Part One: The Bastard Who Invented The Lobotomy

In Episode 94, Robert is joined by Daniel Van Kirk to discuss Walter Freeman, the father of lobotomies.

FOOTNOTES:

1. The Lobotomist
2. Walter Freeman: The Father of the Lobotomy
3. Rosemary Kennedy: the sad life of President Kennedy's younger sister
4. Rosemary Kennedy: Telling the story of a forgotten daughter
5. Inside Rosemary Kennedy's Disastrous Lobotomy – And How Her Father Chose Her Doctor
6. Walter Freeman: The Father of the Lobotomy
7. He was bad, so they put an ice pick in his brain...
8. Joe Kennedy, Sr sought secret deal with De Valera on Irish ports during the War
9. Mental Illness Is On the Rise in the U.S. for a Frustrating Reason
10. The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness 
11. My Lobotomy

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's not a morning person? My me? I'm Robert Evans
hosted Behind the Bastards, the show where we talk about
the worst people in history, and I introduced the show badly. Uh.
Today we have an unusual morning recording at an ungodly hour.
What is it, Sophie. I feel like I'm the first

(00:22):
person who's ever been awake this early, aside from my
guest today, of course, Mr Daniel ban Kirk. Hello, thanks
for having me back. How are you doing, Daniel? I'm great,
my man, I'm wonderful. Daniel. Go ahead, no, no, oh,
I'll just say I've I've been up for two hours,
so I feel it's very impressive. Do you do you

(00:43):
like mornings? I do not, But I've recently found out
that I am able to get so many more things
done the earlier I get up, which would seem to
be very simple math, but nothing that I had personally
made any efforts to experience until recently in my life.
So I would say, on average nowadays, I'm up around

(01:03):
before eight, maybe sometimes six thirty. But I am not
a morning person. I hate sunrises. I love sunset. Robert
would say six, that's the middle of the night. Well,
that is when I went to bed last night, they're
about maybe five. Well, I appreciate you making this effort. Then, man,

(01:25):
that's crazy. My sleep schedule is still funked up from
the flight. Sure, now, Daniel, we've we've established that that
you're sort of ambivalent towards mornings, leaning towards not liking them.
How do you feel about brains? How do you feel
about your brain? I feel pretty good about it. H Yeah,

(01:45):
it's it's held up pretty well. My memory is still
very good, and I haven't gotten to the point where
I have to have a calendar. I would say I
use it for about fifty of my stuff. I should
be using it for a lot more, but mine's held
up so far. I think well, I think most people
like their brain, except for the moments when they hate them. Um.

(02:05):
And I think that probably for the listeners of the
show is statistically have spent like about fifty of their
waking hours not liking their brain. Because this is a
show for depressed people who like to hear about terrible things. Um.
As a general rule, that's our that's our demo, isn't it, Sophie.
I hope not. And I screwed up so I mean

(02:31):
me too. Maybe I'm describing the author of the show
and it's it's uh, it's primary cast more than the listeners.
I hope the listeners are happy, but I'm making an
assumption here either way, you're here for them. As of
a two thousand seventeen study, but the Journal of Psychiatric Services,
more than eight million Americans suffer from severe psychological distress.

(02:52):
Now this is a blanket term for quote, feelings of sadness, worthlessness,
restlessness that are hazardous enough to impair physical well being.
That sounds pretty familiar to me, um, And that number
doesn't include all the Americans struggling with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, psychosis, depression,
and a whole galaxy of other brain based thing of
the jigs to deal with. And as some extent, it's

(03:14):
always been this way. Huge chunks of people have always
had brains that don't let them comfortably interface with mainstream society. Now,
we're not great at helping people with mental illnesses in
two thousand nineteen, but a few decades ago we were
much worse at it. And today we're going to talk
about the man who was perhaps the very very worst
of all at it. So you know, the name Walter

(03:39):
Jackson Freeman. The second I do now he invented lobotomies,
and that's who we're talking about today. They're just they're like, well,
we'll just remove it. Yep, We'll just we'll just we'll
just scramble it up a little bit. Actually, yeah, oh,
you yell too much. We'll remove it. Oh you had

(04:00):
an unwanted pregnancy. We'll remove it, and not just the
pregnancy part. No, actually we will keep the pregnancy, but
we'll scramble that brain up. Yeah. And I've heard, well,
I'm sure we'll touch on some of them, but I've
just heard horror stories of like, well, we had a
sister and then she just wouldn't stop arguing with our parents,

(04:21):
so she went away. She liked boys, so we stuck
a needle in a brain. Oh what a time it was. Yeah, Okay, man,
I am going to bunker down for this. Yeah. My
dog is a registered therapy dog if you need to
pat her. Okay, great, awesome? Is she registered lobotomist, Sophie,

(04:42):
Because I feel like there's a lot of money in that. No,
but we'll look into it. We'll look into it. Walter
Jackson Freeme in the second was born on November four
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Walter the First, was also
a doctor, but not a very good one. He hated
the work, and he did it only grudgingly. He was

(05:03):
like an ear nose and throat doctor, and it was
said that his ideal world would have been one in
which people didn't have ears, noses, or throats, so he
wouldn't have to work. His son took that one next level.
Then you want things just removed that you don't want
to deal with that. That's what I'm gonna do, Dad, now.

(05:26):
Walter Jackson the seconds h grandfather, Keen Freeman, was one
of the most celebrated physicians of his age and was
like the first doctor who did a bunch of important things.
He was a legitimate, like trailblazing medical motherfucker. So Walter
Freeman the Second was a sick child, which was not
unusual in an error where the average fist fight came
with a better pragnosis than the average surgery. He developed

(05:48):
in large lymph nodes when he was fourteen months old,
which his grandfather had to cut out. The surgery worked,
but it permanently paralyzed some of the muscles in Walter's
shoulder and head. Uh. Walter the second also underwent tons
selectomy and suffered from diphtheria, scarlet fever, the measles, whooping cough,
the mumps, and pink eye. I don't want to say
that God definitely one of this baby dead, but I

(06:09):
think the evidence speaks for itself. M Yeah, they tried. Yeah,
he did his best. Young Walter's first memory was of
the head of a pickaxe breaking through the wall of
his nursery as the result of a home demolition that
got a little sloppy. Which is a pretty pretty badass
first memory. You gotta give it. Oh, yeah for sure. Also, uh,

(06:31):
not too far off of an analogy of what he
would later do to people's own lives, and not too
far off from a great scene in The Shining, which
starred Jack Nicholson, who was also in One Flew Over
the Cuckoo's Nest movie about a lobotomy. Oh that was
a good not We tied a lot of things together.
U now. The wonderful biography of Walter the Lobotomist notes

