November 7, 2019 • 49 mins
In part two, Robert is joined again by Daniel Van Kirk to continue discussing Walter Freeman.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
What's grease and m door knobs. I'm Robert Evans hosted
Behind the Bastards for part two of our episode on
the inventor of lobotomy, and the door to the recording
studio has been greased with olive oil, which I'm informing
listeners of so that they can truly get into the
behind the Bastard spirit by greasing their own doors with
(00:22):
olive oil. So everybody play look at home, Grease, grease
something near you up with olive oil. All wait, all right,
I'm here as with in part one with Daniel van Kirk. Daniel,
how are you? How are you? How are you? How
are you? How are you doing today? I am great.
I'm so glad to be back for the conclusion of
this story about a horrific man who justified his means. Yep,
(00:45):
he's a bad man. And speaking of bad men, were
about to talk about a president. Although a president most
people like, um, so I may be pissing some people off.
John and Robert Kennedy are probably the two most famous
brothers in American history. One was the president until he
got shot, another would have been the president if he
hadn't been shot. Both men have come to symbolize fairly
(01:08):
or unfairly, an era of just in decent governance in
the United States of America, one that will probably never
come again. But the Kennedy brothers had a sister as
well as another brother named Ted, who we don't talk
about much because of that lady he drunkenly killed. This
woman's name was Rosemary Kennedy, and her life was stolen
by Dr Watts, Dr Freeman, and wild unchecked misogyny. Now,
(01:30):
Rosemary's birth was, in the words of the Irish Times,
complicated by medical misadventure. Depending on which source you read,
you will hear different things about the exact extent of
her intellectual disabilities. Some articles I've read say she was
severely mentally handicapped and unable to lead a normal life.
Others argue she had learning disabilities but was otherwise bright
and capable. I'm not a doctor, but I did teach
(01:52):
special ed once, and it seems fair for me to say,
whatever the precise extent of her issues, Rosemary Kennedy would
have been capable of living a real, satively independent life
with some specific help. Now you get very different versions
of Rosemary story depending on which right up you read.
For example, here's people. As Rosemary entered her late teens,
her parents saw less of the affectionate, dutiful and eager
to please young woman they knew and loved, and more
(02:14):
of her violent outbursts. She began screaming and yelling and
throwing things. She was violent and throwing vases across the room.
She was out of control. One person says now that
article paints Rosemary is a deeply disturbed young woman, and
her lobotomy is tragic, but purely the result of her
parents not having better options to care for such a
disabled child in a more primitive era. Another Irish Times
(02:34):
article I found, which interviewed one of her biographers, a
man named Irvine, takes a different route. Irvine has a
more filled out picture in his head. He sees her
as stunningly beautiful. It was often said she was the
most beautiful of the Kennedy's, beautiful and poetic. She did
have learning disabilities, It's hard to say how much, but
she wrote letters, she kept a diary. She became a
Montessori teacher for a while, and she taught young children.
Her favorite book was Winnie the Pooh, and she could
(02:56):
read that to children. So yeah, yeah, great book. He
has the sense of a fairly normal, deeply loving young woman.
Every letter that she wrote a show drenched in this
want for her father to acknowledge her and love her.
Every one of those letters is heartbreaking. It's all about
I'm doing my best and I hope this pleases you.
She would send reports about her weight because wait was
a huge thing in the Kennedy family, monitoring the weight
(03:18):
of all the children. There's so much correspondence where Joe
and Rose are just talking about the weight of their children.
So yeah. Meanwhile, an Irish Central article I found on
her describes her this way. By kindergarten, Rosemary was called
retarded in the lingo of the times, and such children
were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image,
it was a disaster. Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third
(03:39):
or fourth grade intelligence, and she was packed off to
a boarding school for misfits. From there, she wrote her
father a heartbreaking letter, Darling, Daddy, I hate to disappoint
you in any way. Come to see me very soon.
I get very lonesome every day now. Rosemary finally caught
a break when her father became ambassador to Britain, and
she thrived in a London convent school. But back in
(04:00):
the States, Rosemary, who again was very attractive, began attracting
admirers at twenties. She was a picturesque young woman, a
snow princess with flushed cheeks, gleaming, smile, plump figure in
a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met. Uh.
And of course, as Larson writes, her parents found her
sexuality dangerous. And I think this gets to the core
of kennedy family issues with Rosemary more than anything, um.
(04:24):
And it seems to me, based on what I've read,
that the argument that she was mentally retarded is very oversold.
I think she had learning disabilities. I think she was
someone who had difficulty thriving in a normal school. But
I think she was basically it seems like she was
basically a functional, intelligent person UM who was a young,
attractive woman and people wanted to fuck her, and she
(04:45):
wanted to funk them, and this was not okay with
Joe Kennedy. So I think that's the core of the issue. Um.
The Kennedy's were a powerful, wealthy, high society family just
got to stay in line on that family got to
stay in line, in line. She has some learning disabilities,
and she's promiscuous and a woman. We can't we gotta
(05:08):
can't take out this part of it too. Yeah, she
maybe having some mood disorders. So maybe she like flies
off the handle and gets like yelly and stuff and
like that. They'd assume, like, well, she's not happy in
the family, so she must be broken. Yeah, that's and
she's a woman's here to disregard her exactly, Like that's
going to carry on the name, Yeah, exactly. I think
(05:28):
she was a strong willed young woman who wanted to
live a life that would have been inconvenient to the
family goals. And it's my opinion that this, more than
anything else, sealed her fate. And before we go any further,
I want you to take a look at this picture
of Rosemary. Will be on our website too, Sophie, can
you show that to Daniel. Oh she looks like fun. Yeah,
she looks fun. She looks like a normal, healthy young woman.
(05:50):
I would describe her as looking playful and lively and coy,
like a willful young woman with a spirit behind her. Yeah,
she falls into uh like fun girl. Winter, Yeah, fun
girl fall. Now, within mere months of this photograph, she
would be reduced to a shambling ruin of herself by
the treatments of doctor's Freeman and Watts. But the final
(06:12):
decision on whether or not to perform the lobotomy on
Rosemary was up to the family patriarch Joseph from People Quote,
Without his wife's knowledge, he took Rosemary to see Dr
Walter Freeman, a controversial neurologist, psychiatrist and professor at George
Washington University who had gained fame for popularizing lobotomies in America.
He took her to the best at the time, and
at the time time readers, Digest, Newsweek, everybody was touting
(06:34):
the best thing for mental illness, the lobotomy. It was
the cure. All people were so eager for some help
that they just grabbed onto it. You see, that's Freedman
from the last episode being smart about just playing into
the press. He did. He'd gotten this ship into the press,
and fucking Joe Kennedy reads this in a Newsweek as
he's sipping fucking Manhattan's and his his his can of
(06:56):
Bunkport retreat or wherever the funk it is. And if
you need to wonder about how much you Kennedy cared
about the like agency or um agency. She's a girl, exactly,
writes of a woman. Not only is he taking his
daughter to get her brain carved out, he's not telling
his own wife that he's doing it. No, why would he? Exactly? Yeah,
(07:18):
this is all double it's a double smack. Yeah. Now,
Freeman diagnosed Rosemary with agitated depression and promised Joe that
a lobotomy would put an into her rages and render
her happy and content. What did he diagnose her with
agitated depression? This sounds like that ship where they're like, Oh,
what do you want me to call it? What do
(07:38):
you want here? Joe? Yeah, she's not she's not happy
and that's a problem. That means she's broken, right, But
the agitated is why we have to do something about it,
because it's just getting worse. The family's got money and
she's not happy. So the only thing to do was
to break a brain us, okay, sorry. In the file
of Dr Freeman assisted by Dr James Watts for him
(08:00):
to prefrontal lobotomy and Rosemary at George Washington University Hospital
rather than curing her. The lobotomy essentially erased Rosemary Kennedy.
The procedure itself literally involved Dr Watts scraping away at
her brain tissue while Dr Freeman asked her to repeat
stories from her childhood and lists the month of the year.
When she could no longer answer, the procedure was pronounced
a success. Whoa yeah, tell us when we've taken enough
(08:25):
you tell us, yeah, tell us when you don't remember
who you are, and then we'll be like, part we
got it perfect, We got her Because I wondered that too,
like if somebody got their lobotomy right. And then they
were still like the in the last episode, the doctor
who went out and got drunk. Still like what they
were like, well, we gotta go in and dig a
little deeper. I guess they often did that. Not always.
(08:48):
We'll talk about some other cases later, um, but yeah,
that was not uncommon. For the one. They were like,
let's get it all, just keep talking it all. Just
get the whole girl out of there. Yeah, just make
her a shell now. Rosemary spent the rest of her
life completely dependent on a small handful of caretakers until
her father's stroke. She lived isolated and hidden from the
(09:08):
rest of the family at St. Koleta's, a Catholic facility
in wisconsant for inconveniently disabled members of which families. When
Joe finally stroked out, her nieces and nephews attempted to
reintegrate her back into the family, but any hope she'd
ever had of an independent life of forging in existence
for herself was obliterated by doctors Freeman and Watts. Unice
Kennedy would eventually create the Special Olympics in honor of Rosemary,
(09:31):
and in nineteen eighties seven story in the Saturday Evening
Post brought the whole sordid tale to light, but that
was far too late to stop the career of Walter
Freeman from reaping an unspeakable toll in human lives. By
nineteen forty five, at the end of Freeman and Watts's collaboration,
around a hundred fifty lobotomies were being performed annually nationwide.
But in nineteen forty six, Walter Freeman introduced his revolutionary
(09:51):
transorbital lobotomy technique and started teaching it to surgeons and
non surgeons all around this glorious land. By nineteen forty nine,
some five of thousand lobotomies were being performed annually, so
that's great. Many of those were performed by Dr Freeman himself,
who started traveling the nation showing off his skills to
rooms full of doctors in the press. And I'm going
(10:11):
to quote now from the book The Lobotomist. Patricia Darien,
a student nurse at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville,
watched Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy at a nearby state hospital.
Freeman selected the patients for operations, she reported, by twisting
their joints to determine their flexibility, not by reading or
taking histories. After a special luncheon honor of the occasion
of his visit, he occupied a conference room and had
(10:32):
each patient shocked and photographed. When all was ready, he
would plunge the lucatom in. Darien noted he wore no gown, mask,
or gloves. Afterwards, he would sit the patients up and
have them walked out of the room. He was very
proud of the fact that the people walked in and
walked out, none had to be carried, although one or
two of them sagged badly on the way out. She remembered.
After several operations, Freeman enlivened the demonstration by cutting nerve
(10:54):
fibers on both sides of the brain simultaneously. Then he
looked up at us, smiling. I thought I was seeing
a circus act. He moved both hands back and forth
in unison, cutting the brain identically behind each eye. It
astonished me that he was so gay, so high, so up.
Darien recalled the sequence of events as a living nightmare,
a deeply disturbing performance. He's reached his final form. Yeah now.
(11:16):
Frank Freeman, Walter's son, was occasionally enlisted to help his
father in these lobotomy exhibitions. They would spend weeks at
a time on the road, crossing thousands of miles, visiting
numerous hospitals, and lobotomizing huge numbers of people. In nineteen
fifty two, Frank helped his father perform a lobotomy. The
process started when Walter immobilized the patient with a series
of powerful electro shocks, and then, as Frank recalled, I
(11:38):
was there to hold the person's legs down. We all
went for a ride when he threw the switch. When
the patient stopped seizing, Walter would lift the eyelid, jam
his ice pick inside and shattered the bone that separated
it from the brain. He would carefully hammer away at
gray matter until both sides of the frontal lobe had
been disconnected. Frank recalled, I was kind of impressed. He
made it look so easy. That's good, right, Well, I mean, yeah,
(12:00):
it's so easy because he loves it. He's so you know,
like you were saying, do what you love and you'll
never work a day in your life of hammering into
people's brains with a nice pet. But he also seems
obsessed with the celebrity of it, like he wants to
like be the guy and come to your town and
put on his brain show. He wants to put on
(12:21):
a show. He wants to do it with both hands.
