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Lobotomies, then and now
 

The Tampa Tribune
January 21, 2008
By KURT LOFT
Lobotomy: Proceeding Without Caution

Psychiatrist Walter Freeman, holding mallet, performs an "ice pick"
lobotomy at George Washington University

TAMPA - Howard Dully was 12 years old when his stepmother opted for the
lobotomy.
Dully assumed the procedure was routine and that she knew best how to
cure his "mental illness." But she came close to turning the youngster
into a vegetable.
"I didn't realize how barbaric it was until later in my life," Dully
said by telephone from his home in San Jose, Calif. "As a kid, it didn't
really matter to me."
The 59-year-old Duffy works as a bus driving instructor. Last year, he
published a book called "My Lobotomy," which traces what happened that
day in 1960 and the impact it continues to have on his life. The story
unfolds tonight on an "American Experience" television documentary.
Dully was one of an estimated 30,000 people in the United States who had
documented lobotomies in the two decades after World War II. A
now-discredited form of psychosurgery, the lobotomy at one time was
heralded as a medical breakthrough in the treatment of mental disorders.
By any credible scientific standard, lobotomies are crude and horrific,
experts say, and often did irreparable damage to the patient's brain.
"I had to deal with a lot of anger about what was done to me," Dully
said. "It channeled into rebellion over the years. But I realized anger
wasn't going to do any good because I didn't have enough information
about what happened to me until much later in my life."
Dully's anger over his stepmother's decision boiled over to the man who
performed the procedure, an American psychiatrist named Walter Freeman.
He performed nearly 3,000 lobotomies on people suffering from dementia,
depression or other mental conditions - many of whom had never been
diagnosed for their problems.
Freeman was 28 years old when he arrived in 1924 at St. Elizabeth's in
Washington, D.C., a hospital for the mentally ill. Appalled by what he
saw, he dedicated himself to improving the lives of such people. He
embarked on a bold experiment to identify and alter the part of the
brain he believed caused mental instability.
Freeman began exploring lobotomy techniques in 1936 after reading about
a treatment for depression being done in Portugal. Freeman expanded on
the idea by drilling holes into the skull, then turned to a more
"efficient" technique using long pins resembling ice picks. He conducted
his first "ice pick" lobotomy in 1946, separating the thalamus from the
frontal lobe of a frantic, suicidal woman. As he predicted, she became
docile - but unresponsive.
As Freeman conducted more lobotomies, he advertised his dramatic
results, promoting his technique as a 10-minute medical marvel. Nearly
all his procedures included press coverage and before-and-after photo
ops. In 1952, he made headlines by performing 25 lobotomies in a single
day. Freeman soon enjoyed celebrity.
"He had a kind of perverse need to shock people," Elliot Valenstein, a
neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, said in the documentary.
Dully's stepmother read about Freeman and scheduled a consultation about
the boy's personality, which she called "unruly and defiant." After
examining the boy, Freeman suggested a transorbital lobotomy. Dully was
brought to Freeman's office on Dec. 16.
After rendering the child unconscious with electroshock therapy, Freeman
inserted a stainless-steel ice pick underneath the upper lid of each
eye, then tapped it with a rubber mallet until it broke through the
socket wall. He then wiggled the rod back and forth to cut connections
to the frontal lobe of the brain.
"But I didn't have a mental illness," Dully said. "What it was supposed
to do, it didn't do at all."
While Dully said his lobotomy made little noticeable difference to him
physically or mentally as he was growing up, it eventually had an impact
on his life, including feelings of abandonment.
"I always felt that something was taken from me, that there was a piece
missing because my life has never gone well," he said. "Some of my
judgment is not good. I don't have the drive that a normal person has.
I've had trouble almost all my life in almost anything I did: work,
relationships, money. I wasted my whole life on this one issue. My whole
life."
Freeman continued performing lobotomies long after the development of
anti-psychotic drugs. His last procedure was in 1967 on a housewife
named Helen Mortenson. The operation was traumatic - Mortenson died of a
brain hemorrhage - and Freeman's license to practice medicine was
revoked.
Before he died of cancer in 1972, Freeman spent his last years visiting
his former patients, some of whom called him an amoral monster. Others
had no idea who he was - or what he had done to them.
Dully's story, as well as the career of Freeman, are the focus of the
"American Experience" documentary, "The Lobotomist," airing tonight on
PBS. The special addresses a dark chapter in modern American medicine
and underscores the parallel between ambition and compassion.
"What amazes me about all this is the medical community didn't have any
oversight" on Freeman's work, Dully said. "It wasn't done in an
operating room. They gave you electroshock beforehand, then Freeman took
the ice picks out of his pocket. They weren't even sterilized."
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Story Link:
http://www2.tbo.com/content/2008/jan/21/lobotomy-proceeding-without-caut
ion/