(06:55):
that he also nursed a lifelong fear of horses, but
never knew why. That doesn't come up again I just
think it's interesting people are terrified of something for no
reason and they can't let it go. Well, I'm also
afraid of horses. Okay, well that's not what we're talking
about today. All right, Well you need to put that in.
You need that needs to go in the book. Are

(07:15):
you scared of anything on like an existential level that
that makes no sense to you? I don't. Well that's
but if you're scared of it, doesn't it make sense
to you? So not always? I don't know. I'm I'm
very afraid of prison. Okay, that makes total sense. Yeah,
that's what. But what it makes sense to me? But
it is like, yeah, when I just think about not

(07:38):
being able to get out of somewhere that destined to
like you know, like they're like, oh, we decide. I
don't know. I don't like it. Bothers me. That shows
sixty days in Have you watched that? No? That sounds
like a fucking nightmare. Though. It's like they embed civilians
into like a prison system. The only person that knows
they're not an actual prisoner is the warden, and then

(08:02):
the camera crew sets up as though they're doing a
documentary in the prison, but they used that to do,
like their confessional talking head moments. So they interview a
lot of prisoners, but none of them assumed, well, one
of us isn't actually even supposed to be here, and
their jobs to like last sixty days, and quite a
few of them end up just getting beaten up. Yeah,
that makes sense. One was bad at his cover story

(08:25):
of what he was supposed to be in there for.
So once you just start lying to other prisoners, they
assume you must be a pedophile, and that's why you're like,
no fun intended kg about what you got in there for.
And that didn't end well for that guy either. Once
everybody was like, oh, you're a pedophile, he's like no, no, no,
no no, And then they don't care about that. That's
what they think, So you get beat up there. I

(08:49):
don't know if there is any cash price. I'm trying
to think, like you would have to have to be
I would only do it for enough money that I
would be able to buy a cabin in the woods,
Like would have to give me cabin in the woods
money in order to like do that fucking thing. But
that sounds like the worst. That's like it would have
to be nice woods and so you for like you

(09:12):
would do it. Five hundred is going to be the
low end of that ship. I'm talking a nice cabin.
See one time I went when I toured Alcatraz, they
let us go into the solitary confinement and they're like,
anybody want to check it out? And then I thought,
you know what, lean in on your fear. So I
went in and the guys shut the door. They're like,

(09:33):
I don't know what you call it. Probably a park
ranger at this point because of what Alcatraz is, and
then the tour guide whatever, and uh then he pretended
that the door was stuck and he couldn't get me out.
And I did not enjoy those few very short moments
that felt like very long hours. See I would I
would live in Alcatraz if it could just be my
house and I had a sack of rifles and an

(09:55):
Internet connection. Um, that would be fun. I could take
pot shots at Silicon Valley would be satisfying. I would
sign up for that podcast. Mm hm, welcome back to
Robert on the Rock. It's another episode. Okay, we should
probably get back to the podcast. We were talking he

(10:17):
scared of horses. Now, when Walter was a small child,
his family moved to an area near Rittenhouse Square, a
once fancy but now slummy neighborhood. Uh and this is
again in Philadelphia now. Freeman would later recall it as
a rather dingy place where nursemaid's wheeled baby carriages and gossiped.
Walter's family was quite well off, and he came up
with maids and cooks and nanny's to attend to his

(10:39):
and his parents every whim. He was not overly adventurous
as a child, and later wrote of himself on the whole,
I think I was a sensitive, imaginative boy, docile, shut
in a bit, and full of questions. His parents nicknamed
him Little Walter Why Why, And the growing boy was
particularly intrigued by the family business medicine. He had a
good relationship with his grandfather, but almost no real friends.

(11:01):
The only boy he played with regularly was his younger
cousin Morris. The book The Lobotomist describes their friendship as
basically identical to a Calvin and hobb strip. Walter and
Morris nursed a mutual contempt for girls and made grand
plans for the Society for the Prevention of Useless Girls
spugs for short. Disdaining the company of other children, they
set up another exclusive secret society, just two members strong,

(11:23):
which they called the wal Risk Club. Yeah, that's like
the fucking Calvin and Hobbs strip. Yeah, and they got
a Transmorguar fire. Wasn't that one of the things through times? Yeah?
So did I. It's kind of a bummer if you
imagine this is what happened to Calvin when he grew up.
I'm not doing that. Don't do that. Don't do That'll
be more Hobbs. I could see Hobbs getting into this

(11:45):
line of work, but definitely not scrambling brains now. Walter
was a good student. He excelled in Latin and Greek,
and he won prizes for his scholastics. He was never
any good at sports, nor did he grow any more
adept with the opposite sex. As he blossomed into a teenager,
he found girls bothersome and later wrote, I think I
actively disliked girls until I went to college. This is

(12:06):
all going to make so much sense later, This is
all going to make so much sense immediately. Um. Walter
Freeman was the oldest of six siblings, all but two
of whom were boys. He did not get along well
with him, nor did he particularly care for his parents.
Walter would later note repeatedly that he never loved his mother.
He was only a little closer to his father, who

(12:28):
took him and his brothers on regular hiking, fishing, and
camping trips. The elder Walter hated his medical practice and
considered the outdoors his only refuge. He was a weird dude. Once,
when Walter the Second was caught skipping school, his father
punished him by whipping himself in front of the truant officer. Wait, WHOA, Yeah,
the dad whipped himself or he had Walter the Second, No,

(12:51):
he whipped the dad whipped himself in front of the
truant officer to myself by skipping school. Yeah, and he
did it in front of the cop. WHOA, Like that's
that's so fucked up. It takes like you really have
to process that ship because the layers fucking up the

(13:12):
kid's head, you know that. Like I'm a truant officer.
Imagine that guy. He's like, Hey, well buddy, I just
want kids to go to school. Why are we doing this?
All you gotta do is sign the sheet man. All
you gotta do is sign the sheet that I told
you he wasn't at school put me down. Why did
you bring a whip to this meeting? You? You don't

(13:33):
need to do this. No one's asking you to do this, sir.
I just wanted to know. I'm also gonna have to
write you up for right for whipping yourself because I
have to document that I witnessed this. He missed a
day of school. This isn't really a whipping situation. I
wondered what you meant when you were like, cool, I'll
bring my whip. H Yeah, I have trouble getting my

(13:57):
head around. What kind of man does that? Oh? I know?
And then I'm sure the truan officer was like I
wanted the kid to leave, and then just like in
Will Farrell and he's bonding down, the dad was like,
let the boy watch. I feel that's horrific. That's a
mind fuck. Yeah, that's a galaxy level mind fuck. Oh boy.