That you're really impressed. And see they all walked out
of here. Did you see him all walk out like
well to be carried himself. But yeah, he was lazy
when he came in. Yeah. Now, over the course of
a very long career, Walter would perform more than three thousand,
four hundred and thirty nine lobotomies in fifty five hospitals
(12:43):
in twenty three states. The entire time he believed himself
to be something of a heroic medical radical, pulling his
discipline forward into the future. His motto was lobotomy gets
them home, which meant in effect that lobotomizing people allowed
them to exist comfortably and without complaint in Americans Itty.
It is impossible to know how many of Freeman's patients
truly benefited from his treatment. His summaries of his results
(13:06):
were always very biased, and it's never possible to analyze
them outside of the lens of his own opinions. Objective
scientific analysis of the results of lobotomies in this period
are essentially impossible to find. We know that at least
four hundred and ninety of his patients died as a
result of his services. We also know that lobotomizing human
beings was not simply a matter of medical necessity. The
(13:27):
longer Freeman worked as a solo lobotomist, the more he
leaned into the performance art side of the field. And
I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post now, shocking his colleagues,
for instance, grew into a great source of pleasure. Once,
during a lobotomy demonstration at a nursing home in Baltimore
before a group of surgeons who replaced his surgical hammer
with a carpenter's mallet. He delighted in reporting how other
lobotomy demonstrations made a Columbia University professor emeritus of neurology
(13:50):
weakened with faintness, sickened students in England, and so outraged
a German neurologist that Freeman said, I almost had to
push him out of the way in order to perform
the operation. Several times he shut off his virtuosity with
the Luca toome by performing two handed lobotomies, working both
eye sockets simultaneously on people. That's forget that there's a
(14:11):
person on the other end of this hammer and pick yeah, yeah, yeah.
His cross country trips in pursuit of lobotomy patients and
his self appointment as the Transorbital Procedures International Ambassador only
heightened Freeman's sense of professional solitude and caused him to
commit serious erras of judgment. More than once, he worked
the luke toome forcefully enough to break it inside a
patient's brain at Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa. He accidentally
(14:34):
killed a patient when he stepped back to take a
photo during the surgery, and allowed the lucatome to sink
deep into the patient's mid brain. That's all from jack
al High. Yeah that's pretty fucked up. Huh yeah. Yeah.
Also we don't know what his scale is. It still
might have been deemed a success by him. The guy's
not complaining anymore now. Many of Walter's patients were unable
(15:00):
to walk away or really think after his ministrations, but
this caused less of an issue than you might think.
The bulk of his clientele were inmates at asylums, and
the folks paying for surgeries didn't so much want those
folks healed as they wanted them quieter. People in charge
of hospitals often welcomed Freemen into their institutions because the
lobotomized patients. Some of them, you know, would go home
(15:20):
because they'd actually be helped by the procedure, and the
others were generally easier to manage. Freeman himself wrote, the
noise level of the ward went down, incidents were fewer,
cooperation improved, and the ward could be brightened when curtains
and flower pots were no longer in danger of being
used as weapons, so it mainem easier to deal with. Yeah,
no more biting no more biting, no more problems at all,
(15:41):
because they can't do anything anymore because he just erased
them basically in a lot of cases, and we don't
have to like technically say we killed them. Yeah yeah,
I mean hundreds of people were improved by his work,
hundreds more it's less clear, and of course hundreds and
hundreds died. But this in part one, it's almost seems
(16:02):
like though they're using the exception to prove the rule. Yeah,
so it's like it's there's some people that's benefited, so
we should do this for everyone. We think we needs it,
Like exactly, they don't. Those the numbers don't really match up.
If the people are benefited from you're like, well five
of these people five percent, it might not work out
for I'm still not favor for it, but I get
(16:23):
what your logic is. But being like, oh, a few
percentage of people, this really small group, this really helps, well,
then that doesn't mean we should be doing it for everyone. Also,
when I was I keep thinking, I was like, I'm
sure this happened to people who are autistic, right, oh god,
yeah yeah, because but that wasn't even like they didn't
even know. I didn't was autism even diagnosed in the seventies. No, no, no, no,
(16:46):
I don't think at this point. I I think it
was even after that that they really had a handle
on it. But like it's possible that's what was going
on with Rosemary. She may have had like aspergers or
something like that. I really don't know. I don't think
anybody does. I'm gonna guess a lot of his patients
were aught histic and they just got written down as
imbeciles or retarded, which is like the lingo they would
have used at the time. And you know, because they
(17:07):
required different means to like reach and teach and like
work with you know, because they had a different sort
of brain. Uh, they just sort of hammered into their
brain until they weren't a problem anymore. Right, How many
women wouldn't have gotten a lobotomy if they hadn't been married.
That's a scary question, because they was a man saying, well,
(17:28):
you're the problem, you aren't making the food, you fight
with me, you have your own thoughts, which I'm sick
of hearing. But if they had just never if they
had become a to use it, the lingo of the
of the era a Spinster, they would have never gotten
a lobotomy because they would have had an oppressive man
in their life to be like, I'm sick of you. Yep, yep.
(17:50):
Marriage doomed them. Yeah, that's fair to say, probably hundreds
of cases at at least. Yeah, Now, Freemen had plenty
of problems with Oh. Actually, before before we get into
Freeman's problems, you know what's not a problem our advertisers. Great,
(18:10):
you know, who won't lobotomize their wives? Who the products
and services that advertise on this show. Great? Then I
then I want to hear about him, because now I'm
interested products. We're back and we're talking about Walter Freeman,
(18:31):
and of course the issues that came as a result
of him hammering ice picks into the brains of thousands
of people. Uh. In ninety seven, Freeman operated on a
Washington cop after the brain ice picking, said cop hemorrhaged
on both sides of his brain, and, in Freeman's words,
was never able to do more than the simplest tasks
around the house. Even so, Freeman did a brisk business
in Washington State. In the late nineteen forties. He met
(18:53):
the actress Francis Farmer at Western State Hospital. She'd been
a patient there for five years, largely as a result
of behaved your her parents considered wild and unconventional, but
we today would probably just call being a human. We
don't know for sure if Freeman lobotomized her, but some
reports say he did, and Frank Freeman says his father did.
There's a picture that is almost certainly of miss Farmer's operation.
(19:15):
It shows a man Walter in a sleeveless shirt with
hairy arms and ungloved hams, hammering a lucatom, the surgical
device he invented to replace his ice pick into a
woman's eye. As a crowd watches and there goes what
would have been my Halloween costume. Yep, yep, tragic sleeveless
Harry ice pick m hmm. By ten fifty four, tranquilizers
(19:36):
like chlorpromazine replaced lobotomies as the preferred treatment for agitated
people in asylums. Freeman left Washington for Los Altos, California,
and for the next eighteen years he split his time
between lobotomizing people and hiking. Actual medical science gradually left
him behind, but Freeman continued his research on transorbital lobotomies
because he loves it. He loves he loves it. In
(19:58):
nineteen sixty four, he conducted an experiment meant on fourteen
disturbed mental defectives, mostly young schizophrenics. In a letter to
a colleague, he explained that this experiment tested the efficacy
of injecting hot water into the brain after stabbing it
with an ice pick. I was prepared to accept two fatalities,
but fortunately all the patients survived, and he invited to
return next May. What is he new, tiede. He's just
(20:20):
trying to come. He's like, well, but now we do
this thing like that would just shoot some water in there.
Oh my god. I don't see how any of these
patients could improve, but at least one can now be
cared for at home again. His his concern is that
they be easy to care for now that they get better. Really,
if we you know what else, you remove the whole head.
You can do whatever you want with that. But real
(20:41):
fucking easy, to be real easy. They don't complain. There's
you don't even have to feed him. M hmm. Now,
since Walter worked at a variety of different hospitals during
this period, he enlisted a number of different nurses to
help him in his thousands of procedures. One of these
people was Helen Comer, a nurse in West Virginia for
thirty four years. I found her account in an article
written by Story Corps in nineteen fifty four. I assisted
(21:03):
Dr Freeman and doing a transorbital lobotomy. I was a
new nurse at the time and I was drafted to
work in there with him. Had no idea about what
I was getting into, but I was curious and I
wanted to see it. And I saw it. Oh my,
The room was full of people. Everyone wanted to see
what was going on. People from town and everywhere else
came up to witness the occasion. He came and I
held the patient's head and he did the lobotomy. He
had an instrument. To me, it looked like a nail,
(21:24):
a great big nail. It had a sharp point, and
he inserted this in the corner of the individual's eye
and banged it with a mallet I guess it was.
And then he pulled from one side and pulled to
the other. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to watch.
I know that day we lost one patient because they
couldn't stop the bleeding, and I can't remember if any
others died. It wasn't what I thought it might be.
To me, it was cruel, but that was just my opinion.
(21:44):
I was just doing the job I was employed to do. Remember,
I've seen all kinds of things in my line of work,
so if I stopped and dwelled on each little thing,
I'd be hurting. I remember he was relaxed. He was
very calm while he was operating. He made it look
easy to do. I think he just had an extremely high,
self confident person anality. He didn't have any qualms. He
wanted to prove that he was right. He was convinced
that he was right. I thought, how can a man
(22:05):
be relaxed just going blindly into a brain. But of
course I didn't have the authority to say stop. That.
These patients were not young ones. I think they were
all about thirty or forty years old. I knew two
of them. After the operation, I found that they had
changed in their personality. My impression, which I remember still,
was that they didn't ask any questions. Expression of deep
turmoil in their heart or in their soul was subdued.
(22:26):
There was something missing emotions. I would say, you know,
if you were to converse with somebody, there's always emotion
with it. Just take all of your emotion out of
a conversation with somebody and what's left. Uh yeah, when
they're like, oh, I can't believe he just kept doing it?
And how I mean, and I know you've probably covered this,
just the amount of people who had some sort of
(22:46):
like like they were a sociopath and the medical field
gave them that outlet. I mean, it happens in the military.
I I feel like Freeman might have been a sociopath,
like he's he's described as having a lot of difficulty
like necting to people, a shallow affect, like yeah, he
kept trophies like I do think he thought he was
(23:07):
helping people, But I think his understanding of what helping
people was was helping the people who had to care
for these folks. I don't think he actually cared about
the patients because he's broken anyway. You just don't care.
You just don't give a You lack empathy, and if anything,
you do these things to people to like sponge off
of their emotion and their feelings and their reaction. Yeah. Yeah, Now,
(23:33):
the most common diagnosis for which Freeman prescribed brain scraping
with schizophrenia. This does not mean that most of his
patients were actually schizophrenic, just that he hastily declared them
to be schizophrenic before jamming in ice pick through based
on how well they could bend their joints. Yeah. Yeah.
Other common ailments treated via ice picking were chronic pain
(23:54):
and suicidal depression. In seven New York Times article listed
the various symptoms for which lobotomies were often prescribed. Tension, apprehension, anxiety, depression, insomnia,
suicidal ideas, delusions, hallucinations, crying spells, melancholia, obsessions, panic states, disorientation, psycholesia,
pains of psychic origin, nervous indigestion, and hysterical paralysis. Nervous indigestion. Yeah. Now,
(24:20):
if you know anything about the fifties and sixties c
i A, you know that nobody fucked around with human
brains in new and exciting ways without drawing their attention.
