I recently finished the autobiography “My Lobotomy” by Howard Dully.
Dr. Walter Freeman has been termed “The father of the American Lobotomy”. He came from money, surrounded by a strict mother and father and a family history centering around medicine. He went to Yale, and afterwards enrolled in the Pennsylvania Medical School, where he became fascinated with the brain. After medical school, he traveled the world studying neurology and psychiatry, and he visited various asylums.
It was a time of neurology and psychotherapy. Sigmund Freud was publishing his theories on human emotion, and were gaining widespread acceptance. Dr. Freeman, however, was not interested in Dr. Freud or psychoanalysis. He thought this approach was actually dangerous. Instead, he believed there were biological explanations for various mental diseases, and therefore must be surgical treatments.
Over the next decade he experimented on mental patients with various new treatments, including massive doses of insuling, Metrazole (a stimulant drug), or electroshock therapy. He was not very successful as a doctor, but was a huge hit as a teacher.
In 1935 while visiting London, Dr. Freeman attended a presentation on chimpanzees whose frontal lobes were operated on, and they became passive and subdued. A Portuguese neurologist named Egas Moniz also attended this presentation, and upon his return to Lisbon, began performing similar experiments on humans. He called it “psycho-surgery.” These experiments involved drilling holes in his patient’s heads, and making cuts in their frontal lobes. He used a tool he called a “leucotome”, and dubbed the procedure a “leucotomy”.
Dr. Freeman read of the experiments in a French medical journal, and decided this was what he wanted to do. He contacted the company that supplied Moniz’s leucotomes, and ordered himself some. He and a surgeon partner began practicing on cadaver brains. Shortly after, he performed his first leucotomy.
They deemed this surgery a success. He then began performing these operations often on many patients. He changed the name of the procedure to “lobotomy”. Many of the procedures had poor results, but Dr. Freeman made excuses for these failures and looked over them.
In the early 1940’s, an Italian surgeon was attempting to refine the prefrontal lobotomy by entering the brain through the thin bone of the eye socket, thereby not having to drill through the skull. Freeman read up on the experiment, and in early 1946 he conducted America’s first transorbital lobotomy.
Dr. Freeman performed a multitude of these transorbital procedures. His youngest patient was 12 year old Howard Dully. Howard’s mother died when he was very young, and his new stepmother was not a nice woman. She was strict, and cruel. And she did not like Howard, since he did not fit her vision of a perfect child. Howard was constantly in trouble, whether he had done anything wrong or not. She took Howard to various medical doctors, trying to get him institutionalized, and when the doctors disagreed with her, then she would drop their care, and take him elsewhere. Eventually, she came to Dr. Freeman. After just a few short visits, Dr. Freeman diagnosed Howard as being schizophrenic and recommended the transorbital lobotomy. His father took only two days to agree to the operation.
This book covers Howard’s journey through life leading up to, and after, his lobotomy. When the lobotomy did not produce the results Howard’s new mother wanted, they found a way to give him over to the state. It follows his paths through different homes, and how he tries to find a way to gain the love and companionship of his parents as he is shifted from place to place.
It was a deeply disturbing look at how society viewed mental therapy in those days, and how little involvement or choices there were for the authorities in those days.