SYSK Selects: How Lobotomies Work

of my favorite stuff lies in those topics. And this one is all about lobotomyes, man, oh man, just get ready to learn about the frontal lobe ice pick lobotomy. Actually used to do that. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. It's called Stuff you Should Know. Uh, it's Josh and Chuck comes in Long Beach together. Now you know you're in trouble. What's Chuck think? How long you even sitting on that one week? That's good? Thanks?

Thank you, Chuck. How you doing well, sir? Are you pretty good? Don't feel great? Actually, Chuck? I mean glad to be alive? Yes, so, Chuck. Yes, I think this could arguably pan out to be our greatest podcast ever. No, I really don't think so, Chuck did the cheek thing twice before this one was kind enough to do it a second time. And I don't think we've ever had a topic that Chuck and I were more intensely interested

in than this one. I know. It kind of just came out of nowhere, and it's really well, not out of nowhere, because it's historical, but um, in our eyes, out of nowhere, which if funny, I say, in our eyes. Yeah, a little foreshadowing from Charles Bryant. Nice one, Chuck. If you will get off of L O L Cats for a second and go check your iTunes, you'll find that the title of this one is how lobotomies work, and that's what we're gonna be talking about. Our lobotomy is

so fascinating, it really is. Lobotomy is kind of exist in this little um segment of twentieth century culture medical madness. So I guess you could say right right, and pop culture, because you still hear it being thrown around like boys might lobotomize me, scramble my brain. But it's kind of exactly the way it happened. Yeah, yeah, So, Chuck, you're a lover of great cinema, right, of course, of course, you've seen one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, right, I

have a poster you do. Yeah, A good one. Yeah, the one in Jack Nicholson laughing with the watch cap on. Yeah, it's a good one. Um. So, of course you remember the pivotal scene of the movie where McMurphy is um lobotomized for being unruly, tries to kill Nurse Hatchet because nurse Ratchet. Nurse Ratchet, Hatchet. That was a Freudian slip right there. It was she was a hatchet. Yeah. Um so, uh she was mean and I'm totally with you. It

was a Freudian slip. Part that got me. I had like eight chokes going in my head at once, and I was like, I can't say that. I can't say that. I can't say that. It's like the Terminator exactly right. Yeah. Um so yeah. So he tries to kill Nurse Ratchet because she was a terrible nurse and kind of evil, very evil, And so he gets lobotomized and they don't show the procedure. Don't worry if you ever want to know what one was like, we're going to go into

grizzly detail a minute. Um. And he comes out just kind of this drooling imbecile, which I have to remind everybody was actually a medical term before it was imbecile, moron an idiot? Were all degrees of mental retardation? Aren't that weird? Yeah? Of course this is at the same time that people were performing lobotomy, so it seems like very archaic, even though it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, well,

let's set the scene. Okay, all right, so we're talking in the nineteen thirties, and the nineteen thirties were a terrible time to be nuts. Basically, you got locked up in a straight jacket to keep you from eating your own feces um or throwing it at orderlies or doing anything really crazy. And that was about it. Um. They had certain um, certain techniques like shock therapy. Right, what

do they use? Uh they still use shock therapy here and there actually so well you have like electro convulsive therapy, and you had apparently they also used to use insulin. Okay, insulin, right, we know how bad that is from I can't remember one of our aging podcasts, right, Um. And they would basically inject a hefty dose of insulin into a patient. Um too, the okay, chuck my paper wrestling was going to get the wrath. They they know we used crib sheets,

buddy um. So they inject a patient with the hefty dose of insulin and um would basically shock their system, possibly causing convulsions. There was another drug was just to subdue them. Hold on, I'm getting to that. This is the craziest part. This is this was the grasp that medical science had on mental illness at the time. There's another drug called metrozol which was a respiratory and um circulatory stimulant, and the hefty doses it to produce shock

and convulsions. So if you'll notice, all three of these produced convulsions shock therapy. And the reason that they did that was because there was a suspicion that there is a link between epilepsy, convulsions, and mental illness and that if you had one, you couldn't have the other. So by producing convulsions, they thought that they were treating mental illness. Unbelievable. Yeah, so you could have just had epilepsy and that that they would set you in the electro convulsive shock therapy

chair and to treat you. Yeah, they'd stick a little paddle in your mouth and turn on the juice. Tell you what, man, I like. I sometimes look back and say, by the nineteen fifties, that would have been cool to lift back then. But then you hear stories like this and you kind of forget about the downside. Yeah, ect is definitely one of the downside idea of this era, right alright. So um, another problem with this was that the mental um mental care. Wow, have you had lobotomy?