In nineteen fifty two, the agency hired Henley Laughlin, a psychiatrist,
to report on the potential of lobotomies to help the
god fearing American government disabled communists. I'm going to quote
from the book Lobotomist. Again in his classified report titled
(24:42):
some Areas of Psychiatric Interest, Laughlin commented that the procedure
would be adaptable to intelligence work, and noted that he
watched Dr Freeman performed twenty two transorbital lobotomies with an
average of about six minutes per operation. This included time
for before and after photographs, as well as the keeping
of notes and records. From an empiric standpoint, the operative
procedure is relatively simple and could be learned in a
brief period of time by almost any intelligent person. In addition,
(25:05):
he wrote, there is not great outward evidence of injury
or damage to the patient. Besides the behavior changes in
the black eyes, the average pathologist performing an autopsy would
have to be a keen and careful observer to detect
changes in the brain substance made by the operator. Because
I felt unable to disclose to Dr Freeman the real
basis of my interest, Laughlin notes he could not solicit
the lobotomy expert's opinions as to how the procedure might
be modified for use by the CIA. Laughlin, who also
(25:27):
professed an interest in the possibilities of taking him not
at control of patients during the period of unconsciousness following
electroshock therapy. Formed his own opinions on the potential lobotomy
presented as an intelligence tool. To date, there has been
considerable discussion relative to the possible use of the lobotomy
type operation by this agency as a neutralizing weapon, Laughlin
wrote in prefacing his conclusions, he described the role of
(25:48):
the frontal lobes as one that allowed a person to
pursue a cause and feel devotion to it. Certainly, any
crusading spirit is apt to be quenched. He reported, community
enterprise and activities in the way of social uplift, leadership,
and executive abilities and activities are apt to be lessened
after operation. On this basis, a zealous and fanatic communist,
if lobotomized, might retain his interest in communism, but his drive,
(26:09):
zeal and ability to organize or direct would be substantially reduced.
So that's good. You take out the fight baby. Also,
I wondered if for interrogation used like the CIA would
be like, well, there's so much more agreeable. They'll tell
you anything. We should lobotomize them then interview them. I
will say, the good news is that even the CIA
in this period had too many scruples to lobotomized people
(26:31):
as a method of social control. What what what what
are we in the sixties by now? Yeah? Yeah, yeah yeah,
the sixties the LSD, right is they're they're ghosting strangers
with acid like like Gangbusters. Yeah. But Laughlin wound up
recommending against lobotomies as a way to disabled communists h
and his His main reason for doing so is that
it would look really bad to scramble the opinions of
(26:53):
people whose opinions differed from the US government, Like, if
that got out, it would be bad. Um. So it
is here that I should note that on at least
one point, Walter Freeman was on the somewhat defensible side
of medical history. As I previously stated, there was a
time when mental health professionals believe that all mental issues
stemmed essentially from repressed memories and traumas and other things
(27:16):
that a therapist could work out. Freeman was on the
vanguard of doctors who argued that many brain problems were
physical or chemical in nature, um and based more on
circumstances of biology than things that had happened to the patient.
And Freeman and his fellows wound up being right. We
know today that many mental health issues do stem from
hormonal or chemical imbalances, things that can be corrected with
medication or, in rare cases, surgery. Walter identified the problem
(27:39):
in mainstream medicine rather correctly. He was just very wrong
about its solution, and because he was such an advocate
for his solitary practice of lobotomizing people, he failed miserably
to advance his theory of mental illness with the Times.
In nineteen sixty he treated one Howard dully, On, eleven
year old boy with what I would describe as mild
to moderate behavioral issues. Howard fought with his brother, lied
(28:01):
to his parents, and occasionally stole candy. He was rather
withdrawn and anti social, but certainly not someone a reasonable
person would diagnose as in need of major brain surgery.
His behavioral issues, such as they were, stemmed from understandable causes.
His mother had died of cancer when he was five.
His father had remarried a cold and demanding stepmother who
hated him. Howard was emotionally abused by her and ignored
(28:24):
in favor of his stepmother's biological children, so he acted
out more and more as he grew he's acting out.
He wants attention someone exactly caring parenting. Yeah, And as
he acted out, his stepmother responded by beating him and
forcing him to eat alone. This made his behavioral problems worse,
and his stepmother decided that meant there was something wrong
with him. She started talking to psychiatrists and eventually wound
(28:47):
up preferred to doctor Walter Freeman. Now by this point,
Walter was a thoroughly fringed figure. Lobotomy was still practiced
far too widely, but most medical professionals no longer believed
it was anything but a deeply flawed last resort measure.
But Howard's stepmother didn't care about that. When Walter interviewed
here steps on, he saw evidence of profound disturbance. Quote.
(29:07):
He is clever at stealing, but always leaves something behind
to show what he's done. Freeman records from Yeah He's
he's a yeah yeah. If it's a banana, he throws
the peel at the window. If it's a candy bar,
he leaves the rapper around someplace. He does a good
deal of daydreaming, and when asked about it, he says,
I don't know. He has defy at at times. You
tell me to do this, and I'll do that. He
has a vicious expression on his face some of the time. Now,
(29:29):
based on a brief interview, Dr Freeman declared Howard to
be schizophrenic and prescribed one dose of scrambled brain for
the young boy. When he met the famous doctor, Howard
was struck by his round glasses, his suit and his
stylish goatee and made him look a little like a beatnick.
He was warm, personable and easy to get along with.
Was I fearful? No? I had no idea what he
was going to do with me. I'm gonna quote next
(29:50):
from a right up in the Guardian. When Dully awoke
the next day, his eyes were swollen and bruised and
he was running a high fever. He recalls a severe
pain in his head and the discomfort of his hospital gown,
which gave open at the back. He had no idea
of what had happened. I was in a mental flog,
Dully says. I was like a zombie. I had no
awareness of what Freeman had done. Eight weeks after the
doctor first saw him, Dully came around from his operation
(30:11):
in a state of numbed confusion. The hospital reports stated
that he had been given a transorbital lobotomy. A sharp
instrument was thrust through the orbital roof on both sides
and moved so as to sever the brain pathways in
the frontal lobes. Dr Freeman's bill came to two hundred dollars.
Dully was his youngest ever patient. Extraordinarily, he survived. Now
Howard would go on to live a full life eventually,
(30:32):
but first he suffered three years of homelessness, mental illness,
and a deep confusion as a result of the damage
done to him. He would grow into a school bus
driving trainer and a living monument to the resilience of
the human brain. But one cannot help it read his
story and wonder how much less painful his life might
have been if a ship heeled doctor hadn't driven an
ice pick into his fucking brain gleefully, yeah with with
(30:54):
panash and also the like, uh seems like schizophrenia to me.
That work, So schizophrenia, I can definitely do this. And
he's still in the candy bar. And that bitch, that
bitch of a step mom was like whatever, I don't care.
I just brought him here to get his brain taken out.
So yeah, and she's probably mad or long fucking dead hopefully,
but she's mad that it seems to have been on
(31:17):
the air, like the side of things, where somebody didn't
lose all capacity for life. Yeah, he was still a person,
unfortunately for much of her I'm sure dismay. Now you
know what won't declare you a schizophrenic for stealing a
candy bar and scramble your brains with an ice pick?
The products and services that support this show. Oh then
(31:38):
I want to know about him? Oh yeah, absolutely, Here
we go and we're back. We're talking about Walter Freeman
in the twilight of his career, you know, the sixties
and ship as medical science starts to pull away from
Freeman's practices and towards more humane methods of treating them
(32:00):
mentally ill um and I I guess more humane methods
includes literally everything that doesn't involve an ice pick. Um.
So while this was all going on in his field,
Walter doubled and tripled down on his claim to fame.
He spent increasing amounts of time doing what he called
shrink baiting, essentially trying to trigger more respectable physicians and
writing limericks about his professional enemies. He was known to
(32:22):
declare that he would rather be wrong than boring. That's
so true. That's on his tombstone. That's on his tombstone. Now.
This desire to buck tradition led him to issue other
basic aspects of professional medical niceties from The Guardian. He
had a buccaneering disregard for the usual medical formalities. He
chewed gum while he operated, and displayed impatience with what
(32:45):
he called all that germ crap, routinely failing to sterilize
his hands or wear rubber gloves. Despite a fourteen percent
fatality rate, Freeman performed three thousand and four hundred thirty
nine lobotomies in his lifetime, and we haven't talked about
any mail practice suits at all. No on the sixties man. Now,
in case you aren't aware, a fourteen percent fatality rate
(33:06):
is essentially criminal. Any modern surgeon who killed that many
patients with what they considered to be a routine operation
would be investigated on the suspicion that they were some
sort of serial killer. But of course Walter Freeman was
not really a surgeon. He was just a doctor who
found a lazier way to perform brain surgery using a
tool from his kitchen God Damnit. Walter's personal life was
(33:28):
no prettier than his career. In six he watched his
eleven year old son, the namesake of his grandfather, die
horribly in Yosemite National Park. The boy was filling up
a canteen in a stream when he fell over and
was dashed to death upon the rocks. Walter's wife, Marjorie,
was a chronic alcoholic, which is not surprising, and the
doctor cheated on her constantly. Still, his remaining children considered
(33:49):
him to have been a good father and defend his
legacy today as a medical trailblazer. I found this quote
from his son, Frank, now a retired security guard, and
I think it was meant to sound positive, but it's
just an intentionally horrifying to me. He is a friendly
giant of a man. This is talking about Frank. He's
a friendly giant of a man. Dress smartly in a
double breasted dark blue suit and a burgundy tie kept
in place by a thin gold clip. He was a
(34:10):
marvelous father, Frank said, sitting in a room filled with
crossword dictionaries and Dick France's novels. He loved a children
and always made time for us out of his busy schedule,
taking us camping every summer all across the country. Frank
recalls being invited to observe a love botomy when he
was twenty one, and vividly remembers having a little crack
as the orbital plate fractured. It only took about six
or seven minutes, and Dad kept up a running commentary. Indeed,
(34:31):
the original ice pick used for the first transorbital lobotomy
came from the Freeman family kitchen drawer. We had several
of them, says Frank, cheerfully. We're using the punch holes
in our belts when we got bigger. I'm enormously proud
of my father. I do think he's been unfairly treated.
He was an interventionalist surgeon, a pioneer, and that took
guts apple tree fall, yeah for him to like, Oh
(34:52):
you know, he did a good a good thing, and
isn't that great? Look here, look I got a nice
pick of my kids right now. We could go poke
anybody's eye. We to poke holes in our belts, and
my dad used to poke holes and brains. This is fine. Yeah,
this is fine, This is fine. Yeah. Now, thankfully he
wound up a security guard rather than a brain surgeon,
(35:12):
which I think would have been a better career for
his dad too, in retrospect, when his dad was sick
all the time. Yeah, yeah, he really should have stayed
that way. Now. In nineteen sixty seven, Freeman was visited
by Helen Mortenson, one of his earliest patients. She had
received two lobotomies from Freeman, one in ninety six and
one in nineteen fifty six after a relapse. In nineteen
(35:34):
sixty seven, she relapsed again, likely as a result of
her brain repairing itself, and she went into Walter for
a third lobotomy. This was conducted at Herrick Memorial Hospital
in Berkeley, California, and, unfortunately for Helen, Walter severed a
blood vessel in her brain. She died three days later
from the operation, and Freeman's surgical privileges were revoked. He
lived for five more years, during which he performed no
(35:56):
additional lobotomies. He died from cancer on May thirty one, night,
teen seventy two, at the right old age of seventy six.