(14:20):
I bet that true an officer felt bad for that.
I bet in the future he was like, you know what,
you need to stop skipping school, but we're not going
to tell your dad any officer. Let everyone's skip. Yeah,
he was like, I'm not going through that again. I
am not doing that again. So uh as is probably
not a surprise hearing that Walter's father was no less

(14:43):
awkward when it came to talking to his young adults
song about sex. Years later, Walter recalled, I had been
showing interest in the external anatomy of my young girl
cousins with the aid of his ancient textbooks on anatomy
and gynecology illustrated with woodcuts. He dilated upon internal anatomy, reproduction,
and especially venereal disease, threatening to have me followed or
even tempted by operatives who would report to him. I

(15:06):
was thoroughly uncomfortable, but remained a virgin. He never alluded
to it again. So if you're a young parent out
there looking to stop your kid from fucking too early,
this is one way to keep them a virgin for
a very long time. Yeah, or watch a racer head
but yeah, or watch your racer head. Yeah. But okay,
So he he got way into his He said, straight up,

(15:28):
I was really into my female cousins anatomy. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah,
he well, you know, you know that's that's fucked up.
I think in an earlier age in which boys and
girls did not socialize. Like you run into stories like
that a lot in the early nineteen hundreds just because
like you weren't hanging out with any other girls, So
like that's when people would have that. Really it's it's

(15:49):
messed up and a symptom of some unhealthy things in
the culture. But I'm not gonna say that that right,
there is evidence that Walter was weird from the beginning.
Maybe they were the only girls he spent any time around.
And I guess so when you stay at yeah anime,
to me, it's like he makes me feel like I
guess I in tone that he's more preoccupied, Like it's
okay to wonder what's under their clothes, but don't start

(16:10):
wondering what's under their skin. I think that was just
sort of, um a euphemism they used because again, nobody
had good vocabulary to talk about like bodies back then,
because everyone was fucked up, and you know, it was
an even less healthy time. There was no feveral summer
or Midwestern boy autumn at which I'm currently a part of.

(16:32):
Oh yeah, that's yeah. Midwestern boy autumn is good. Uh,
Southeastern boy late summer slash early fall, which really doesn't
get going until November. Um, get a lot of them.
I like slutty people, April showers. That's my favorite time
of year. Slutty people, April showers. Um, there has to

(16:55):
be a porn star named April Showers, right of course.
Oh yeah, no, there's like they're okay, I hope, So
we're putting in the universe. If there isn't, I also
called DIBs. If any of us get into porn, I
mean we're that's gonna be the sequel podcast to this one.
Robert Evans makes a porno. Um, it is not going

(17:18):
to be popular. Uh. Back to Walter freemanow So, Walter
graduated from high school when he was just sixteen years old. Uh.
He immediately started attending classes at Yale UM. He was
academically excellent, but completely miserable. He was too young an
immature to get up to any kind of animal house
type bonding shenanigans with his fellow young men, and his

(17:39):
utter disdain for women made most kinds of socialization impossible.
It turns out it's not great to be in college
at age sixteen. Not not the best time to do that. Uh.
He briefly worked for the Yale Daily News. But was
let go after he spilled a bunch of alphabetized subscriber
cards in front of his editor. He joined the swim
team at one point, but refused to practice when anyone
was around. He want people to see him with his

(18:01):
shirt off. Um, so he's You get a feel for
the kind of young man Walter Freeman was not a
comfortable one. Um now, and in fairness, knowing about his dad,
how could he possibly have been right? His initial degree
program was engineering, but this track was disrupted at the

(18:22):
end of his junior year when he ate a bad
batch of raw clams and caught typhoid fever. He spent
months laid up with this, in an assortment of other
ailments that took up the entirety of his first semester
senior year at Yale. The long months he spent at
hospitals and sick beds helped Walter realize that he wanted
something different out of life, a career in medicine. M now.

(18:42):
He'd initially not wanted to go down that road, do
largely to the fact that his father had told him
it was a terrible life. Don't be a fucking doctor.
As he whips himself. Uh, this isn't about you. I'm
whipping myself because someone else left a muffin out on
the counter. This is they're whipping. But I needed to

(19:02):
talk to you. Also, he's third generations to his dad.
Probably was forced into it by his dad. Yeah, and
so he maybe this was his one thing where he
was trying to be like, you don't do what you
don't have. You don't have to do this, and it
didn't matter. I feel like he's saying, you don't have
to do this while everybody looks at him whipping himself
and it's like, you really don't have to do this. So, uh, Walter,

(19:28):
seeing his dad was a miserable, fucked up person, Walter
instead looked towards his grandfather as a role model and
enrolled in summer classes at the University of Chicago to
catch up on medical school before or to catch up
on like medicine and science related classes before starting medical
school the next year. He excelled in this as well,
and attempted to rebuild his health by walking thirty minutes

(19:49):
to and from campus every day carrying a heavy box
of bones. I don't know where you could just get
bones back then. Yeah, he just decided he needed. He
wanted to like get healthy, and a way to do
it was to carry around a lot of bones. And
because he's a person, a rock isn't good enough. Yeah,
there were more bones than rocks back then. There were

(20:09):
just people dying left and right. So he stopped H.
Holmes's place and picked up what years this that doesn't
check out? Actually I think it might check out this
late late eighteen nineties. I don't remember exactly when H.
Jones was. No, he would have been. He would have been.
He was born in nive so, but there would have

(20:30):
been there would have been a lot of bones laying
around in the early nine hundred bone heavy period. World
War One was on a shiploads of bones. Now. Yeah,
so he excelled in his classes, and he was getting better,
you know, healthier thanks to his bone box. But in
spite of all this, he he got sick again very
quickly and was soon bedridden. He later recalled I wrote

(20:52):
home saying, I guess God didn't want me to study medicine.
In reply, I received a stern admonition not to think
that way, much less to mention it. Wait, Robert, he
got sick again, Yeah, he kept he was very sick.
He was a sick, sick young man. Oh man, this
is You're right. Mother Nature was trying to kill him.
God was definitely trying to stop him from being He's

(21:14):
a fighter. He's a fighter. He is a persistent son
of a bit. He shouldn't have been let it go.
He should not have been somebody should have walked in
whipping themselves and been like, this is so that you
can let it go, Just go. Yeah, that's I think
that we have to land on the conclusion that if
only there'd been more whipping in his childhood, he would

(21:35):
have turned out better. Can I ask you a foreshadowing
question that I don't expect you to answer yet because
I don't know that we should even if you can.
But much like we all wonder, like what purpose does
mosquitoes provide? Like what uh, what did they give us
in the long run or whatever other than just bad stuff,
I would love to know by the end of this episode,

(21:56):
I already hate him. If at some point you're gonna
be like, well, actually, because of the lobotomy, we now
have this positive thing in our world, and I'm anxious
to see if if that comes about at all. Yes,
he was actually this is getting ahead a little bit.
He doesn't want to do that to you. I'm just
that's what's already in my had I'm like, yeah, I
hope there's some benefit to this fucker. Yeah. The spoiler