I had a little bit of and yeah, um no, I had some metro's all earlier. I'm all jacked up. Um. The the the state of mental hospitals in the US in the in the thirties and forties was that they were overcrowded, right, because I mean, if you can't treat anybody, really, you can't treat their mental illness, which they come in there in yeah, right. They wanted docile patients, they wanted people that didn't cause trouble and really anyway that they could get there was kind of okay at the time.

And this right, and this was also before drug therapy was created. So in the thirties, nineteen thirty six, this new procedure comes about, right, Well, it was the thirty in Portugal you're right. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, that was doctor Antonio IGAs Monies and Dr Almida Lima in Portugal. H performed the first lobotomies by drilling holes into the skull on either side of the preforntal cortex and injecting

alcohol in there to destroy the fibers connected it. And this was actually based on UM an earlier study from nineteen thirty three by a couple of Yale researchers who removed the prefrontal cortex is from a pair of monkeys and the other one Binky will say yeah. Um, these two monkeys had their prefrontal cortex core texas removed and um. The researchers found that they could still They still had intellect, but they were lacking the emotion that led to violent

outbursts when they didn't get their way. Zecky, by the way, I like Binky better. Um can we stay with Binky? Okay? So the the doctor um, oh, the Portugue Fulton and Carlisle. I'll know you're going back to Portugal. Yeah. Dr Moniz saw Fulton present um. One of the Yale researchers saw Fulton present his findings and he thought, huh, my mental patients act like monkeys, you know, violent outbursts when they

don't you know, when they see things that aren't really there. Right, So let me get my hands on a cadaver and see what I can see, what I can work out with the brain. So this early, this early, uh, it was called the prefrontal lobotomy. Right, started out, like you said, by drilling holes in the school and adding alcohol. And the whole reason why chuck the prefrontal cortex. Why the frontal lobe? What's so important about that? Well, the pre

funnel lobe. But cortex, Josh has a number of complex functions, um called executive functions is what they're known as. We're talking high level decision making, planning, reasoning, understanding. Personality, it's personal expression, that right thing. So basically your personality, the way you create things, the way you see the world and how you react to the world, g emotions, Right, this is all this is all generated here. It's originates

in the prefrontal court. And you're stabbing the front of your head right now you speaking, uh. And so that as we all know that the brain is connected, it's all connected together, sending and receiving signals like like mass email. And uh so, what you have here, You've got two types of matter, gray and white matter. Gray matter includes neurons and brain cells and blood vessels and things like that. White matter is axons and nerve fibers, and they connect

the gray matter and carry messages with electric impulses. So what the gray matters where these impulses are generated. The white matter translates them or transfers them, transmits, It transmits one of the trans uh so, a lobotomy. What that does is it is intended to sever the white matter between the different areas of gray matter, thus interrupting the transmission essentially, right, And the problem um with dr monies

is technique. The early technique using alcohol is like you said, the brains all connected, and alcohol being a liquid, it's kind of hard to keep in one place. So it started to go and destroy other area, is it, right, A very good idea. But he was onto something. He was onto something by destroying the white matter, right, yes, So instead he decided to be a little more precise and he kept with the whole drilling method is actually based on an ancient um ancient method of brain surgery

called trepidation, right, which actually what gosh, we could. I'm going to be in trouble here. We had a fan right in and suggest trepidation and that's what got me on the botomies in the first place. And I apologize. So if you're out there listening, oh you don't remember the fan, thank you, nameless fan. We love you, Binky,