Between nineteen thirty six and the late nineteen fifties, the
wave of lobotomies Walter ignited led to more than forty
tho lobotomies and perhaps more than fifty. Some aspects of
the techniques Dr Freeman pioneered are still in use, but
only on a profoundly limited scale. Less than twenty brain
(36:18):
operations per year on average are performed in the US
to treat psychiatric disorders. Most of these use lasers or
radiation to lesion off small sections of a particular chunk
of the brain, primarily to treat obsessive compulsitive disorder or Parkinson's.
Transorbital lobotomies are no longer practiced, and most of the
young men and women Dr Walter Freeman I spect have
(36:38):
long since followed him to the grave. And that's the episode. Wow,
so there's still done. But I'm sure nowadays somebody washed
into hands beforehand any sort of brain surgery to deal
with any sort of psychosis. Some of the things he
like pioneered are performed on a very limited basis um
(36:59):
or are part of more humane treatments. But again, like
twenty people a year received something vaguely similar, and they're
not even that similar. It's just that they removed similar
parts of the brain because it does help certain people.
But again, you look at how many thousands of operations
he performed, and the actual needs seems to be somewhere
like maybe a couple dozen people a year benefit really
(37:20):
form of what he did, he liked it right. It's
like when he was good to get an oil change
and you can tell they just want to change breaks.
They're like, new breaks, do you really, Well, that's what
we do here as breaks, So that's what we're gonna say,
you need. I think a lot of it was that
he um he was He was good at performing a lobotomy,
(37:43):
and most people weren't. Most people couldn't do that sort
of work without like breaking down because it was just
horrifying to a normal human being to shove an ice
pick into a skull um. And Freeman didn't give a ship,
and he didn't like working with other people, so he's
able to do this alone and he was the best
stat it and that's all he wanted from his career.
So that's the only thing he really did right. And
(38:04):
he didn't grow up with much of an affinity for
the female gender, so he was more than happy to
shut up a wife. Oh yeah, your wife's talking sounds
like schizophrenia. Yeah, yeah, that's wild, that's horrific. Yeah, it's
pretty bad, dude. The fact, when do you think, so
(38:24):
it probably should have really ended by like sixty five, Yeah,
I mean he stopped sixties seven was his last one.
I think it probably should have stopped by the fifties.
I guess you understandable. You know, she was like the
late forties. I think, oh she was, that's right. I
keep thinking, so I was thinking of the person that
was in sixty two, but yeah, she was in the forties.
(38:45):
That's right. They started in the late thirties. You could
argue that there was maybe a decade there where, just
if you assume medical science is going to have some
really rough patches, just because it's hard to figure it out,
maybe a decade where people would have done this before
realizing oh, this actually is just turning people off and
not fixing any problems. Um. But it went on for
(39:07):
a long and most doctors by the fifties certainly were
aware that like, oh, this is not the thing you
do for everybody who's got a mental illness. There's better treatments.
But he kept right on rolling almost to the seventies,
like he damn near made it to Disco. Well, thank
(39:27):
god for that. Yeah, thank god that we stopped it
before Disco. Yeah, yeah, that would have really tarnished America's
brightest period. Also, I love when we get to give
the CIA credit for things they didn't do. Yeah, the
CIA was like, this seems real fucked up, which should
tell you all you need to know. We're just gonna
abduct people off the street and give them toxic doses
(39:50):
of LSD. That seems like the humane option. Oh man,
Like in between assassinating democratically a elected leaders and running
death squads, the CIA looks back at this and it's like,
oh boy, that's gonna piss people off. If we do this,
that's good. That's gonna really look bad. We're not looking
to get into that ice pick game. Yeah, we don't
(40:11):
want to. We don't want to be monsters. No, and
it's too much evidence. Yeah, LSD wears off. Yeah, So Daniel, Yeah,
how you feeling well educated? First of all, so I
appreciate that. I'm so surprised that some people went on
to live normal lives. I love that Howard went on
(40:32):
to yeah to actually like kind of be okay. Yeah, yeah,
that's a horror story. Man. There's so many horror stories
in this man's life. Yeah, he's a living, like a
living monument to how resilient human beings can be. He
had like a family, he like lived it seems to
have been a pretty happy life after he got you know,
(40:54):
over some things, and it was like, you know, training
school bus drivers. That's not an easy job, that's an
important job. He was apparently good at it, so like,
but it's like that's amazing. The brain repair can repair itself. Yeah,
and it probably did the best to it could. Yeah,
it seems like it did great in his case. Um
did Watts had up? Uh like really end up distancing
(41:15):
himself then from Friedman? No, I think he you know,
he had some major arguments with the man, but he
always regarded him as a brilliant, pioneering doctor. Um just
somebody who he think took things a little too far
and was a little bit too cavalier. But like he
really respected him. It seems I'm not an expert on Watts,
No not. Yeah, so, uh you feel happy after this?
(41:40):
I mean I'm happier that I'm living in a better
medical time, don't you feel like we're not doing anything
right now medically that we're gonna look back. I'm sure
somebody's gonna be like, actually, and then I'm like, oh no,
I think we're doing lots of ship that we're going
to look back on. It's early fucked up. Oh yeah, man,
I think we're doing a ton of stuff that is
going to be looked back on as deeply um problematic,
not as I don't think we're doing anything on a
(42:02):
mass scale that's nearly as bad as the mass lobotomies
that we're being performed back then. But I think we're
doing a lot of fund up ship. Um. I think
particularly what's going to be looked at in the future,
as as bad as as lobotomies are on that level,
is how we deal um with people who have uh
there's evidence that a lot of violent criminals, like people
(42:23):
who are in prison for violent crimes, have head injuries. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
They looked at that air in Hernandez case, and that
that the Boston Globe did the Spotlight team profoundly damage. Yeah.
I think we're going to look at our treatment of
prisoners UM as an essentially rooted in our inability to
(42:43):
recognize or our desire to not give a shit about
a lot of types of mental illness um and not
treat it and just lock it up. And I think
that that is something that will be viewed on the
same scale as lobotomies are today. I think I was
trying to like a specific procedure that we're like, oh,
you never do that anymore. But yeah, I know that's
a that's all, that's you're you're right on the nose
(43:04):
with that stuff. Yeah, I think I think there might.
I don't think it compares in terms of the scale,
but I think like one of the things a lot
of people with autism complain about with groups like Autism
Speaks is that their goal is to like eradicate autism,
and a lot of people argue, like, well, but wait,
I'm perfectly happy. I just have a different kind of
brain and I think about the world differently, and your
desire to eradicate me is kind of like eugenics and horrible.
(43:28):
And I do think that we will increasingly recognize that,
like trying to wipe out autism is incredibly fucked up, um,
and then instead we should be focusing on like helping
these people comtegrate with everyone else and like, yeah, um,
but I don't think the scale of that, and I
don't think like that's not it's a sliding scale. I
(43:51):
think it's worse. Two jam I s picks into people's brains.
I just keep thinking of the show that Nick. Did
you watch? The Nick No highly recommended Clive Owe and
Chris Sullivan who's not on the show This is us.
I think it's Soderberg, but it was on Showtime, And
it's all about like the medical advancements in the like
(44:11):
teens and twenties, and just seeing like what they were
trying to figure out and the chances they were taking
that ended up working, and like the advancements they would
find just even how to like do a transfusion and
stuff like that. So I just kept thinking of that,
because my whole thing is like when something very delicate
and very tricky, maybe that's redundant, but um ends up
(44:33):
being like common. I always wonder how many times what
was the trial and error process? It kind of scares me,
like what was the trial and error process for Walter Jackson,
Freedman and whatever? And those people are gone, I mean,
and and those monkeys are gone it's, um, you know,
there's an extent to which we were going to try lobotomies.
(44:57):
Of course it was. It was it was going to happen,
and it's bad. You know, even though some people were
going to be horribly affected by it. It had to
happen for medical science to advance. It didn't have to
happen on this scale. It's like, we were going to
realize that like riddling could be helpful in treating certain
kinds of like a d h D. It didn't have
(45:17):
to be wildly over prescribed to children at the level
it was in the nineteen nineties and stuff. Um, not
that I don't think obviously, I don't think giving riddle
into kids as nearly as bad as thousands of lobotomies
with ice picks and unwashed hands. But um, there's always
going to be some sort of like, we figured out
this new thing, it helps some people, let's massively over
(45:37):
apply it. That's kind of how human beings are. Um.
But if like, that's part of why the scientific method
is supposed to work the way it's supposed to work,
where scientists are supposed to kind of pull their ego
out of it and look at like Okay, well, now
we have data saying we're actually doing this way too
much and we should stop. But then you get a
guy like Freeman who bases his whole identity on the
(45:58):
fact that he's the best at this thing that we
shouldn't really be doing, um, and then it doesn't stop.
So it's this kind of problem where in an ideal world,
if we treated science the way we're always supposed to
treat it, somebody would have walked up to Freeman in
like the late forties or early fifties and been like, actually,
this is being done way too much, and he would
(46:18):
be like, ah, damn, okay, well let's figure out something better.
But instead he doesn't ye because he just wants to
do this. He wants to do this thing. He wants
to funk with people's brain exactly. Also, are you are
you a Song of Ice and Fire guy at all?
Or yeah? I love it? Yeah yeah yeah. Makes me
think of Qui born umah, the character, because there's always
(46:39):
that too in medical history, whether it's like because I
look at it, then there's more, I'm sure, but just
in the sake of this conversation, like I look at
like there's people who learn what medicine works, and they
dedicate their life to helping people. And then there's the
other type of person who has no problem just poking around,
putting things together and then seeing what comes of and
(47:00):
a lot of times you get advancements out of that
or you find out something that works. But they might
not necessarily be the same type of traditional doctor who
wants to help someone. They're just very curious and have
the ability to just dig around in people's innards to
see what can work where. And that always creeps me
onto it isn't that great? Yeah, yeah, you wanna plug
(47:23):
your plug doubles Daniel I do. Um. People should go
to Daniel van Kirk dot com. There you can see
all of my dates and where I'm going to be. Um.
I've got December two, I'm doing a show at Largo
on November two, I will be headlining in Pedalouma, California,
and other tour dates and things as well. But most importantly,
(47:46):
you can get my album Thanks Diane. It drops on November.
It's if you're hearing this before then you can pre
buy the album at the Apple Store app in your
phone or go to Daniel van Kirk dot com and
you can click through to there. When you do that,
you'll get an instant track called Don't Be a Dick,
which I'm proud of. But you'll get the whole album
onni November and go to Daniel van Kirk dot com
(48:09):
for all that, or listen to me on my podcast
Dump People Town, which I do with the Squaw Brothers,
or pen Pals, which I do with Rory Scoville. Cool Well,
I am Robert Evans. You can find me on the
internet at behind the Bastards dot com, where the sources
for this episode will be, including uh Jack el his
wonderful book Lobotomist. Uh. You can find us on Twitter
(48:33):
at Instagram A at Bastard's pod. You can find me
on Twitter at I right okay, And you can find
love in your heart as long as you're willing to
put an ice pick into your brain. So again, this
is my encouragement to all of our listeners to grab
an ice pick and start lobotomizing. Be a hero like
Dr Freeman. So if you can, we can we urge
(48:53):
people to carry out unlicensed surgery. No, but you could
plug your other podcast. I have an their podcast. I
do have another poet friend. Yeah, the Worst Year Ever
with Katie and Cody Uh from Some More News. We
talk about election, which will be the worst year ever.
