit too cavalier. But like he really respected him. It seems I'm not an expert on Watts, No not. Yeah, so, uh you feel happy after this?

I mean I'm happier that I'm living in a better medical time, don't you feel like we're not doing anything right now medically that we're gonna look back. I'm sure somebody's gonna be like, actually, and then I'm like, oh no, I think we're doing lots of ship that we're going

to look back on. It's early fucked up. Oh yeah, man, I think we're doing a ton of stuff that is going to be looked back on as deeply um problematic, not as I don't think we're doing anything on a mass scale that's nearly as bad as the mass lobotomies that we're being performed back then. But I think we're

doing a lot of fund up ship. Um. I think particularly what's going to be looked at in the future, as as bad as as lobotomies are on that level, is how we deal um with people who have uh there's evidence that a lot of violent criminals, like people who are in prison for violent crimes, have head injuries. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. They looked at that air in Hernandez case, and that that the Boston Globe did the Spotlight team profoundly damage. Yeah.

I think we're going to look at our treatment of prisoners UM as an essentially rooted in our inability to recognize or our desire to not give a shit about a lot of types of mental illness um and not treat it and just lock it up. And I think that that is something that will be viewed on the same scale as lobotomies are today. I think I was trying to like a specific procedure that we're like, oh,

you never do that anymore. But yeah, I know that's a that's all, that's you're you're right on the nose with that stuff. Yeah, I think I think there might. I don't think it compares in terms of the scale, but I think like one of the things a lot of people with autism complain about with groups like Autism Speaks is that their goal is to like eradicate autism, and a lot of people argue, like, well, but wait,

I'm perfectly happy. I just have a different kind of brain and I think about the world differently, and your desire to eradicate me is kind of like eugenics and horrible. And I do think that we will increasingly recognize that, like trying to wipe out autism is incredibly fucked up, um, and then instead we should be focusing on like helping these people comtegrate with everyone else and like, yeah, um, but I don't think the scale of that, and I don't think like that's not it's a sliding scale. I

think it's worse. Two jam I s picks into people's brains. I just keep thinking of the show that Nick. Did you watch? The Nick No highly recommended Clive Owe and Chris Sullivan who's not on the show This is us.

I think it's Soderberg, but it was on Showtime, And it's all about like the medical advancements in the like teens and twenties, and just seeing like what they were trying to figure out and the chances they were taking that ended up working, and like the advancements they would find just even how to like do a transfusion and stuff like that. So I just kept thinking of that, because my whole thing is like when something very delicate and very tricky, maybe that's redundant, but um ends up

being like common. I always wonder how many times what was the trial and error process? It kind of scares me, like what was the trial and error process for Walter Jackson, Freedman and whatever? And those people are gone, I mean, and and those monkeys are gone it's, um, you know, there's an extent to which we were going to try lobotomies. Of course it was. It was it was going to happen, and it's bad. You know, even though some people were going to be horribly affected by it. It had to

happen for medical science to advance. It didn't have to happen on this scale. It's like, we were going to realize that like riddling could be helpful in treating certain kinds of like a d h D. It didn't have to be wildly over prescribed to children at the level it was in the nineteen nineties and stuff. Um, not that I don't think obviously, I don't think giving riddle into kids as nearly as bad as thousands of lobotomies

with ice picks and unwashed hands. But um, there's always going to be some sort of like, we figured out this new thing, it helps some people, let's massively over apply it. That's kind of how human beings are. Um. But if like, that's part of why the scientific method is supposed to work the way it's supposed to work, where scientists are supposed to kind of pull their ego out of it and look at like Okay, well, now we have data saying we're actually doing this way too

much and we should stop. But then you get a guy like Freeman who bases his whole identity on the fact that he's the best at this thing that we shouldn't really be doing, um, and then it doesn't stop.

So it's this kind of problem where in an ideal world, if we treated science the way we're always supposed to treat it, somebody would have walked up to Freeman in like the late forties or early fifties and been like, actually, this is being done way too much, and he would be like, ah, damn, okay, well let's figure out something better. But instead he doesn't ye because he just wants to do this. He wants to do this thing. He wants

to funk with people's brain exactly. Also, are you are you a Song of Ice and Fire guy at all? Or yeah? I love it? Yeah yeah yeah. Makes me think of Qui born umah, the character, because there's always that too in medical history, whether it's like because I look at it, then there's more, I'm sure, but just in the sake of this conversation, like I look at like there's people who learn what medicine works, and they

dedicate their life to helping people. And then there's the other type of person who has no problem just poking around, putting things together and then seeing what comes of and a lot of times you get advancements out of that or you find out something that works. But they might not necessarily be the same type of traditional doctor who wants to help someone. They're just very curious and have the ability to just dig around in people's innards to see what can work where. And that always creeps me

onto it isn't that great? Yeah, yeah, you wanna plug your plug doubles Daniel I do. Um. People should go to Daniel van Kirk dot com. There you can see all of my dates and where I'm going to be. Um. I've got December two, I'm doing a show at Largo on November two, I will be headlining in Pedalouma, California, and other tour dates and things as well. But most importantly, you can get my album Thanks Diane. It drops on November.

It's if you're hearing this before then you can pre buy the album at the Apple Store app in your phone or go to Daniel van Kirk dot com and you can click through to there. When you do that, you'll get an instant track called Don't Be a Dick, which I'm proud of. But you'll get the whole album onni November and go to Daniel van Kirk dot com for all that, or listen to me on my podcast Dump People Town, which I do with the Squaw Brothers, or pen Pals, which I do with Rory Scoville. Cool Well,

I am Robert Evans. You can find me on the internet at behind the Bastards dot com, where the sources for this episode will be, including uh Jack el his wonderful book Lobotomist. Uh. You can find us on Twitter at Instagram A at Bastard's pod. You can find me on Twitter at I right okay, And you can find love in your heart as long as you're willing to put an ice pick into your brain. So again, this is my encouragement to all of our listeners to grab

an ice pick and start lobotomizing. Be a hero like Dr Freeman. So if you can, we can we urge people to carry out unlicensed surgery. No, but you could plug your other podcast. I have an their podcast. I do have another poet friend. Yeah, the Worst Year Ever with Katie and Cody Uh from Some More News. We talk about election, which will be the worst year ever. Um So, if you want a lobotomy to feel like sweet release, listen to the Worst Year Ever. This week

we talk about Tulsi Cabard, so that one's fun. Nice. Yeah, Well, thanks for having me on this show man. I love coming back and learning. Yeah, I'm thank you for coming. Daniel, thank you for learning. Uh and uh, thank you for spreading the gospel of the ice Pick