thanks Binky or Becky uh um. Yeah. And actually in the article how the botomies work, um, there's a cool relief from a horonymous box Um painting of some early physician trepanning a patient and he's got like a little segment of the skull lifted off in the brain's exposed and he's just poking around in there. Um. But okay, so he's still dr Monez is still using the drilling method, but now he's inserting instruments in there. He inserted this one that sounded like, Um, it's a handle with a

little loopy wire that comes out. But yes, so when you when you push it, when you push down the back of it, the loop extends out, and then you can pull it in and just basically removed hunks of prefrontal cortex of white matter, right, And that's exactly what hopefully it didn't matter. Yeah, you would sing UM and it was successful. Well yeah, to to again, to varying degrees and maybe not again because I think that's the first time we've said that. But yeah, the the lobotomy

was successful to varying degrees, very varying degrees. But there was this guy who went and saw UM dr monies perform one of these. Yeah, this work gets good. And this guy was named Dr Walter Freeman. And for probably about what fifty thousand people uh in the U s Alone, this meeting between these two men was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of humanity, because that's about how many people were lobotomized between for about over about a seven year period in the US. Was it

just seven years? Wow? Okay, heavy work, So then there was many many more actually um. But yeah, the Dr Walter Freeman became an immediate UM evangelists. He was called for lobotomies. UM. He he tried monies as technique with a with a partner UM and did it successfully for a while. But the problem is it was still surgery, right, It required a surgeon to do it um operating room. Right. If Freeman was actually not a neurosurgeon. He was a neurologist,

required anesthetic. Yeah, so there there were some some drawbacks to it in Freeman's of pin right, expense being one of them. Time and resources. So he created something that was a lot handier, a lot easier, and a lot quicker, and that is what we call the transorbital or ice pick lobotomy, Right, Can I say what this is? He determined that if you took something which is technically called an orbital class, but it really looks sort of like an ice pick. You said it yesterday on our webcasts.

It's a nice pick. Uh, call it a rose by any other name exactly. So you put this ice pick over over the eyeball, but under the bone there what's that called Between the eyeball and the eyelid, The eyeball

on the island until the back of the orbital bone. Right, So once you get to the back of the ordable orbital bone, there's a little resist sense there because it's bone, and so enter a little silver hammer and so he just tinks on that thing until it cracks through and then he's got a pretty clean passageway to the frontal cortex. And so you've got an ice pick sticking out of

your eye. He uh, he scrambles it up a little bit once it's in there, and then he does the same thing on the other side, and uh, ten minutes later you're lobotomized, literally, so he do both sides right right, Um, he got kind of good at this. Yeah, Dr Freeman got really I guess you could say good at this, or at least very fast. Um. In one two week period in West Virginia, he performed lobotomies on people, and in one day, he performed lobotomies on twenty five patients,

right one day and one day. So he's just basically bringing him in and sending him out. He's exactly doing that. Actually, I read an interview with one of his assistants at the time and he said he would literally not take breaks. As the patient left, another one would be brought in ten minutes later boom. And I don't think we mentioned yet. He he before he does this, he doesn't use anesthetic.

He knocks them out with electro shock, right. So it's making use of two extremely primitive and violent techniques right time. And the result was, like we said, varied, I mean, it ranged anywhere from people being satisfied, and you know, seemingly successful, like a highly emotional people suicidal all of a sudden, being more docile and not so worried to uh to death and people rendered vegetables literally. So yeah, well doctor the map. Dr Freeman actually referred to lobotomyes

um informally as soul surgery. Yeah. I hate that. The reason why is because he was basically removing what kind of what makes us human. People could still function under successful abotomy. People could still function, they could still talk, but they weren't They weren't doing anything, they weren't bringing anything to the table. There was no reason for them to exist so much anymore for the personality surgery exactly right, um and uh he would uh he did it um

again so fast, it's so so often. And he had a touch of a showman to him that he basically did. He had a lobotomobile in which he performed demonstrations. Right. He toured the country, went all over the place. I think he ended up doing. Estimates run from two thousand to five thousand. Between nineteen forty six and nineteen sixty seven, transorbital lobotomies UM in twenty three states in the US right,