Um So, if you want a lobotomy to feel like
(49:15):
sweet release, listen to the Worst Year Ever. This week
we talk about Tulsi Cabard, so that one's fun. Nice. Yeah, Well,
thanks for having me on this show man. I love
coming back and learning. Yeah, I'm thank you for coming. Daniel,
thank you for learning. Uh and uh, thank you for
spreading the gospel of the ice Pick
What's grease and m door knobs. I'm Robert Evans hosted
Behind the Bastards for part two of our episode on
the inventor of lobotomy, and the door to the recording
studio has been greased with olive oil, which I'm informing
listeners of so that they can truly get into the
behind the Bastard spirit by greasing their own doors with
(00:22):
olive oil. So everybody play look at home, Grease, grease
something near you up with olive oil. All wait, all right,
I'm here as with in part one with Daniel van Kirk. Daniel,
how are you? How are you? How are you? How
are you? How are you doing today? I am great.
I'm so glad to be back for the conclusion of
this story about a horrific man who justified his means. Yep,
(00:45):
he's a bad man. And speaking of bad men, were
about to talk about a president. Although a president most
people like, um, so I may be pissing some people off.
John and Robert Kennedy are probably the two most famous
brothers in American history. One was the president until he
got shot, another would have been the president if he
hadn't been shot. Both men have come to symbolize fairly
(01:08):
or unfairly, an era of just in decent governance in
the United States of America, one that will probably never
come again. But the Kennedy brothers had a sister as
well as another brother named Ted, who we don't talk
about much because of that lady he drunkenly killed. This
woman's name was Rosemary Kennedy, and her life was stolen
by Dr Watts, Dr Freeman, and wild unchecked misogyny. Now,
(01:30):
Rosemary's birth was, in the words of the Irish Times,
complicated by medical misadventure. Depending on which source you read,
you will hear different things about the exact extent of
her intellectual disabilities. Some articles I've read say she was
severely mentally handicapped and unable to lead a normal life.
Others argue she had learning disabilities but was otherwise bright
and capable. I'm not a doctor, but I did teach
(01:52):
special ed once, and it seems fair for me to say,
whatever the precise extent of her issues, Rosemary Kennedy would
have been capable of living a real, satively independent life
with some specific help. Now you get very different versions
of Rosemary story depending on which right up you read.
For example, here's people. As Rosemary entered her late teens,
her parents saw less of the affectionate, dutiful and eager
to please young woman they knew and loved, and more
(02:14):
of her violent outbursts. She began screaming and yelling and
throwing things. She was violent and throwing vases across the room.
She was out of control. One person says now that
article paints Rosemary is a deeply disturbed young woman, and
her lobotomy is tragic, but purely the result of her
parents not having better options to care for such a
disabled child in a more primitive era. Another Irish Times
(02:34):
article I found, which interviewed one of her biographers, a
man named Irvine, takes a different route. Irvine has a
more filled out picture in his head. He sees her
as stunningly beautiful. It was often said she was the
most beautiful of the Kennedy's, beautiful and poetic. She did
have learning disabilities, It's hard to say how much, but
she wrote letters, she kept a diary. She became a
Montessori teacher for a while, and she taught young children.
Her favorite book was Winnie the Pooh, and she could
(02:56):
read that to children. So yeah, yeah, great book. He
has the sense of a fairly normal, deeply loving young woman.
Every letter that she wrote a show drenched in this
want for her father to acknowledge her and love her.
Every one of those letters is heartbreaking. It's all about
I'm doing my best and I hope this pleases you.
She would send reports about her weight because wait was
a huge thing in the Kennedy family, monitoring the weight
(03:18):
of all the children. There's so much correspondence where Joe
and Rose are just talking about the weight of their children.
So yeah. Meanwhile, an Irish Central article I found on
her describes her this way. By kindergarten, Rosemary was called
retarded in the lingo of the times, and such children
were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image,
it was a disaster. Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third
(03:39):
or fourth grade intelligence, and she was packed off to
a boarding school for misfits. From there, she wrote her
father a heartbreaking letter, Darling, Daddy, I hate to disappoint
you in any way. Come to see me very soon.
I get very lonesome every day now. Rosemary finally caught
a break when her father became ambassador to Britain, and
she thrived in a London convent school. But back in
(04:00):
the States, Rosemary, who again was very attractive, began attracting
admirers at twenties. She was a picturesque young woman, a
snow princess with flushed cheeks, gleaming, smile, plump figure in
a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met. Uh.
And of course, as Larson writes, her parents found her
sexuality dangerous. And I think this gets to the core
of kennedy family issues with Rosemary more than anything, um.
(04:24):
And it seems to me, based on what I've read,
that the argument that she was mentally retarded is very oversold.
I think she had learning disabilities. I think she was
someone who had difficulty thriving in a normal school. But
I think she was basically it seems like she was
basically a functional, intelligent person UM who was a young,
attractive woman and people wanted to fuck her, and she
(04:45):
wanted to funk them, and this was not okay with
Joe Kennedy. So I think that's the core of the issue. Um.
The Kennedy's were a powerful, wealthy, high society family just
got to stay in line on that family got to
stay in line, in line. She has some learning disabilities,
and she's promiscuous and a woman. We can't we gotta
(05:08):
can't take out this part of it too. Yeah, she
maybe having some mood disorders. So maybe she like flies
off the handle and gets like yelly and stuff and
like that. They'd assume, like, well, she's not happy in
the family, so she must be broken. Yeah, that's and
she's a woman's here to disregard her exactly, Like that's
going to carry on the name, Yeah, exactly. I think
(05:28):
she was a strong willed young woman who wanted to
live a life that would have been inconvenient to the
family goals. And it's my opinion that this, more than
anything else, sealed her fate. And before we go any further,
I want you to take a look at this picture
of Rosemary. Will be on our website too, Sophie, can
you show that to Daniel. Oh she looks like fun. Yeah,
she looks fun. She looks like a normal, healthy young woman.
(05:50):
I would describe her as looking playful and lively and coy,
like a willful young woman with a spirit behind her. Yeah,
she falls into uh like fun girl. Winter, Yeah, fun
girl fall. Now, within mere months of this photograph, she
would be reduced to a shambling ruin of herself by
the treatments of doctor's Freeman and Watts. But the final
(06:12):
decision on whether or not to perform the lobotomy on
Rosemary was up to the family patriarch Joseph from People Quote,
Without his wife's knowledge, he took Rosemary to see Dr
Walter Freeman, a controversial neurologist, psychiatrist and professor at George
Washington University who had gained fame for popularizing lobotomies in America.
He took her to the best at the time, and
at the time time readers, Digest, Newsweek, everybody was touting
(06:34):
the best thing for mental illness, the lobotomy. It was
the cure. All people were so eager for some help
that they just grabbed onto it. You see, that's Freedman
from the last episode being smart about just playing into
the press. He did. He'd gotten this ship into the press,
and fucking Joe Kennedy reads this in a Newsweek as
he's sipping fucking Manhattan's and his his his can of
(06:56):
Bunkport retreat or wherever the funk it is. And if
you need to wonder about how much you Kennedy cared
about the like agency or um agency. She's a girl, exactly,
writes of a woman. Not only is he taking his
daughter to get her brain carved out, he's not telling
his own wife that he's doing it. No, why would he? Exactly? Yeah,
(07:18):
this is all double it's a double smack. Yeah. Now,
Freeman diagnosed Rosemary with agitated depression and promised Joe that
a lobotomy would put an into her rages and render
her happy and content. What did he diagnose her with
agitated depression? This sounds like that ship where they're like, Oh,
what do you want me to call it? What do
(07:38):
you want here? Joe? Yeah, she's not she's not happy
and that's a problem. That means she's broken, right, But
the agitated is why we have to do something about it,
because it's just getting worse. The family's got money and
she's not happy. So the only thing to do was
to break a brain us, okay, sorry. In the file
of Dr Freeman assisted by Dr James Watts for him
(08:00):
to prefrontal lobotomy and Rosemary at George Washington University Hospital
rather than curing her. The lobotomy essentially erased Rosemary Kennedy.
The procedure itself literally involved Dr Watts scraping away at
her brain tissue while Dr Freeman asked her to repeat
stories from her childhood and lists the month of the year.
When she could no longer answer, the procedure was pronounced
a success. Whoa yeah, tell us when we've taken enough
(08:25):
you tell us, yeah, tell us when you don't remember
who you are, and then we'll be like, part we
got it perfect, We got her Because I wondered that too,
like if somebody got their lobotomy right. And then they
were still like the in the last episode, the doctor
who went out and got drunk. Still like what they
were like, well, we gotta go in and dig a
little deeper. I guess they often did that. Not always.
(08:48):
We'll talk about some other cases later, um, but yeah,
that was not uncommon. For the one. They were like,
let's get it all, just keep talking it all. Just
get the whole girl out of there. Yeah, just make
her a shell now. Rosemary spent the rest of her
life completely dependent on a small handful of caretakers until
her father's stroke. She lived isolated and hidden from the
(09:08):
rest of the family at St. Koleta's, a Catholic facility
in wisconsant for inconveniently disabled members of which families. When
Joe finally stroked out, her nieces and nephews attempted to
reintegrate her back into the family, but any hope she'd
ever had of an independent life of forging in existence
for herself was obliterated by doctors Freeman and Watts. Unice
Kennedy would eventually create the Special Olympics in honor of Rosemary,
(09:31):
and in nineteen eighties seven story in the Saturday Evening
Post brought the whole sordid tale to light, but that
was far too late to stop the career of Walter
Freeman from reaping an unspeakable toll in human lives. By
nineteen forty five, at the end of Freeman and Watts's collaboration,
around a hundred fifty lobotomies were being performed annually nationwide.
But in nineteen forty six, Walter Freeman introduced his revolutionary
(09:51):
transorbital lobotomy technique and started teaching it to surgeons and
non surgeons all around this glorious land. By nineteen forty nine,
some five of thousand lobotomies were being performed annually, so
that's great. Many of those were performed by Dr Freeman himself,
who started traveling the nation showing off his skills to
rooms full of doctors in the press. And I'm going
(10:11):
to quote now from the book The Lobotomist. Patricia Darien,
a student nurse at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville,
watched Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy at a nearby state hospital.
Freeman selected the patients for operations, she reported, by twisting
their joints to determine their flexibility, not by reading or
taking histories. After a special luncheon honor of the occasion
of his visit, he occupied a conference room and had
(10:32):
each patient shocked and photographed. When all was ready, he
would plunge the lucatom in. Darien noted he wore no gown, mask,
or gloves. Afterwards, he would sit the patients up and
have them walked out of the room. He was very
proud of the fact that the people walked in and
walked out, none had to be carried, although one or
two of them sagged badly on the way out. She remembered.
After several operations, Freeman enlivened the demonstration by cutting nerve
(10:54):
fibers on both sides of the brain simultaneously. Then he
looked up at us, smiling. I thought I was seeing
a circus act. He moved both hands back and forth
in unison, cutting the brain identically behind each eye. It
astonished me that he was so gay, so high, so up.
Darien recalled the sequence of events as a living nightmare,
a deeply disturbing performance. He's reached his final form. Yeah now.
(11:16):
Frank Freeman, Walter's son, was occasionally enlisted to help his
father in these lobotomy exhibitions. They would spend weeks at
a time on the road, crossing thousands of miles, visiting
numerous hospitals, and lobotomizing huge numbers of people. In nineteen
fifty two, Frank helped his father perform a lobotomy. The
process started when Walter immobilized the patient with a series
of powerful electro shocks, and then, as Frank recalled, I
(11:38):
was there to hold the person's legs down. We all
went for a ride when he threw the switch. When
the patient stopped seizing, Walter would lift the eyelid, jam
his ice pick inside and shattered the bone that separated
it from the brain. He would carefully hammer away at
gray matter until both sides of the frontal lobe had
been disconnected. Frank recalled, I was kind of impressed. He
made it look so easy. That's good, right, Well, I mean, yeah,
(12:00):
it's so easy because he loves it. He's so you know,
like you were saying, do what you love and you'll
never work a day in your life of hammering into
people's brains with a nice pet. But he also seems
obsessed with the celebrity of it, like he wants to
like be the guy and come to your town and
put on his brain show. He wants to put on
(12:21):
a show. He wants to do it with both hands.
