I've come here to California on the trail of one of the most infamous doctors of the 20th century Dr Walter Freeman the [Music] laist Walter Freeman began practicing as a doctor in the 1920s going on to work in one of the last institutions set up to house growing numbers of mentally ill people the Shell Shocked victims of the first world war and inmates with Dreadful psychiatric problems lived out their lives in what were known as snake pits psychiatric hospitals in the 1930s were terrible places to be as a patient and they were terrible places because they were they were places of hopelessness there were really no effective treatments for most mental disorders for the most part these hospitals warehoused patients for long periods of times decades even entire lives Freeman was horrified at the sheer waste of human potential now he started out with with good intentions and here was a terribly serious problem and it wasn't getting any better it was getting worse it was a public health problem Freeman was convinced that the root cause of many of the patients problems lay in the physical structure of their brains so he decided to change them a pulled by what he was seeing in these snake pits Freeman now spent increasing amounts of time in the laboratory catat brains dissecting brains examining brains looking for differences this is the brain received through the courtesy of Washington sanitaria Freeman thought that surgery could help patients far more than the current treatments are cut off at the level of the middle of the pond spurred on by the growing understanding of what different regions of the brain do he finally decided that the problem lay in a set of connections between the thalamus and the frontal lobe the pointer demonstrates the thalamus and the anterior thalamic radiation going to all parts of the frontal L Freeman believed if he could sever the connections between the thalamus and the frontal lobe and this would dampen down all those awful emotions and it would if you like cure the patients he saw this as surgery of the Soul a way of bringing the Damned back to life but there was a problem Freeman was not himself a surgeon so he got together with a man who was James watts and together they started performing the operation ation they called labotomy [Music] a labotomy involved opening the side of the skull at both sides and entering the brain using a tool called a lucone it looked like a butter knife and Freeman and watts would insert this tool into the brain through the side hole and attempt to cut some of the neural Pathways connecting the frontal loes of the brain to the [Music] thalamus Freeman and Watts reported about onethird of their patients were improved by labotomy about 1ir were not affected much and that the remaining third were worse off after their operations [Music] Freeman and Watts considered this to be a great success but the operation was so timec consuming they knew it could never make a significant impact on the vast numbers in the asylums so how was he going to get to all those people he needed to find a way to make it simpler and much much faster [Music] this is a camper van of the type that w Freeman used to take his kids on holiday in and inside this van is the answer to Walter Freeman's problem his solution if you like to all human ills inside this camper van is Walter Freeman's contribution to the history of surgery he called this operation the transorbital labotomy the instrument that Walter Freeman chose for his new improved labotomy was this an ice pick it's the sort of thing you'd have found in every 1940s home it was absolutely perfect for what he needed it for it was hard it was tough it did the job so what Freeman did is he would antiz the patient using ECT then he would get his ice pick and a hammer and he would go into the brain through here I think I'll try it down a skull rather myself here it is watch closely he's going him in here he pushes the eye ball out of the way and he works his way to the back to a thin bit of bur right at the back and then what you do is you buop it buop it through the skull yep going through going about 5 cm and then you just squiggle it around he was actually much more Adept than I was but he would use two at the same time and then out it comes and according to Freeman the only postoperative care the patient needed was a pair of dark glasses transorbital labotomy was so simple it could be done by anyone anywhere and in under 10 [Music] minutes Freeman was so thrilled by his Discovery he got into his camper van and he drove off crisscrossing the states 11 times in one year to show the doctors just what they could [Music] do often Freeman would do as many as 25 transoral laies in a single day one right after the other Freeman had some great exhibitionist Tendencies he would perform labotomy left-handed even though though he was right-handed he would sometimes perform using a carpenter's Mallet the operation I witnessed was shocking uh it was quick it was easy and it was diabolical he lined up two women a quick my father went over and tickled the first one in the ribs so on and she stop that he went over and tickled the ribs of the other one uh-uh she was paralyzed on the left [Music] side Walter Freeman performed thousands of labotomy his techniques so widely it's estimated that more than 100,000 people were lobotomized with mixed results they had their failures um but there again a remarkable number of those patients returned to their families and had some kind of a life now it's certainly true that some of the patients became more docile and easier to handle but many of the others were so badly damage they could never take their place in the world and of course some died this young man is one of Lot's success stories cases like his encourage Freeman to extend his [Music] practice he moved from using labotomy as a last resort to using them on people who by anyone's standard were perfectly normal [Applause] [Music]