he'd performed with both hands. He would stick the ice picks in with both hands at once to add a little flare, but showmanship. Yeah, so he was basically performing shows, lobotomy shows. Um. And not everybody reacted well to these. Um. There was seasoned surgeons who had seen tons of gore and blood and horrible things in their lifetimes. Um would

commit watching these things. Some had to leave. Um. There was a nurse whose account I read of watching a lobotomy said, uh, the when he moved the ice picks back and forth, it made the sound of tearing cloth. Um. Later on in the USSR, which actually banned lobotomies, and I think nineteen which is embarrassing. Yeah, well fourteen years before we did right. Yeah. Um, a physician named Nikolai

or serinsky Sky thanks Dudski um he called. He said that lobotomies violate the principles of humanity and change an insane person into an idiot. Again remember a medical tournament at the time. Um. So there I imagine that there was something that affected you. Were you human being, like

a real human being? See being? This this rough violent, um misguided or unguided procedure being performed that it would affect you in some way, like some very primal party of you would say, that's not supposed to happen, right, Plus, there was no official scientific basis for this. It was basically, hey, look at the result in some cases, that is what

they were kind of basing this whole thing on. And also, as we were saying about Freeman being a showman and doing it so fast, there was one visit to a mental institution in Iowa. I don't remember what year it was, um, but Freeman killed three people in one visit, and one of the people this is so awful, um, he was doing his little show off thing with the two picks at once. Instead of as his own procedure dictated one and then the other side. He he was doing two

picks at once. So the patients on the table um with two ice picks sticking out of his eyes, and Freeman says, I'm going to take a photo of this, steps back to take a photo. One of the ice picks slips and kills the patient instantly. So apparently Freeman was said to have basically just packed up right then and moved on to the next place without missing a bead or staying geez, that packed up the lobotomobile. Yeah, hit the you know one person he lobotomized, Josh, I

know you do. He lobotomized John F. Kennedy's sister, Rosemary Dr. Freeman did in one. Uh. Rosemary was twenty three years old and uh, early on her childhood she was shy and easy going, they say, but as a teenager, shocker, she became rebellious and moody, which and that's what struck me in a lot of these cases is so many of them, we're just normal human emotions, like anything from postpartum depression to you know, an overactive child. You know,

it's just unbelievable. So she was lobotomized and uh afterward was rendered Basically, she couldn't speak, she had the mental capacity of an infant, couldn't control her bodily functions, and the Kennedy family basically from that point on said that she uh was mentally retarded, which they claimed that she may have been before, but who knows. You want to talk about another guy, Howie Chuck and I have a

shared hero. He is an indomitable three fifty pounds six ft three bus driver who has this gentle tender personality, and his name is Howard Dully. And at the age of twelve, Howard Dully met Dr Freeman under unfortunate circumstances, meaning Dr Freeman had a couple of ice picks on him when they met, and um, Howard ended up under Freeman's care because of his stepmother, right chuck, Yeah, he It was the kind of the classic story the father gets remarried to a stepmother who is not very patient

and understanding with her son. That sounded like, you know, it sounds like he may have been a little ryanbunctious, but what twelve year old boy isn't. And I think you have some good notes, actual notes. Yeah, well in Freeman's notes that Dully turned up later, and we should say, how are Dully created this great radio piece that's an MPR. You can actually find um by typing in my lobotomy and Google. I think it's the first thing that comes up.

It's one of the most amazing things you've ever heard, where he just goes and retraces the steps of his lobotomy that he got when he was twelve and tries to get to the bottom of what happened. We typically don't recommend people go listen to other things that it's not us, but that's how good it is, right, yeah, exactly, it is that good. Uh, it's way better than us actually.

Um But he finds the Dr. Freeman's notes on his case and apparently a stepmother pled her case to get him lobotomized by pointing out that he daydreams a lot, and when you ask him what he's daydreaming about, he says, I don't know. Uh, he doesn't want to go to bed, and when he does, he sleeps well. In my personal favorite, he turns on the lights in rooms when there's broad daylight streaming in unbelievable. I know that kid deserves the lobotomy.