That you're really impressed. And see they all walked out
of here. Did you see him all walk out like
well to be carried himself. But yeah, he was lazy
when he came in. Yeah. Now, over the course of
a very long career, Walter would perform more than three thousand,
four hundred and thirty nine lobotomies in fifty five hospitals
(12:43):
in twenty three states. The entire time he believed himself
to be something of a heroic medical radical, pulling his
discipline forward into the future. His motto was lobotomy gets
them home, which meant in effect that lobotomizing people allowed
them to exist comfortably and without complaint in Americans Itty.
It is impossible to know how many of Freeman's patients
truly benefited from his treatment. His summaries of his results
(13:06):
were always very biased, and it's never possible to analyze
them outside of the lens of his own opinions. Objective
scientific analysis of the results of lobotomies in this period
are essentially impossible to find. We know that at least
four hundred and ninety of his patients died as a
result of his services. We also know that lobotomizing human
beings was not simply a matter of medical necessity. The
(13:27):
longer Freeman worked as a solo lobotomist, the more he
leaned into the performance art side of the field. And
I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post now, shocking his colleagues,
for instance, grew into a great source of pleasure. Once,
during a lobotomy demonstration at a nursing home in Baltimore
before a group of surgeons who replaced his surgical hammer
with a carpenter's mallet. He delighted in reporting how other
lobotomy demonstrations made a Columbia University professor emeritus of neurology
(13:50):
weakened with faintness, sickened students in England, and so outraged
a German neurologist that Freeman said, I almost had to
push him out of the way in order to perform
the operation. Several times he shut off his virtuosity with
the Luca toome by performing two handed lobotomies, working both
eye sockets simultaneously on people. That's forget that there's a
(14:11):
person on the other end of this hammer and pick yeah, yeah, yeah.
His cross country trips in pursuit of lobotomy patients and
his self appointment as the Transorbital Procedures International Ambassador only
heightened Freeman's sense of professional solitude and caused him to
commit serious erras of judgment. More than once, he worked
the luke toome forcefully enough to break it inside a
patient's brain at Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa. He accidentally
(14:34):
killed a patient when he stepped back to take a
photo during the surgery, and allowed the lucatome to sink
deep into the patient's mid brain. That's all from jack
al High. Yeah that's pretty fucked up. Huh yeah. Yeah.
Also we don't know what his scale is. It still
might have been deemed a success by him. The guy's
not complaining anymore now. Many of Walter's patients were unable
(15:00):
to walk away or really think after his ministrations, but
this caused less of an issue than you might think.
The bulk of his clientele were inmates at asylums, and
the folks paying for surgeries didn't so much want those
folks healed as they wanted them quieter. People in charge
of hospitals often welcomed Freemen into their institutions because the
lobotomized patients. Some of them, you know, would go home
(15:20):
because they'd actually be helped by the procedure, and the
others were generally easier to manage. Freeman himself wrote, the
noise level of the ward went down, incidents were fewer,
cooperation improved, and the ward could be brightened when curtains
and flower pots were no longer in danger of being
used as weapons, so it mainem easier to deal with. Yeah,
no more biting no more biting, no more problems at all,
(15:41):
because they can't do anything anymore because he just erased
them basically in a lot of cases, and we don't
have to like technically say we killed them. Yeah yeah,
I mean hundreds of people were improved by his work,
hundreds more it's less clear, and of course hundreds and
hundreds died. But this in part one, it's almost seems
(16:02):
like though they're using the exception to prove the rule. Yeah,
so it's like it's there's some people that's benefited, so
we should do this for everyone. We think we needs it,
Like exactly, they don't. Those the numbers don't really match up.
If the people are benefited from you're like, well five
of these people five percent, it might not work out
for I'm still not favor for it, but I get
(16:23):
what your logic is. But being like, oh, a few
percentage of people, this really small group, this really helps, well,
then that doesn't mean we should be doing it for everyone. Also,
when I was I keep thinking, I was like, I'm
sure this happened to people who are autistic, right, oh god,
yeah yeah, because but that wasn't even like they didn't
even know. I didn't was autism even diagnosed in the seventies. No, no, no, no,
(16:46):
I don't think at this point. I I think it
was even after that that they really had a handle
on it. But like it's possible that's what was going
on with Rosemary. She may have had like aspergers or
something like that. I really don't know. I don't think
anybody does. I'm gonna guess a lot of his patients
were aught histic and they just got written down as
imbeciles or retarded, which is like the lingo they would
have used at the time. And you know, because they
(17:07):
required different means to like reach and teach and like
work with you know, because they had a different sort
of brain. Uh, they just sort of hammered into their
brain until they weren't a problem anymore. Right, How many
women wouldn't have gotten a lobotomy if they hadn't been married.
That's a scary question, because they was a man saying, well,
(17:28):
you're the problem, you aren't making the food, you fight
with me, you have your own thoughts, which I'm sick
of hearing. But if they had just never if they
had become a to use it, the lingo of the
of the era a Spinster, they would have never gotten
a lobotomy because they would have had an oppressive man
in their life to be like, I'm sick of you. Yep, yep.
(17:50):
Marriage doomed them. Yeah, that's fair to say, probably hundreds
of cases at at least. Yeah, Now, Freemen had plenty
of problems with Oh. Actually, before before we get into
Freeman's problems, you know what's not a problem our advertisers. Great,
(18:10):
you know, who won't lobotomize their wives? Who the products
and services that advertise on this show. Great? Then I
then I want to hear about him, because now I'm
interested products. We're back and we're talking about Walter Freeman,
(18:31):
and of course the issues that came as a result
of him hammering ice picks into the brains of thousands
of people. Uh. In ninety seven, Freeman operated on a
Washington cop after the brain ice picking, said cop hemorrhaged
on both sides of his brain, and, in Freeman's words,
was never able to do more than the simplest tasks
around the house. Even so, Freeman did a brisk business
in Washington State. In the late nineteen forties. He met
(18:53):
the actress Francis Farmer at Western State Hospital. She'd been
a patient there for five years, largely as a result
of behaved your her parents considered wild and unconventional, but
we today would probably just call being a human. We
don't know for sure if Freeman lobotomized her, but some
reports say he did, and Frank Freeman says his father did.
There's a picture that is almost certainly of miss Farmer's operation.
(19:15):
It shows a man Walter in a sleeveless shirt with
hairy arms and ungloved hams, hammering a lucatom, the surgical
device he invented to replace his ice pick into a
woman's eye. As a crowd watches and there goes what
would have been my Halloween costume. Yep, yep, tragic sleeveless
Harry ice pick m hmm. By ten fifty four, tranquilizers
(19:36):
like chlorpromazine replaced lobotomies as the preferred treatment for agitated
people in asylums. Freeman left Washington for Los Altos, California,
and for the next eighteen years he split his time
between lobotomizing people and hiking. Actual medical science gradually left
him behind, but Freeman continued his research on transorbital lobotomies
because he loves it. He loves he loves it. In
(19:58):
nineteen sixty four, he conducted an experiment meant on fourteen
disturbed mental defectives, mostly young schizophrenics. In a letter to
a colleague, he explained that this experiment tested the efficacy
of injecting hot water into the brain after stabbing it
with an ice pick. I was prepared to accept two fatalities,
but fortunately all the patients survived, and he invited to
return next May. What is he new, tiede. He's just
(20:20):
trying to come. He's like, well, but now we do
this thing like that would just shoot some water in there.
Oh my god. I don't see how any of these
patients could improve, but at least one can now be
cared for at home again. His his concern is that
they be easy to care for now that they get better. Really,
if we you know what else, you remove the whole head.
You can do whatever you want with that. But real
(20:41):
fucking easy, to be real easy. They don't complain. There's
you don't even have to feed him. M hmm. Now,
since Walter worked at a variety of different hospitals during
this period, he enlisted a number of different nurses to
help him in his thousands of procedures. One of these
people was Helen Comer, a nurse in West Virginia for
thirty four years. I found her account in an article
written by Story Corps in nineteen fifty four. I assisted
(21:03):
Dr Freeman and doing a transorbital lobotomy. I was a
new nurse at the time and I was drafted to
work in there with him. Had no idea about what
I was getting into, but I was curious and I
wanted to see it. And I saw it. Oh my,
The room was full of people. Everyone wanted to see
what was going on. People from town and everywhere else
came up to witness the occasion. He came and I
held the patient's head and he did the lobotomy. He
had an instrument. To me, it looked like a nail,
(21:24):
a great big nail. It had a sharp point, and
he inserted this in the corner of the individual's eye
and banged it with a mallet I guess it was.
And then he pulled from one side and pulled to
the other. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to watch.
I know that day we lost one patient because they
couldn't stop the bleeding, and I can't remember if any
others died. It wasn't what I thought it might be.
To me, it was cruel, but that was just my opinion.
(21:44):
I was just doing the job I was employed to do. Remember,
I've seen all kinds of things in my line of work,
so if I stopped and dwelled on each little thing,
I'd be hurting. I remember he was relaxed. He was
very calm while he was operating. He made it look
easy to do. I think he just had an extremely high,
self confident person anality. He didn't have any qualms. He
wanted to prove that he was right. He was convinced
that he was right. I thought, how can a man
(22:05):
be relaxed just going blindly into a brain. But of
course I didn't have the authority to say stop. That.
These patients were not young ones. I think they were
all about thirty or forty years old. I knew two
of them. After the operation, I found that they had
changed in their personality. My impression, which I remember still,
was that they didn't ask any questions. Expression of deep
turmoil in their heart or in their soul was subdued.
(22:26):
There was something missing emotions. I would say, you know,
if you were to converse with somebody, there's always emotion
with it. Just take all of your emotion out of
a conversation with somebody and what's left. Uh yeah, when
they're like, oh, I can't believe he just kept doing it?
And how I mean, and I know you've probably covered this,
just the amount of people who had some sort of
(22:46):
like like they were a sociopath and the medical field
gave them that outlet. I mean, it happens in the military.
I I feel like Freeman might have been a sociopath,
like he's he's described as having a lot of difficulty
like necting to people, a shallow affect, like yeah, he
kept trophies like I do think he thought he was
(23:07):
helping people, But I think his understanding of what helping
people was was helping the people who had to care
for these folks. I don't think he actually cared about
the patients because he's broken anyway. You just don't care.
You just don't give a You lack empathy, and if anything,
you do these things to people to like sponge off
of their emotion and their feelings and their reaction. Yeah. Yeah, Now,
(23:33):
the most common diagnosis for which Freeman prescribed brain scraping
with schizophrenia. This does not mean that most of his
patients were actually schizophrenic, just that he hastily declared them
to be schizophrenic before jamming in ice pick through based
on how well they could bend their joints. Yeah. Yeah.
Other common ailments treated via ice picking were chronic pain
(23:54):
and suicidal depression. In seven New York Times article listed
the various symptoms for which lobotomies were often prescribed. Tension, apprehension, anxiety, depression, insomnia,
suicidal ideas, delusions, hallucinations, crying spells, melancholia, obsessions, panic states, disorientation, psycholesia,
pains of psychic origin, nervous indigestion, and hysterical paralysis. Nervous indigestion. Yeah. Now,
(24:20):
if you know anything about the fifties and sixties c
i A, you know that nobody fucked around with human
brains in new and exciting ways without drawing their attention.