(22:18):
I will give you is that it turned out he
was right for the wrong reasons, or at least he
was right, but it led him to do the wrong things.
Like the little kid in a Bronx tail. I've not
seen you. Oh he covers for he covers for a
mob guy. And he asked his dad, Robert de Niro.
He goes, I did I did a good thing, right, Dad?
And he goes, yeah, you did. You did a good
thing for a bad man, Like it was the right thing,

(22:40):
but you did it for the wrong person. Yeah. Well
it's a little different than that. We'll get well, we'll
get there. So after a second ton selectomy, Freeman's health improved,
and soon he was off to medical school. During the
first Hand bones in hand. During the First World War,
he was drafted into the Army Medical Corps and he
became a sergeant. He continued his education. He was demoted

(23:02):
once for threatening his company commander with a shoe, but
otherwise had a solid service we're not. We can't skip
this with a shoe just a little shoe fight. You've
had a couple. I've never had a shoe fight. We
we all have the odds shoe fight. I can Tina Turner,
that's the most popular shoe fight of all time. Yeah,
it was just like an argument and he like picked

(23:24):
up his shoe and yelled at somebody and didn't realize
that they were his commanding officer. Um it's less interesting
than you'd think. It's funnier when you just summarize it
that way. Um. Now. Walter graduated as a doctor in
nineteen twenty, the second in his class. By this point,
he had become so enamored with medicine that every other
aspect of his past had followed by the wayside. Medicine,

(23:45):
he wrote, held my interest to the point where I
excluded many other things. In fact, I was barely aware
of my family. Do not recall what they were doing
or where they were during this period. So Walter has
fallen fully into medicine. And speaking of falling fully into something,
Daniel van Kirk, it's time for us and our audience

(24:05):
to fall fully into the products and services that support
this program. Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. Let's
let's whip ourselves in front of the audience to convince
them to buy these these products that support the show.
Imagine me wailing on myself with a cat of nine tales.
It makes me sad. But you, I didn't come to school,

(24:27):
and so now you have to hurt yourself. And yeah,
now I have to hurt myself products. We're back. So
when we left off, Walter Freeman had fallen in love
with medicine and had forgotten what his family was even doing.
He was so enthralled with his new career, and in

(24:49):
his father's case, what he was doing was dying of
liver cancer. Now, yeah, yeah, yeah, Walter could not really
have cared less about this. The only thing he did
to help his father during this period, because he was
living at home still, it was periodically shave him with
a straight razor. He refused to soften his dad's stubble
in warm water before shaving him because quote, the task

(25:12):
was distasteful, and I finished it as quickly as possible.
I'm sure my mother would have been more gentle, but
she considered shaving a man's job, and I was the
only one at home, so like, I'm gonna I'll shave you, dad,
but I'm not gonna like make it pleasant for you,
because I want to get done with this ship quick.
Great great kid. Now, although his dad was kind of

(25:34):
sucked him up, so fair, I guess you have to
whip me. I can't do it myself. I can't get
shaved without a whipping. As a medical intern, Walter was
somewhat uneven. He excelled in neurology, but proved less apt
at handling what he called scut work, like transporting urine
samples for analysis. Sometimes he would pour samples down the

(25:55):
drain just to be rid of them. He was fascinated
by neurosurgery, but too bored of the details of it
to actually learn to perform surgery. He was fascinated by illness,
but almost bored by the actual human beings he had
to treat. He was, in short, a very strange dude,
as this passage from the lobotomist makes clear. Soon another
patient commanded Freeman's curiosity. A young man who arrived at

(26:17):
the hospital with his penis and dire shape and flamed
and dark. The organ was encircled by a ring that
the patient's girlfriend had thrust over it but was unable
to remove Freeman. Yet, we're talking like nineteen twenties cock rings.
I think we're talking a normal ring that she put
on his cock and it became a problem when he
got hard. No. Yeah, that's why you use the like

(26:39):
the bendy rubber ones, not like a normal metal ring.
That's one of our sponsors today. Yes, Josiah and Sons
old fashioned Amish cock rings, the only cock rings that
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want a Josiah and Son's cock ring that was too perfect.

(27:00):
Now in Redwood, So a guy walks in and says, hey,
I gotta, I gotta. And you know that that conversation
was awkward because much like you just talked about, no
one was using good like healthy like jargon for each
other to talk about themselves. Or they don't think anyone
uses the word penis in that entire conversation. He's like,

(27:23):
I've gone problematic in my nethers. Ye. So uh. Freeman
ended the patient's agony by filing through the ring and
twisting it free with forceps. The boy asked for the ring,
but I told him it was a specimen and that
I would have to keep it. Freeman wrote, I had
the ring, repad and the Freeman Man crest and de
graved on it for years. Afterward, Freeman wore the specimen

(27:45):
on a goat shade. If we were in an episode
of Mine Hunters, this is what we would call a trophy. Yeah,
that's fucked up. What a conversation starter, though. I like
that you don that crest aftermarket because this used to

(28:07):
be this used to be a broken ring. How so well,
a gentleman came in had it in his nethers. I
took it off and now I probably present it wo man. Wow, yeah,
real quick, think about this. There's a chance, unless he
was buried with it, that ring is out there somewhere. God,

(28:29):
I hope. So if you have Walter Freeman's cockering necklace,
I would pay good money to have it. I don't
know what I would do with it. We'll find a
use for it. If you could start collecting things from
your episodes and you'd be like the Collector and Guardians
of the Galaxy in the Marvel universe. But you're like, oh,

(28:50):
that's actually from the episode where we talk about, because
that ring is gotta be I bet somebody doesn't even
know what they have. Or if I get a TV
show that would be that would be the premises me
hunting down artifacts of terrible people will start with like
an original copy of one of Hitler's favorite, uh fantasy novels.
But yeah, yeah, yeah, Saddam Hussein's typewriter, you know, all

(29:12):
the all the all the great, all the hits, Ron
Hubbard's I don't know, uh boat yeah, or like that
first episode I did where we talked about the Nazis
in Hollywood, like even an old like Lemley's like movie
cars o hell yeah yeah, yeah, the city of Pittsburgh. Man,

(29:32):
there's a lot of things to collect. Okay, sorry I
have derailed this, but that that I mean, how could
I not? We just went filing tale. Yeah. So. Walter
spent a year in Europe, doing medical residences in France
and performing medical testing on animals. The highlight of his
trip was watching the autopsy of an elephant. He was
fascinated by the four hour task of opening the creature's

(29:53):
skull to remove its brain. Walter's first thought was that
a jackhammer would have been the ideal tool. To remove it.
But this thought, pro says, spawned a lifelong fascination in
finding unique ways to break into skulls and access brains.
He is into that do what you love, the money
will follow. His first major job came courtesy of his grandfather, Keene,