But one of the things that I think one of the reasons why you and I both look up to Howard Dolly, it was because he has wondered his whole life how different would he be Like I lived hard and fast as a younger man, right right, Yeah, actually, way way harder and faster. Um so, But I've I've often wondered, you know, how much sharper would I be had I not lived like that? But this is my own doing, It was my own choosing. Howard Dolly had to think that same thing, like, is there something wrong

with me? Is there a part of me missing through no choice or fault of his own? We should also say that, Um, when Howard's stepmother found that he was not a vegetable, she just got him out of the house and he became a ward of the state. So he went all around lady. Yeah, so um again in the end, he finds, you know, there there really isn't something wrong within the he he's a pretty terrific persons as he as it turned out, lobotomy or not right.

It took him a long time though. I mean he battled addiction and various forms of mental illness his whole life after this, and uh, I think going this the special that air, and he wrote a book and went and talked to his father. After forty years, he actually finally spoke to his dad about it, and that seems to have been the thing to get him over the edge to not feeling like a freak anymore. As he called it. Yeah, you can actually hear him working it

out in my lobotomy. Yeah, a big deep voice. Yeah, he sounds kind of like Sam, not Sam Shepherdson. What's the guy? Uh, the big Lebowski Sam Elliott, Sam Elliott, Yeah, that's what are you reminded me of the dude. Yeah. He also had that big mustache to sort of like Sam Ellie, that handlebar biker mustache. So, uh, chuck. Whatever happened to lobotomies? Why where? Why did they go the way of the dinosaur? Just go? Well? Uh, A couple

of reasons. I mean, one, there was a lot of gaining steam with the criticism of it because they found that they were lobotomizing criminals. They were lobotomizing soldiers from World War Two because criminals against their will sometimes right, but they lobotomized soldiers because hospitals were overcrowded veterans unbelievable, and so that that was kind of gaining steam. And

then the introduction of uh thorzine basically everything. Um. I believe that somebody said that thorzine was to the treatment of schizophrenia, that insulin I'm sorry, that penicillin was to the treatment of infectious diseases, which is a pretty big comparison. So thorazine was developed in nineteen fifty and as it

began to fall into widespread use. Um, lobotomy is kind of fell out of widespread use, and Dr Freeman himself he uh, he had one last one, one last lobotomy in nineteen sixty seven, right, Yeah, he killed a woman with the brain hemorrhage after the third try. I think this is her third lobotomy, and uh, she wasn't just you know, some mental patient in Iowa. This is a housewife. And when she died of I believe of hemorrhage after

the procedure, that third procedure, that was it. He was banned from surgery performing any kind of surgery from that that point on and actually spent the rest of his days until he died in nineteen seventy two, traveling the country and the camper, which if it was his lobotomobile, yeah, I don't know. He wasn't pitching it. He was actually going around trying to um find. He was visiting old patients to prove that he had done good, and he had done some good in a couple of of cases,

in several cases, I imagined. His first one was a woman I can't remember her first name, but it was ian Esco and she uh, she was violently suicidal, is described by her daughter. And afterwards she went on to to live a happy, fulfilled life. Yeah, but you know, every every successful case I read about, they would say things like they weren't violently suicidal anymore and they were just, you know, kind of happy, but it still seemed to be that lights wrong. But no one's home thing like

the couple the er, yeah, the married couple was. The husband had his wife lobottom eyes because she was so emotional and she was suicidal as well. Yeah, and she says that she was happy as a clam and he was satisfied. He said that she came home and she never calls any more trouble and she was just happy and she could still back talk. Yeah, she could still cooking, clean and do all the things she could do before. And she agreed, I just haven't been worried about things

since then. And she was in her eighties. But you know, you read that, and emotions are normal, mood swings are normal. It's agreed. But I do I do think that there is a certain threshold and if you're violently suicidal, you know, maybe a lobotomy was a better option. Yeah, But I also want to know what the criteria for all this was back then. There wasn't any so yeah, so put

that in your pipe. And but one of the most unsettling things, one of the most unsettling things that I found from this article is that lobotomies are still performed today in England, right, the UK is one of a few countries um where it's it's no longer called the botomies because lobotomy is such a horrible stigma attached to it, and for good reason, neurosurgery for a mental disorder and m D and today apparently they use m r s