In nineteen fifty two, the agency hired Henley Laughlin, a psychiatrist,
to report on the potential of lobotomies to help the
god fearing American government disabled communists. I'm going to quote
from the book Lobotomist. Again in his classified report titled
(24:42):
some Areas of Psychiatric Interest, Laughlin commented that the procedure
would be adaptable to intelligence work, and noted that he
watched Dr Freeman performed twenty two transorbital lobotomies with an
average of about six minutes per operation. This included time
for before and after photographs, as well as the keeping
of notes and records. From an empiric standpoint, the operative
procedure is relatively simple and could be learned in a
brief period of time by almost any intelligent person. In addition,
(25:05):
he wrote, there is not great outward evidence of injury
or damage to the patient. Besides the behavior changes in
the black eyes, the average pathologist performing an autopsy would
have to be a keen and careful observer to detect
changes in the brain substance made by the operator. Because
I felt unable to disclose to Dr Freeman the real
basis of my interest, Laughlin notes he could not solicit
the lobotomy expert's opinions as to how the procedure might
be modified for use by the CIA. Laughlin, who also
(25:27):
professed an interest in the possibilities of taking him not
at control of patients during the period of unconsciousness following
electroshock therapy. Formed his own opinions on the potential lobotomy
presented as an intelligence tool. To date, there has been
considerable discussion relative to the possible use of the lobotomy
type operation by this agency as a neutralizing weapon, Laughlin
wrote in prefacing his conclusions, he described the role of
(25:48):
the frontal lobes as one that allowed a person to
pursue a cause and feel devotion to it. Certainly, any
crusading spirit is apt to be quenched. He reported, community
enterprise and activities in the way of social uplift, leadership,
and executive abilities and activities are apt to be lessened
after operation. On this basis, a zealous and fanatic communist,
if lobotomized, might retain his interest in communism, but his drive,
(26:09):
zeal and ability to organize or direct would be substantially reduced.
So that's good. You take out the fight baby. Also,
I wondered if for interrogation used like the CIA would
be like, well, there's so much more agreeable. They'll tell
you anything. We should lobotomize them then interview them. I
will say, the good news is that even the CIA
in this period had too many scruples to lobotomized people
(26:31):
as a method of social control. What what what what
are we in the sixties by now? Yeah? Yeah, yeah yeah,
the sixties the LSD, right is they're they're ghosting strangers
with acid like like Gangbusters. Yeah. But Laughlin wound up
recommending against lobotomies as a way to disabled communists h
and his His main reason for doing so is that
it would look really bad to scramble the opinions of
(26:53):
people whose opinions differed from the US government, Like, if
that got out, it would be bad. Um. So it
is here that I should note that on at least
one point, Walter Freeman was on the somewhat defensible side
of medical history. As I previously stated, there was a
time when mental health professionals believe that all mental issues
stemmed essentially from repressed memories and traumas and other things
(27:16):
that a therapist could work out. Freeman was on the
vanguard of doctors who argued that many brain problems were
physical or chemical in nature, um and based more on
circumstances of biology than things that had happened to the patient.
And Freeman and his fellows wound up being right. We
know today that many mental health issues do stem from
hormonal or chemical imbalances, things that can be corrected with
medication or, in rare cases, surgery. Walter identified the problem
(27:39):
in mainstream medicine rather correctly. He was just very wrong
about its solution, and because he was such an advocate
for his solitary practice of lobotomizing people, he failed miserably
to advance his theory of mental illness with the Times.
In nineteen sixty he treated one Howard dully, On, eleven
year old boy with what I would describe as mild
to moderate behavioral issues. Howard fought with his brother, lied
(28:01):
to his parents, and occasionally stole candy. He was rather
withdrawn and anti social, but certainly not someone a reasonable
person would diagnose as in need of major brain surgery.
His behavioral issues, such as they were, stemmed from understandable causes.
His mother had died of cancer when he was five.
His father had remarried a cold and demanding stepmother who
hated him. Howard was emotionally abused by her and ignored
(28:24):
in favor of his stepmother's biological children, so he acted
out more and more as he grew he's acting out.
He wants attention someone exactly caring parenting. Yeah, And as
he acted out, his stepmother responded by beating him and
forcing him to eat alone. This made his behavioral problems worse,
and his stepmother decided that meant there was something wrong
with him. She started talking to psychiatrists and eventually wound
(28:47):
up preferred to doctor Walter Freeman. Now by this point,
Walter was a thoroughly fringed figure. Lobotomy was still practiced
far too widely, but most medical professionals no longer believed
it was anything but a deeply flawed last resort measure.
But Howard's stepmother didn't care about that. When Walter interviewed
here steps on, he saw evidence of profound disturbance. Quote.
(29:07):
He is clever at stealing, but always leaves something behind
to show what he's done. Freeman records from Yeah He's
he's a yeah yeah. If it's a banana, he throws
the peel at the window. If it's a candy bar,
he leaves the rapper around someplace. He does a good
deal of daydreaming, and when asked about it, he says,
I don't know. He has defy at at times. You
tell me to do this, and I'll do that. He
has a vicious expression on his face some of the time. Now,
(29:29):
based on a brief interview, Dr Freeman declared Howard to
be schizophrenic and prescribed one dose of scrambled brain for
the young boy. When he met the famous doctor, Howard
was struck by his round glasses, his suit and his
stylish goatee and made him look a little like a beatnick.
He was warm, personable and easy to get along with.
Was I fearful? No? I had no idea what he
was going to do with me. I'm gonna quote next
(29:50):
from a right up in the Guardian. When Dully awoke
the next day, his eyes were swollen and bruised and
he was running a high fever. He recalls a severe
pain in his head and the discomfort of his hospital gown,
which gave open at the back. He had no idea
of what had happened. I was in a mental flog,
Dully says. I was like a zombie. I had no
awareness of what Freeman had done. Eight weeks after the
doctor first saw him, Dully came around from his operation
(30:11):
in a state of numbed confusion. The hospital reports stated
that he had been given a transorbital lobotomy. A sharp
instrument was thrust through the orbital roof on both sides
and moved so as to sever the brain pathways in
the frontal lobes. Dr Freeman's bill came to two hundred dollars.
Dully was his youngest ever patient. Extraordinarily, he survived. Now
Howard would go on to live a full life eventually,
(30:32):
but first he suffered three years of homelessness, mental illness,
and a deep confusion as a result of the damage
done to him. He would grow into a school bus
driving trainer and a living monument to the resilience of
the human brain. But one cannot help it read his
story and wonder how much less painful his life might
have been if a ship heeled doctor hadn't driven an
ice pick into his fucking brain gleefully, yeah with with
(30:54):
panash and also the like, uh seems like schizophrenia to me.
That work, So schizophrenia, I can definitely do this. And
he's still in the candy bar. And that bitch, that
bitch of a step mom was like whatever, I don't care.
I just brought him here to get his brain taken out.
So yeah, and she's probably mad or long fucking dead hopefully,
but she's mad that it seems to have been on
(31:17):
the air, like the side of things, where somebody didn't
lose all capacity for life. Yeah, he was still a person,
unfortunately for much of her I'm sure dismay. Now you
know what won't declare you a schizophrenic for stealing a
candy bar and scramble your brains with an ice pick?
The products and services that support this show. Oh then
(31:38):
I want to know about him? Oh yeah, absolutely, Here
we go and we're back. We're talking about Walter Freeman
in the twilight of his career, you know, the sixties
and ship as medical science starts to pull away from
Freeman's practices and towards more humane methods of treating them
(32:00):
mentally ill um and I I guess more humane methods
includes literally everything that doesn't involve an ice pick. Um.
So while this was all going on in his field,
Walter doubled and tripled down on his claim to fame.
He spent increasing amounts of time doing what he called
shrink baiting, essentially trying to trigger more respectable physicians and
writing limericks about his professional enemies. He was known to
(32:22):
declare that he would rather be wrong than boring. That's
so true. That's on his tombstone. That's on his tombstone. Now.
This desire to buck tradition led him to issue other
basic aspects of professional medical niceties from The Guardian. He
had a buccaneering disregard for the usual medical formalities. He
chewed gum while he operated, and displayed impatience with what
(32:45):
he called all that germ crap, routinely failing to sterilize
his hands or wear rubber gloves. Despite a fourteen percent
fatality rate, Freeman performed three thousand and four hundred thirty
nine lobotomies in his lifetime, and we haven't talked about
any mail practice suits at all. No on the sixties man. Now,
in case you aren't aware, a fourteen percent fatality rate
(33:06):
is essentially criminal. Any modern surgeon who killed that many
patients with what they considered to be a routine operation
would be investigated on the suspicion that they were some
sort of serial killer. But of course Walter Freeman was
not really a surgeon. He was just a doctor who
found a lazier way to perform brain surgery using a
tool from his kitchen God Damnit. Walter's personal life was
(33:28):
no prettier than his career. In six he watched his
eleven year old son, the namesake of his grandfather, die
horribly in Yosemite National Park. The boy was filling up
a canteen in a stream when he fell over and
was dashed to death upon the rocks. Walter's wife, Marjorie,
was a chronic alcoholic, which is not surprising, and the
doctor cheated on her constantly. Still, his remaining children considered
(33:49):
him to have been a good father and defend his
legacy today as a medical trailblazer. I found this quote
from his son, Frank, now a retired security guard, and
I think it was meant to sound positive, but it's
just an intentionally horrifying to me. He is a friendly
giant of a man. This is talking about Frank. He's
a friendly giant of a man. Dress smartly in a
double breasted dark blue suit and a burgundy tie kept
in place by a thin gold clip. He was a
(34:10):
marvelous father, Frank said, sitting in a room filled with
crossword dictionaries and Dick France's novels. He loved a children
and always made time for us out of his busy schedule,
taking us camping every summer all across the country. Frank
recalls being invited to observe a love botomy when he
was twenty one, and vividly remembers having a little crack
as the orbital plate fractured. It only took about six
or seven minutes, and Dad kept up a running commentary. Indeed,
(34:31):
the original ice pick used for the first transorbital lobotomy
came from the Freeman family kitchen drawer. We had several
of them, says Frank, cheerfully. We're using the punch holes
in our belts when we got bigger. I'm enormously proud
of my father. I do think he's been unfairly treated.
He was an interventionalist surgeon, a pioneer, and that took
guts apple tree fall, yeah for him to like, Oh
(34:52):
you know, he did a good a good thing, and
isn't that great? Look here, look I got a nice
pick of my kids right now. We could go poke
anybody's eye. We to poke holes in our belts, and
my dad used to poke holes and brains. This is fine. Yeah,
this is fine, This is fine. Yeah. Now, thankfully he
wound up a security guard rather than a brain surgeon,
(35:12):
which I think would have been a better career for
his dad too, in retrospect, when his dad was sick
all the time. Yeah, yeah, he really should have stayed
that way. Now. In nineteen sixty seven, Freeman was visited
by Helen Mortenson, one of his earliest patients. She had
received two lobotomies from Freeman, one in ninety six and
one in nineteen fifty six after a relapse. In nineteen
(35:34):
sixty seven, she relapsed again, likely as a result of
her brain repairing itself, and she went into Walter for
a third lobotomy. This was conducted at Herrick Memorial Hospital
in Berkeley, California, and, unfortunately for Helen, Walter severed a
blood vessel in her brain. She died three days later
from the operation, and Freeman's surgical privileges were revoked. He
lived for five more years, during which he performed no
(35:56):
additional lobotomies. He died from cancer on May thirty one, night,
teen seventy two, at the right old age of seventy six.