(30:16):
who used his connections to get his grandson a gig
as the senior medical officer in charge of St. Elizabeth's
Hospital in Washington, d C. This was a psychiatric hospital,
and working there gave Walter a direct look into the
horrific ways nineteen twenties America treated the mentally unwell. St.
Elizabeth was essentially a giant box filled warehouse from the
end of Raiders of the Lost Arc, but filled with

(30:37):
sick people instead of antiquities. There were very few real
treatments for psychiatric disorders, so patients were just locked in
there together until they either died or lied well enough
to claim that they had had a spontaneous remission. That
was that was healthcare back then. Oh yeah, your head sick, huh, Well,
we're gonna put you in a miserable box until you
decide you're healthy. Yeah yeah. Walter or Freeman found this

(31:00):
new charge horrifying. He was sickened by the forty inmates
of his asylum, and he wrote the slouching figures, the
vacant stare or averted eyes, the shabby clothing and footwear,
the general and tidiness all aroused rejection rather than sympathy
or interest. So he's horrified and not sympathetic with these people. Yeah,
it doesn't feel bad for him at all. Yeah, yeah,

(31:22):
they're they're just he's just disgusted by them. Now, since
the inmates of this asylum were too pitiful to deserve
Walter's sympathy, he instead focused on learning about the brain
of the psychotic, as he called it, which is again
was like the general it's a specific term now, it
was just the general term for anyone that was like
not fitting into society back you couldn't conform. Yeah, Walter's

(31:44):
goal was less to alleviate discomfort and more to help
these people return to life as productive members of capitalist society. Quote.
I looked around me at the hundreds of patients and thought,
what a waste of manpower and woman power. So again,
not particularly sympathetic to their suffering. He is very gender inclusive. Yeah. Yeah.
Towards this end, he experimented with differing oxygen levels and

(32:07):
their impacts on the brain of manic people. He also
pioneered a new easier method of collecting spinal taps from
the lobotomist. Instead of recruiting help to secure patients in
a deep bend while sitting then inserting the needle of
a collection syringe between the vertebra, Freeman employed what he
was fond of calling the jiffy spinal tap. Without assistance
from other staff members. Freeman directed patients to sit backward

(32:27):
on a chair and deeply bend their neck over the
chair back, carefully navigating the opening at the base of
this goal. He then pushed a needle into a reservoir
of spinal fluid located just inside but perilously close to
the base of the brain. Even a slight error in
the insertion of the needle could permanently injure the patient.
So Walt, he's just showing off, and this this risk
was worth because it allowed him to work alone without

(32:49):
close collaboration with colleagues. Um now a mature adult, Walter
was still very much a loner, and he preferred his
own professional company to acting as part of a team,
even when that went meant a greater risk to the aation.
Walter opened a private practice while working at St. Elizabeth's
to further his research, and also took a job as
a professor of neurology at George Washington University. By the
early nineteen thirties, he had a well earned reputation as

(33:12):
a psychiatric pioneer. Now, Walter was largely responsible for the
introduction of several exciting new treatments, insulin shock therapy, which
plunged patients into insulin shock to try and correct schizophrenic symptoms.
He also experimented with metrosol shock therapy and electro convulsive therapy.
The essential goal of all these treatments was the same

(33:32):
to slap sick people out of their issues by horribly
traumatizing their system. So he's that kind of doctor. He's like, Ah,
these people have a problem. We just need to funk
them up enough that they they get their ship together.
The only time I know of something like this working
is in heat stroke, because you instantly need to be
put into an ice tub right away, Like we need
to shock you out of the thing you're in. But

(33:55):
the idea that we could take anything psychologically and essentially
smack you out of it through one form of mild
torture or another is insane. Who did this ever work
enough that somebody was like, I think this is the
way to do it, you know. Um, So what There's

(34:15):
a couple of things going on here. One of them
is that electro convulsive therapy is still at a very
small scale used today. There are certain people with certain
fairly rare problems that it can help. So I'm sure
there were some people who had very severe psychiatric distress
who were helped by the electro convulsive therapy a tiny
fraction of the total, and I'm sure there was a
larger number who were while they had issues, were also

(34:40):
able to realize like, oh my god, they're gonna keep
torturing me if I don't pretend to be better, And
so they would just like, okay, i'll be better. I won't.
I won't kind of I won't let you know I'm suffering.
Isn't that kind of like the mouse in the maze?
Oh I just got to stop this and so that
that doesn't happen to me anymore. Yeah, but you're learning
through like not you're learning or just like have love

(35:02):
and dog type ship of like this just happens to
you every time. So you just learned to like stop
being loud, but nothing's changed. Yeah, that's a kind of
I think what goes on with a lot of these people.
It's a mix of the tiny amount who like legitimately
do benefit from it because electric convulsive therapy can be
helpful and a larger number who were like, oh, this
is awful, I'll just stop complaining. Yes, I don't want

(35:25):
to go through this anymore. Um now. It was nineteen
thirty five when Walter Freeman first ran into the treatment
that would come to define his practice and the great
bulk of his adult life. That year, he attended a
presentation in London by a researcher who had experimented with
damaging the frontal lobes of chimpanzees just to see what happened.
The results were more or less what you'd expect. These

(35:46):
brain damage chimps became quiet, listless, inactive. Freeman and a
Portuguese neurologists us money is, we're both fascinated by this.
Mona is right away headed back home to Portugal to
experiment with severing the frontal lobes of human beings. The
thinking was that if this procedure could calm chimpanzees down,
it might have the same effect on people suffering from
a mental illness that led to radical swings in personality

(36:09):
and mood, stuff like a bipolar disorders exactly, seizure disorders
and stuff, a whole bunch of different things, because again,
a lot of stuff that we now recognize our separate
things were all lumped together back in that day. Um
So if you were like a schizophrenic, or if you
had a seizure disorder, or if you were bipolar, they
might just say, lump all those people together is the
same thing. You know. They weren't great at this yet. Uh.

(36:32):
In nineteen thirty six, Antonio Monez had perfected his treatment,
the leucotomy, which involved drilling two small holes in the
side of the head in order to sever connective tissue
that attached the frontal lobe to the rest of the brain. Now,
at the time, there were two main theories of psychiatric illness.
The first, which was pushed by guys like Freud, was
that psychiatric ailments were all basically the result of buried memories,

(36:54):
misplaced desires, past traumas, things that you could sit down
and work out with a psychotherapist over a small mountain
of cocaine and uncomfortable couch. The other theory was that
these illnesses were caused by emotional signals from the brain
that were so strong they simply overwhelmed a person. Now,
obviously neither theory is entirely right um, but the theory

(37:14):
that guys like Freeman would adopt, which was that you
know these it was a bunch of signals from the brain,
was closer to right than Freud's theory because it explains
stuff like you know, um uh, seizure disorders or like
schizophrenia and stuff which are not You can't talk therapy
someone with schizophrenia out of having issues like it's a
problem with like signals their brain is sending and they
need some sorts of medication. I think sometimes surgery helps.