as guides to be more precise. But pretty much this type of surgery, psychosurgery as it's called um is, it's pretty much the same thing. It's destroying white matter connections and you're removing people's emotional selves, right. I mean, there may be something too to that, but certainly it was so non specific and non technical to jam ice picks and and just blindly move them back and forth. Said no, wonder that was all kinds of results. So Chuck, we

are both kind of nuts. And I'm really glad it's not like nineteen because yeah, yeah, my wife Emily and I would both be on the the lobotomy table. I think I drive you to the sea Freeman. Thanks, sure, I appreciate that. Yeah. Well that's it. That's it for lobotomies, buddy. Yeah. I encourage people to go out and listen to Howard Dully's uh radio show there. It's really great. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this one. You can read all about Lobotomyes on how stuff works dot com. You know what to do.

Uh you know handy search bar, etcetera. Uh, and Chuck, let's let's talk some audible stuff. So our sponsored audible dot com hit it. Okay, So if everyone goes to www. Dot audible podcast dot com slash stuff and sign up to get one free download from audible dot COM's fifty thousand plus titles of audio books, stand up comedy, spoken word speeches, pretty much anything you can listen to is right there. And I was on their browsing just this morning and I found one of my all time favorite

books by Charles Mann Good One Great. One man runs around um the America's basically two archaeological sites and gets the scoop on the most recent findings and finds that there were way more people in the America's before Columbus showed up than we realized. Uh and yeah, there's a lag between the arrival of Columbus uh to Hispaniola and the second wave that followed within the next fifty years. The second wave found that this, you know, that was

Virgin Territory. There's almost no one there. Turns out it's because about a hundred million people died of smallpox from Columbus's first arrival between then and the second wave. It's fascinating. That's right there. You just did one. Well, maybe we'll do a bigger sewed on it, a bigger said, Yeah, what about you you've been on Yeah, I'm gonna recommend uh just quickly. Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Rapport. Oh, I saw his portraits National Gallery portrait. It was Catonian recently.

It was awesome with his familiar scowl. Yeah, I love that guy. So yeah. He has a very popular book that he reads himself called I'm an American and so can You. And that's all I need to say about that. It's hysterical. Nice check. So you can get either one of those titles for free by going to www. Dot audible podcast dot com slash stuff and signing up and that is Audible right there, baby, let's do a listener.

Let's do it, Josh. I'm just gonna call this. We got a lot of great feedback for the high fruit toast corn Syrup. Yeah, so much so that we're gonna have probably like three podcasts in a row. We're gonna be reading soon that mail. I don't know what it is, we should I can bring back Haikus, Okay, all right, So I'm just gonna call it intelligent listener mail because Max is a smart guy, and I like these most

of all. I'm a graduating senior in the Business College, but when I'm not in class or listening to podcast, I almost always enjoy listening to philosophy. It's more or less my passion. More specifically, I'm interested in world religion, medical metaphysical theory, and man's relationship to nature in the universe. So this guy is obviously smarter than you to say that fruit dose, corn syrup or any other man made chemical compound does not occur naturally. You're speaking with the

basic assumption that man is something different than nature. Unfortunately, for those who can find themselves above nature in a portance or authority, this is not the case. It's our Western culture and religion that strengthens this point of view. Man didn't PLoP into nature is a separate and flawed phenomenon in a stupid natural universe. Man came out of nature. Man is nature, Man is the universe. To borrow a quote from my favorite philosopher Alan Watts, and you're seeing,

you're hearing, you're talking, you're thinking, you're moving. You express that which it is which moves the sun and other stars. So to perceive yourself as something different is only an inability to identify yourself with the cosmos. So Josh Man's manipulation of compounds is really the world's manipulation of itself, or perhaps the universe manipulating itself. And that is certainly a natural occurrence boom. And that is what happens when I off handedly say something is man made nice? Well,

what's the guy's name? Max? And I think the philosophy too, So I thought, what's gonna call? We dig you Max? And we really dig anybody who sends us something, especially if it's as intelligent as that. Uh. If you want to show off your ginormous brain, send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com