Between nineteen thirty six and the late nineteen fifties, the
wave of lobotomies Walter ignited led to more than forty
tho lobotomies and perhaps more than fifty. Some aspects of
the techniques Dr Freeman pioneered are still in use, but
only on a profoundly limited scale. Less than twenty brain
(36:18):
operations per year on average are performed in the US
to treat psychiatric disorders. Most of these use lasers or
radiation to lesion off small sections of a particular chunk
of the brain, primarily to treat obsessive compulsitive disorder or Parkinson's.
Transorbital lobotomies are no longer practiced, and most of the
young men and women Dr Walter Freeman I spect have
(36:38):
long since followed him to the grave. And that's the episode. Wow,
so there's still done. But I'm sure nowadays somebody washed
into hands beforehand any sort of brain surgery to deal
with any sort of psychosis. Some of the things he
like pioneered are performed on a very limited basis um
(36:59):
or are part of more humane treatments. But again, like
twenty people a year received something vaguely similar, and they're
not even that similar. It's just that they removed similar
parts of the brain because it does help certain people.
But again, you look at how many thousands of operations
he performed, and the actual needs seems to be somewhere
like maybe a couple dozen people a year benefit really
(37:20):
form of what he did, he liked it right. It's
like when he was good to get an oil change
and you can tell they just want to change breaks.
They're like, new breaks, do you really, Well, that's what
we do here as breaks, So that's what we're gonna say,
you need. I think a lot of it was that
he um he was He was good at performing a lobotomy,
(37:43):
and most people weren't. Most people couldn't do that sort
of work without like breaking down because it was just
horrifying to a normal human being to shove an ice
pick into a skull um. And Freeman didn't give a ship,
and he didn't like working with other people, so he's
able to do this alone and he was the best
stat it and that's all he wanted from his career.
So that's the only thing he really did right. And
(38:04):
he didn't grow up with much of an affinity for
the female gender, so he was more than happy to
shut up a wife. Oh yeah, your wife's talking sounds
like schizophrenia. Yeah, yeah, that's wild, that's horrific. Yeah, it's
pretty bad, dude. The fact, when do you think, so
(38:24):
it probably should have really ended by like sixty five, Yeah,
I mean he stopped sixties seven was his last one.
I think it probably should have stopped by the fifties.
I guess you understandable. You know, she was like the
late forties. I think, oh she was, that's right. I
keep thinking, so I was thinking of the person that
was in sixty two, but yeah, she was in the forties.
(38:45):
That's right. They started in the late thirties. You could
argue that there was maybe a decade there where, just
if you assume medical science is going to have some
really rough patches, just because it's hard to figure it out,
maybe a decade where people would have done this before
realizing oh, this actually is just turning people off and
not fixing any problems. Um. But it went on for
(39:07):
a long and most doctors by the fifties certainly were
aware that like, oh, this is not the thing you
do for everybody who's got a mental illness. There's better treatments.
But he kept right on rolling almost to the seventies,
like he damn near made it to Disco. Well, thank
(39:27):
god for that. Yeah, thank god that we stopped it
before Disco. Yeah, yeah, that would have really tarnished America's
brightest period. Also, I love when we get to give
the CIA credit for things they didn't do. Yeah, the
CIA was like, this seems real fucked up, which should
tell you all you need to know. We're just gonna
abduct people off the street and give them toxic doses
(39:50):
of LSD. That seems like the humane option. Oh man,
Like in between assassinating democratically a elected leaders and running
death squads, the CIA looks back at this and it's like,
oh boy, that's gonna piss people off. If we do this,
that's good. That's gonna really look bad. We're not looking
to get into that ice pick game. Yeah, we don't
(40:11):
want to. We don't want to be monsters. No, and
it's too much evidence. Yeah, LSD wears off. Yeah, So Daniel, Yeah,
how you feeling well educated? First of all, so I
appreciate that. I'm so surprised that some people went on
to live normal lives. I love that Howard went on
(40:32):
to yeah to actually like kind of be okay. Yeah, yeah,
that's a horror story. Man. There's so many horror stories
in this man's life. Yeah, he's a living, like a
living monument to how resilient human beings can be. He
had like a family, he like lived it seems to
have been a pretty happy life after he got you know,
(40:54):
over some things, and it was like, you know, training
school bus drivers. That's not an easy job, that's an
important job. He was apparently good at it, so like,
but it's like that's amazing. The brain repair can repair itself. Yeah,
and it probably did the best to it could. Yeah,
it seems like it did great in his case. Um
did Watts had up? Uh like really end up distancing
(41:15):
himself then from Friedman? No, I think he you know,
he had some major arguments with the man, but he
always regarded him as a brilliant, pioneering doctor. Um just
somebody who he think took things a little too far
and was a little bit too cavalier. But like he
really respected him. It seems I'm not an expert on Watts,
No not. Yeah, so, uh you feel happy after this?
(41:40):
I mean I'm happier that I'm living in a better
medical time, don't you feel like we're not doing anything
right now medically that we're gonna look back. I'm sure
somebody's gonna be like, actually, and then I'm like, oh no,
I think we're doing lots of ship that we're going
to look back on. It's early fucked up. Oh yeah, man,
I think we're doing a ton of stuff that is
going to be looked back on as deeply um problematic,
not as I don't think we're doing anything on a
(42:02):
mass scale that's nearly as bad as the mass lobotomies
that we're being performed back then. But I think we're
doing a lot of fund up ship. Um. I think
particularly what's going to be looked at in the future,
as as bad as as lobotomies are on that level,
is how we deal um with people who have uh
there's evidence that a lot of violent criminals, like people
(42:23):
who are in prison for violent crimes, have head injuries. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
They looked at that air in Hernandez case, and that
that the Boston Globe did the Spotlight team profoundly damage. Yeah.
I think we're going to look at our treatment of
prisoners UM as an essentially rooted in our inability to
(42:43):
recognize or our desire to not give a shit about
a lot of types of mental illness um and not
treat it and just lock it up. And I think
that that is something that will be viewed on the
same scale as lobotomies are today. I think I was
trying to like a specific procedure that we're like, oh,
you never do that anymore. But yeah, I know that's
a that's all, that's you're you're right on the nose
(43:04):
with that stuff. Yeah, I think I think there might.
I don't think it compares in terms of the scale,
but I think like one of the things a lot
of people with autism complain about with groups like Autism
Speaks is that their goal is to like eradicate autism,
and a lot of people argue, like, well, but wait,
I'm perfectly happy. I just have a different kind of
brain and I think about the world differently, and your
desire to eradicate me is kind of like eugenics and horrible.
(43:28):
And I do think that we will increasingly recognize that,
like trying to wipe out autism is incredibly fucked up, um,
and then instead we should be focusing on like helping
these people comtegrate with everyone else and like, yeah, um,
but I don't think the scale of that, and I
don't think like that's not it's a sliding scale. I
(43:51):
think it's worse. Two jam I s picks into people's brains.
I just keep thinking of the show that Nick. Did
you watch? The Nick No highly recommended Clive Owe and
Chris Sullivan who's not on the show This is us.
I think it's Soderberg, but it was on Showtime, And
it's all about like the medical advancements in the like
(44:11):
teens and twenties, and just seeing like what they were
trying to figure out and the chances they were taking
that ended up working, and like the advancements they would
find just even how to like do a transfusion and
stuff like that. So I just kept thinking of that,
because my whole thing is like when something very delicate
and very tricky, maybe that's redundant, but um ends up
(44:33):
being like common. I always wonder how many times what
was the trial and error process? It kind of scares me,
like what was the trial and error process for Walter Jackson,
Freedman and whatever? And those people are gone, I mean,
and and those monkeys are gone it's, um, you know,
there's an extent to which we were going to try lobotomies.
(44:57):
Of course it was. It was it was going to happen,
and it's bad. You know, even though some people were
going to be horribly affected by it. It had to
happen for medical science to advance. It didn't have to
happen on this scale. It's like, we were going to
realize that like riddling could be helpful in treating certain
kinds of like a d h D. It didn't have
(45:17):
to be wildly over prescribed to children at the level
it was in the nineteen nineties and stuff. Um, not
that I don't think obviously, I don't think giving riddle
into kids as nearly as bad as thousands of lobotomies
with ice picks and unwashed hands. But um, there's always
going to be some sort of like, we figured out
this new thing, it helps some people, let's massively over
(45:37):
apply it. That's kind of how human beings are. Um.
But if like, that's part of why the scientific method
is supposed to work the way it's supposed to work,
where scientists are supposed to kind of pull their ego
out of it and look at like Okay, well, now
we have data saying we're actually doing this way too
much and we should stop. But then you get a
guy like Freeman who bases his whole identity on the
(45:58):
fact that he's the best at this thing that we
shouldn't really be doing, um, and then it doesn't stop.
So it's this kind of problem where in an ideal world,
if we treated science the way we're always supposed to
treat it, somebody would have walked up to Freeman in
like the late forties or early fifties and been like, actually,
this is being done way too much, and he would
(46:18):
be like, ah, damn, okay, well let's figure out something better.
But instead he doesn't ye because he just wants to
do this. He wants to do this thing. He wants
to funk with people's brain exactly. Also, are you are
you a Song of Ice and Fire guy at all?
Or yeah? I love it? Yeah yeah yeah. Makes me
think of Qui born umah, the character, because there's always
(46:39):
that too in medical history, whether it's like because I
look at it, then there's more, I'm sure, but just
in the sake of this conversation, like I look at
like there's people who learn what medicine works, and they
dedicate their life to helping people. And then there's the
other type of person who has no problem just poking around,
putting things together and then seeing what comes of and
(47:00):
a lot of times you get advancements out of that
or you find out something that works. But they might
not necessarily be the same type of traditional doctor who
wants to help someone. They're just very curious and have
the ability to just dig around in people's innards to
see what can work where. And that always creeps me
onto it isn't that great? Yeah, yeah, you wanna plug
(47:23):
your plug doubles Daniel I do. Um. People should go
to Daniel van Kirk dot com. There you can see
all of my dates and where I'm going to be. Um.
I've got December two, I'm doing a show at Largo
on November two, I will be headlining in Pedalouma, California,
and other tour dates and things as well. But most importantly,
(47:46):
you can get my album Thanks Diane. It drops on November.
It's if you're hearing this before then you can pre
buy the album at the Apple Store app in your
phone or go to Daniel van Kirk dot com and
you can click through to there. When you do that,
you'll get an instant track called Don't Be a Dick,
which I'm proud of. But you'll get the whole album
onni November and go to Daniel van Kirk dot com
(48:09):
for all that, or listen to me on my podcast
Dump People Town, which I do with the Squaw Brothers,
or pen Pals, which I do with Rory Scoville. Cool Well,
I am Robert Evans. You can find me on the
internet at behind the Bastards dot com, where the sources
for this episode will be, including uh Jack el his
wonderful book Lobotomist. Uh. You can find us on Twitter
(48:33):
at Instagram A at Bastard's pod. You can find me
on Twitter at I right okay, And you can find
love in your heart as long as you're willing to
put an ice pick into your brain. So again, this
is my encouragement to all of our listeners to grab
an ice pick and start lobotomizing. Be a hero like
Dr Freeman. So if you can, we can we urge
(48:53):
people to carry out unlicensed surgery. No, but you could
plug your other podcast. I have an their podcast. I
do have another poet friend. Yeah, the Worst Year Ever
with Katie and Cody Uh from Some More News. We
talk about election, which will be the worst year ever.
Um So, if you want a lobotomy to feel like
(49:15):
sweet release, listen to the Worst Year Ever. This week
we talk about Tulsi Cabard, so that one's fun. Nice. Yeah, Well,
thanks for having me on this show man. I love
coming back and learning. Yeah, I'm thank you for coming. Daniel,
thank you for learning. Uh and uh, thank you for
spreading the gospel of the ice Pick
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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