(37:38):
But like so, Freeman is on the right track. What
he and other scientists who like adopt this school of
thought are realizing is that you can't talk your way
through all of your mental problems, which is correct. There
are mental problems that have to be dealt with on
like more of a chemical physical level. So that's what
I say when I say he was he was right
about sort of what the issues were. Um but then

(38:02):
we get into what he decided the treatment should be,
which was not correct. But he was on the right
track when he like figured out like what was going
on with people where he was closer to write than
a lot of mainstream doctors. So Maniza's leucotomy seemed to
provide relief to a number of patients. And I should
note that there are variants of this procedure we used today.

(38:24):
Patients suffering from some types of seizure disorders sometimes have
parts of the brain disconnected from one another to stop
or reduce the frequency of said seizures. We still do
use brain surgery. That's kind of an evolution of the
leucotomy to treat people today, and it can be very
helpful to again a very small number of people who
suffer with these disorders. Um. So Moniz was experimenting with
real medicine and he was very responsible with the implications

(38:47):
of his treatment. When he received the Nobel Prize for
it in nineteen forty nine, he insisted the leucotomy was
only to be used as a treatment of last resort
when absolutely nothing else could provide a patient with relief.
So Monez not gonna say is a bad guy. He's
one of the early experimenters with what would come to
be known as a lobotomy. But he's he's doing it
because number one, he recognizes it does help in some cases,

(39:08):
and he's he's very clear about like, we only do
this if there's no other chance of them living a
normal life, or if we want to funk with a chimpanzee.
That was the other guy. Oh that's right, sorry, yeah, yeah,
yeah yeah. Moniz just watched that and was like, oh, ship,
this might best. Yeah. Now. Walter Freeman paid attention to
the work of Antonio Moniz, but he was not convinced

(39:28):
that the leucotomy ought to be a last resort for
suffering people. As the manager of an asylum, he was
deeply frustrated by how much time and manpower it took
to subdue patients dealing with psychotic episodes, schizophrenic breaks, manic faces, etcetera.
The idea that all this could be calmed by the
just chopping up their brains was deeply appealing to him.
So start, yeah, yeah, that'll that'll make it. Wait my job.

(39:50):
So I'm sick of what if I just break them?
Line them up? So Freeman developed a modification of moniz
is pers Sieger and renamed it a lobotomy in much
the same way as Oreos modified the hydrox cookie, and
like Oreos, Freeman's procedure was destined to capture the vast
majority of the market share for such a product. Like Oreos,

(40:12):
you gotta get to that middle good stuff and get
that out. You got you gotta get that out now.
I'm gonna quote now from Jack L. High, who wrote
The Lobotomist and also wrote this piece for The Washington Post.
To him, the intoxicating thing about psycho surgery mon iss
coin term for psychiatric surgery, was its potential to sever
the links between the over excited emotions of an unhealthy
thalamus and the behavioral functions of the prefrontal lobes of

(40:35):
the brain. If it worked, the destruction of these nerve
fibers would prevent the thalamus from poisoning patients. Thinking he
absorbed the details of Moniss work, and with neurosurgeon Watts
became figuring out how to adapt the Portuguese physicians techniques.
Freeman and Watts used brains from the hospital Morgue to
practice the coring of sections of the prefrontal lobes with
a lukatom, which is the device they'd used for that.

(40:57):
But the summer of nineteen thirty six, they were ready
for a live patient, a Miss Hammett from Topeka, Kansas. Now.
Ms Hammett was sixty three years old. She suffered from depression.
She had frequent hysterical fits and difficulties sleeping. Freeman talked
with her and concluded that a lobotomy was the only
way for her to avoid spending the rest of her
life in a mental hospital. Much of the impetus behind

(41:18):
this seems to have been her husband, who was tired
of dealing with a wife who needed help herself rather
than just preparing meals for him and staying quiet. Freeman
and his new partner Watts, schedule Miss Hammett for an
appointment on September nineteen thirty six. Now, the first lobotomy
did not start off well. Miss Hammett tried to back
out when she learned the procedure would require her to

(41:40):
shave her head. Many of her mental health issues focused
around an obsession with her thinning hair, so this was
obviously a matter of grave concern for her. WHOA, yeah,
we're doing the one thing she's already upset about. Oh yeah, yeah.
So Freeman and Watts assured her they would only have
to shave off a few small sections of her scalp.
This was a lie, obviously. Once they forcibly anesthetized her,

(42:01):
they shaved her bald. Freeman recorded that her last words
before going underwear, Who is that man? What does he
want here? What is he going to do to me?
Tell him to go away? Oh? I don't want to
see him. Yeah, Well that's how crazy people talk. So
still I don't think that. Oh yeah, that's him. Yeah,
I think she's very reasonable. That's my point. Once, once

(42:23):
you've been like labeled, we're going to do this to you,
no matter what you say, They're like, well you would
talk like that, You're a crazy You need her a
looney loony. With Freeman watching, Wat's drilled six holes a
top miss Hammett's skull and inserted a luca toom, a
device that essentially hold the brain into each hole, both
doctors worked together on leisuroning the brain, with Watts the
actual surgeon, managing the whole affair, and as odd as

(42:45):
it sounds, the lobotomy seems to have helped Miss Hammett,
At least she and her husband both reported that it helped.
Freeman wrote in his autobiography, she survived five years, according
to Mr Hammett, the happiest years of her life. As
she expressed it, she could go to the theater and
really enjoy the play without thinking of what her back
hair looked like or whether her shoes pinched. And it
is entirely possible that this is an accurate representation of

(43:07):
how Miss Hammett felt. Many of Dr Freeman's lobotomy patients
experienced relief from some of their symptoms. That said, even
the positive experiences with lobotomies are clouded by deeply disturbing
questions of consent and structures of oppression. They're saying speaking
of sorry, sorry, I just really they're saying it actually worked. Yeah,
she she experienced relief that was not wildly uncommon with

(43:28):
his patients. Yeah, but if she's worried about her shoes
and stuff, it's kind of sounds to me like, and
I know we're near a professional and so please take
this with the grain ofshal anyone who hears my voice
that maybe she suffers some some sort of like O. C.
D she was like worried about and so the lobotomy
just made her not really care about anything. So they're like, oh,
things are better. Well, yep, no, you just don't care

(43:51):
about anything. That's not I guess, I guess you're not
doing the thing you did. But I don't know if
that falls into category better. But but for them at
the time, they were saying that for them at the time,
this woman was complaining. Now the woman's not complaining. We
fixed her. It's a different Yeah, we're going to get
into that a little bit more and how problematic all
this was. But again, it's important you know that at

