He was an idealistic doctor, hungry for fame, who would champion one of the century's most infamous medical procedures. He wanted to solve the problems of psychiatry and he wanted to do it fast. The lesson here is not how a man can go off the rails, but it's how science can go off the rails.
Ellen Ionesco was the first patient to undergo a procedure Dr. Freeman had perfected only weeks before. He called it transorbital lobotomy. In a transorbital lobotomy, Freeman would first have the patient rendered unconscious through the use of the electroconvulsive shock machine.
Just before he threw the switch, we all had a laying on of hands and went for a little ride. Usually three successive convulsions are necessary, but in old people a single one may be sufficient, while in a sturdy... young person four or even six convulsions might be administered without danger the patient would then enter unconsciousness for a relatively brief period but several minutes now that the convulsion has decided the nurse holds a towel over the nose and mouth of the the page Freeman would peel back each eyelid insert his ice pick and with a hammer tap through the brain wiggle it about sever the frontal lobes withdraw it and when the patient came to he or she would be given dark glasses to hide the black eyes they've been given We didn't have a refrigerator, we had an icebox. The first ice picks came right out of our kitchen drawer, and they worked like a charm. Turning now to the operation itself, very little preparation is necessary for transorbital lobotomy.
The instrument was put in above the eyeball and in the plane of the nose. You could feel it hit the roof of the orbit and then with a tap of a hammer you could knock it through. the whole thing would take three or four minutes.
This patient came to the hospital this morning after breakfast and he will leave tomorrow afternoon. There are reports which he proudly writes down in his diary about fellow professionals fainting as he proceeds in this, or vomiting. Dr. Watts didn't say anything. He simply turned around and walked out.
Spurred on. by Freeman the number of lobotomies performed annually soared from 150 in 1945 to over 5,000 in 1949 despite the known side effects there seemed to be an endless supply of willing patients ultimately the fate of lobotomy would be settled by a pill in 1954 a new drug called Thorazine began to sweep through state mental hospitals was initially marketed as a chemical lobotomy. I mean, this was seen as a selling point that it produced results similar to lobotomy, but without, of course, all the risks of the surgery. Freeman decided to move to Los Altos, California to resurrect his career.
Far from the reproachful Eastern medical establishment, he could try to bring lobotomy to new categories of patients. If housewives found their early 1950s existence too depressing for words, why Freeman had a solution that would get them through their day happy as little clamps. If children were misbehaving...
conditions we might now see being called hyperactivity disorder, why they might need a lobotomy. In all, Freeman lobotomized 19 children under the age of 18, including a 4-year-old. By 1967, Dr. Freeman had personally performed more than 2,900 lobotomies. In February, at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, he performed his last when a patient died of a brain hemorrhage.
Freeman was stripped of his hospital privileges and soon retired from his medical practice. There's more about The Lobotomist at American Experience Online. Watch the full program on the web. A panel of experts answers your questions. Access additional interviews.
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