(44:13):
the time this looked to again the men who were
the only ones whose opinions mattered in this situation, as
if they were making people like Mrs Hammett better. Um,
now you know what will make you better, Daniel van Kirk.
The products and services that advertise on this show. Nice. Yeah,

(44:33):
can we go to them? Can I learn about him?
We can? Here's uh capitalism lobotomy. We're back now. Uh,
As I said before we rolled out the positive experiences
with lobotomies that you read about when you kind of

(44:55):
read about these early operations. Um, we're all clouded by
very disturbing questions of consent and also structures of oppression
that existed back then and still exist today. During my research,
I came across a story Corps interview with one of
Walter Freeman's patients, Patricia Mowen and her husband Patricia with
Her husband's name is Glynn. By the way, Patricia was
lobotomized in nineteen sixty two, and I'm going to read

(45:17):
the transcript of this husband and wife talking about her procedure.
And again, this is considered to be like one of
the stories of like a success. But I'll read this
to you and you tell me if you think there's
something fucked up going on here, but I will. Glenn Mowen,
my name is Glynn Owen. I am seventy nine years old.
I signed the release for Pat's lobotomy. Patricia Mowen, we
have not talked about it since I had the lobotomy.

(45:38):
I don't think ever. My husband is not a great communicator, Glenn.
I don't talk to her any more than I have
to Patricia. Glenn, be nice. Both laugh. We've been married
about thirteen years and it just started. I cried all
the time. I was just mentally no good, Glenn. One
night I came home and she said, well, I've done
it now. She'd taken a whole bottle of some kind
of pills. Patricia. That's when the doctor decided it was time. Glenn.

(46:00):
He told me this was the last resort. I didn't
know what else to do, Patricia. Dr Freeman said, you
can come out of this vegetable, or you can come
out dead. And I guess I was miserable enough that
I didn't care. Glenn. I was kind of worried because
of the operation of severing a nerve in the brain.
It sounded kind of wild to me, Patricia. He was
afraid he was going to lose his cook, Glenn, and
I don't like to cook. Patricia. I remember nothing after

(46:21):
I saw Dr Freeman. I don't remember going to the hospital,
or having it done, or how long I was there.
That's all gone, Glenn. We were coming back from San
Jose after the operation, and pat informed me that she
couldn't wait to get home because she wanted to file
for divorce. Patricia. I don't remember that at all. I
don't think I said it, Glenn. I think I just
went on driving and ignored the situation. Began to wonder myself,
how much good did this operation accomplish? Really, I can

(46:43):
see no changes in most areas, except she is much
easier to get along with Patricia. You didn't see any
change in the way I kept the house or the
way I Glenn. No, Patricia, I was more a free
person after I had it, just not so concerned about things.
I just went home and started living, I guess is
the best way I can say it. I was able
to get back to taking care of things and cooking
and shopping in that kind of thing. Glenn delighted it.

(47:04):
The way it's turned out, it's been a good life. WHOA, yeah,
that's there's a lot going on there. My favorite I
hope on Glenn's tombstone, who we know is definitely dead
by now. It says I ignored it and kept driving.
I ignored it and kept driving. That's probably how he
lived a lot of his life with her, until he

(47:25):
had to deal with her ass because she wouldn't do
the things she was supposed to and kept complaining about
wanting more pills. She wasn't happy cooking and shopping. So
we drilled a hole in the brain and then it
was fine. You know what, I'm also going to claim
ignorance here, my friend, I was under the assumption before
we started this that if you got a lobotomy, you
were just a shell of a person, that you were

(47:46):
a vegetable or you died. Like, uh, that happened a lot.
But but some people just kind of went into like
in a I don't know if you forks the right word,
but a like just a las a fair feeling towards
life after a lobotom Like they still were very cognitive,
they just didn't really have any argument nerves left. Yeah,

(48:07):
that's its separating the frontal lobe in the way that
they did kind of separates you from your concerns. In
some ways, it stopped people from feeling or thinking as much.
Very agreeable. Yeah, that was kind of the best case
scenario with some of these people. Um, but some they
did they detached too much or go too deep, and

(48:28):
that's when you get catatonic. Yeah, we'll get into that.
I mean, it's it wasn't an exact science, and they
won't be always good at it. That just blew me
away to hear that exchange, because I've been sitting here
the whole time thinking. Every lobotomy ends with just a
feeling of like, no, no, you're gone. A lot of
these people went on to live productive lives. A lot
of them were rendered catatonic. It kind of depended on

(48:50):
how the operation when, like the thing is, brains are weird.
I've known people who have been shot through the head
with rifles, um, and we're fine. Definitely not getting a
rifle in the studio then yeah, well, I mean they
would up fine, we could just It's just it's kind
of a crapshoot with brains. It's it's wild the amount

(49:10):
of things that they can go through, uh and suffer
no noticeable effects. And it's wild the number of things
that can happen to them that seem minor and just
change the person forever. Like it's a fucking crap shoot
at the look at the NFL exactly now. Mrs Hammett's
lobotomy in nineteen thirty six proved to be the beginning
of a decade's long career carving into the brains of

(49:31):
human beings. He and Watts were one of medicine's most
dynamic duos. Following that operation, they established an office at
a home in Washington, d C and gradually refined their technique,
replacing Moniz's luca toom with an object Jack l Hi
describes as resembling a butter knife. They also switched around
the positioning of the holes from which they cut into
the brain. When patient symptoms persisted, Watson Freeman would perform

(49:52):
multiple lobotomies and make deeper cuts into the brain. One patient,
a lawyer suffering from alcoholism, escaped the hospital after his
operation and was found drunk in a downtown bar. One
patient showed up after his surgery and threatened to murder
the doctors two poled guns when Freeman recommended they undergo lobotomies,
so it was not always a smooth process. From early on,
Freeman viewed proper pr as critical to gaining widespread adoption

(50:15):
for his new technique. He and Watts started setting up
a lobotomy booth at the annual A m A Convention
in nineteen thirty nine, crafting displays designed to draw the
attention of journalists rather than impressing other doctors. He later wrote,
I found the technique of getting noticed in the papers.
It was to arrive a day or two ahead of
the opening of the convention and installed the exhibit in
the most graphic manner, and then be alert for prowling newsmen.

(50:37):
Now jackal High notes that Freeman used handheld clackers to
get the attention of reporters with loud noises. He and
Watts even lobotomized a monkey in nineteen thirty nine. This
spectacular event dominated coverage of the convention. Freeman wrote that
night our monkey died, but Watson I made the headlines
even though we did not get an award, and so
so begins as press. I mean, that's what he's going

(51:01):
for here, that's what he's going for. Well, the monkey died,
but people seem to be interested. Now. Of the first
six twenty three surgeries Watson Freeman carried out had what
they described as good results, were fair, and were poor.
Three percent died during or immediately after the surgery, and

(51:22):
if you take Freeman's word for it, those are good results.
More than half of people had like a good result
of the operation, particularly considering these tended to be patients
who had exhausted conventional treatment options. However, Freeman never went
into detail about what he considered to be a good result,
nor did he update his results when patients relapsed which
was extremely common, with the result of that monkey died,

(51:45):
so he was he was because yeah yeah now. Nurses
reported that patients of the duo often needed to relearn
how to eat and handle other basic tasks. They soiled themselves,
flirted bizarrely with orderlies, and would sit staring off into
the distance for hours on end. Walter Freeman considered these
positive changes. The fact that lobotomy patients were dull, quiet, uncoordinated,

(52:07):
and lazy was he felt an improvement over manic episodes
and excessive activity. Many officials at mental hospitals felt the
same way. Freeman. Watt's patients were much easier to deal
with on a long term basis, since many of them
just sat around quietly. By Walter had started to experiment
with new methods of lobotomy. He was frustrated by the
fact that the procedure required a skilled neurosurgeon. That meant

(52:28):
he could only perform the operation when Watts was around,
which dramatically limited the number of people he could properly lobotomize.
This was a problem because he'd come to believe that
lobotomies worked best for patients in the early stages of
their illness. If people waited too long. He feared the
lobotomy might not really help. So he's like, we got
to get into this ship faster. This needs to be

(52:48):
like the first thing we're doing first. You're feeling down today,
sitting this chair and shave your head. I'll be right
there now. Walter started looking into the research of other doctors,
and he found in a town in surgeon named Tomorrow,
Fiamberti Armano had developed a new procedure for reaching the
brain without drilling careful holes in the skull. Instead, Armano
broke into the skull through a soft bone at the

(53:10):
rear of the ice socket. Working on corpses, Freeman developed
a method of accessing the frontal lobe of the brain
through the ice socket using an ice pick from his kitchen.
Working in secret so Watts wouldn't find out, Freeman started
performing solo lobotomies in January of ninety six. He operated

(53:32):
out of the office he and Watch shared, but during
hours when he knew his partner would not be in
the building, Freeman ice picked nine human brains in short order,
sending his patients home in a taxi cab. Next. According
to The Washington Post, Freeman later wrote that during his
tenth transorbital surgery, he called Watts to his office to
assess the operation. Wats later claimed, however, that he entered

(53:53):
Freeman's office unsummoned and found Freeman pushing an ice pick
in the ice socket of an unconscious man. Freeman audaciously
asked Wats hold the ice picks so Freeman could take
a photograph. Whichever account is true, no one disputes the
result of this encounter. Whatt's threatened to break off their
partnership if Freeman persisted in performing lobotomies himself and treating
them as office procedures done without surgical gloves or sterile draping.

(54:15):
For the remainder of his association with Watts, Freeman did
these operations outside the office, So that's cool now, Watson.
Freeman would later fall out professionally over the issue of
transorbital lobotomies. Although Watts retained a deep respect for his partner,
he couldn't get over his belief that brain surgery ought
to only be carried out by a competent brain surgeon,
not random guys with an ice pick. Controversial what a

(54:39):
crazy stance, and Freedman was like, you are far out there. No,
have you seen this ice pick? Children should be able
to fix cars, and non brain surgeons should be able
to put ice picks through people's eyes. I believe that now.
A book the two men authored on the subject of
lobotomies includes this paragraph. The authors regret to announce that

(54:59):
they have been unable to reach an agreement on the
subject of transorbital lobotomy. Freeman believes that he has proved
the method to be simple, quick, effective, and safe to
entrust to the psychiatrist. Watts believes that any procedure involving
cutting off the brain tissue is a major operation and
should remain in the hands of a neurological surgeon. This
is when you're in a relationship with somebody and you're like,
I don't even know why we're fighting about this. Yeah,

(55:21):
why we've been fighting about this? I've just I've just
ice pick, and some motherfucker's like, why are you angry? Right,
we shouldn't be having this fight. Yeah. This book, psycho
Surgery and the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain,
made an enormous splash in the world of medicine when
it was first published in nineteen fifty the Tomb featured

(55:41):
language not often used in works of medicine, like the
term scrawny frayed cats used to refer to a group
of patients. This lurd pros, along with the gaush marketing
technique used by Freeman, who attract the press, alienated many
mainstream medical professionals, but the book was popular and cemented
Freeman's status is a radical physician working on the cutting,
perhaps poking edge of medical science. On the eve of

(56:03):
his fifty second birthday, he wrote, I have a feeling
of competence and assurance that is almost grandiose. Maybe it
comes from superb health, and maybe from the fruition of
dreams that have proved within my grasp. But anyhow, I'm
sitting on top of the world. So that's good. He's happy.
What do you want? In our next episode, We're going
to talk about the second phase of Walter Freeman's career.

(56:23):
We're also going to discuss the most famous patient he
and Watts ever operated on, the poster victim of lobotomy
and sister to President John F. Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy. But
right now, Daniel van Kirk, it's time for you to
plug some plug doubles. I want to let everybody know
I have my first comedy album coming out. It's on
It's on Blonde Medicine. That's the label, and it will

(56:46):
drop on November fift Friday, November. It's called Thanks Diane.
I recorded it in Los Angeles at the UCB Theater
and uh, if this is before when you're hearing this,
you can go to Daniel van Kirk dot com and
pre order, or us go to the iTunes Store app
on your phone, specifically the iTunes Store app, and you'll
be able to pre order there. But on eleven fifteen

(57:07):
or any time there after, you can get it anywhere
that you get your music or listen to such things.
I should say music, but it feels like it's also
for comedy, but it's called Thanks Diane. And go to
Daniel van Kirk for all my tour dates as well
as my own podcast, pen Pals or Dumb People Tone
and I'm Robert Evans uh and you can find me
here on the podcast you're currently listening to, so please

(57:29):
keep listening to this podcast. You can find our sources
on behind the Bastards dot com. You can find us
on Twitter and Instagram and at bastards pod. You can
find me on Twitter at I right. Okay, Uh, you
can also find a lobotomy if you show up at
my door and pay me forty five dollars. I have
an ice pick, so you cannot be doing these. Brain

(57:50):
surgeons need to do these. I feel like anyone can
do these if they have an ice pick. Having this argument,
I I feel like Daniel, Daniel, I respect your opinion
on this, but I disagree with it well, and I
respect your expertise, but I think you need to wear gloves.
Oh gloves you mean cowards hands. All right, that's the

(58:14):
fucking episode. Buy a T shirt on t public and
go off into the world and perform unlicensed lobotomies or not. Nope, Sophie,
we're pro lobotomy now or not.