January 19, 2019 • 33 mins
Lobotomies -- brain surgeries to relieve psychiatric problems -- are rarely performed today, but they were once fairly common. Tune in to learn more about the controversial history and practice of lobotomies.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Saturday Stuff You Should Know
Select edition. Chuck here with my pick of the week,
all the way back to two thousand nine. Lobotomies. Man,
this one is ca crazy. This is one of us
is so good. I wish we could go back and
do it again for the first time. So much fun
to research, really interesting and grizzly history, medical history. Some
(00:22):
of my favorite stuff lies in those topics. And this
one is all about lobotomyes, man, oh man, just get
ready to learn about the frontal lobe ice pick lobotomy.
Actually used to do that. Welcome to Stuff you Should
Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
(00:43):
to the podcast. It's called Stuff you Should Know. Uh,
it's Josh and Chuck comes in Long Beach together. Now
you know you're in trouble. What's Chuck think? How long
you even sitting on that one week? That's good? Thanks?
Thank you, Chuck. How you doing well, sir? Are you
pretty good? Don't feel great? Actually, Chuck? I mean glad
to be alive? Yes, so, Chuck. Yes, I think this
(01:07):
could arguably pan out to be our greatest podcast ever. No,
I really don't think so, Chuck did the cheek thing
twice before this one was kind enough to do it
a second time. And I don't think we've ever had
a topic that Chuck and I were more intensely interested
in than this one. I know. It kind of just
came out of nowhere, and it's really well, not out
of nowhere, because it's historical, but um, in our eyes,
(01:31):
out of nowhere, which if funny, I say, in our eyes. Yeah,
a little foreshadowing from Charles Bryant. Nice one, Chuck. If
you will get off of L O L Cats for
a second and go check your iTunes, you'll find that
the title of this one is how lobotomies work, and
that's what we're gonna be talking about. Our lobotomy is
so fascinating, it really is. Lobotomy is kind of exist
(01:51):
in this little um segment of twentieth century culture medical madness.
So I guess you could say right right, and pop culture,
because you still hear it being thrown around like boys
might lobotomize me, scramble my brain. But it's kind of
exactly the way it happened. Yeah, yeah, So, Chuck, you're
a lover of great cinema, right, of course, of course,
(02:14):
you've seen one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, right, I
have a poster you do. Yeah, A good one. Yeah,
the one in Jack Nicholson laughing with the watch cap on. Yeah,
it's a good one. Um. So, of course you remember
the pivotal scene of the movie where McMurphy is um
lobotomized for being unruly, tries to kill Nurse Hatchet because
nurse Ratchet. Nurse Ratchet, Hatchet. That was a Freudian slip
(02:36):
right there. It was she was a hatchet. Yeah. Um so,
uh she was mean and I'm totally with you. It
was a Freudian slip. Part that got me. I had
like eight chokes going in my head at once, and
I was like, I can't say that. I can't say that.
I can't say that. It's like the Terminator exactly right. Yeah.
Um so yeah. So he tries to kill Nurse Ratchet
(02:57):
because she was a terrible nurse and kind of evil,
very evil, And so he gets lobotomized and they don't
show the procedure. Don't worry if you ever want to
know what one was like, we're going to go into
grizzly detail a minute. Um. And he comes out just
kind of this drooling imbecile, which I have to remind
everybody was actually a medical term before it was imbecile,
(03:21):
moron an idiot? Were all degrees of mental retardation? Aren't
that weird? Yeah? Of course this is at the same
time that people were performing lobotomy, so it seems like
very archaic, even though it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, well,
let's set the scene. Okay, all right, so we're talking
in the nineteen thirties, and the nineteen thirties were a
terrible time to be nuts. Basically, you got locked up
(03:46):
in a straight jacket to keep you from eating your
own feces um or throwing it at orderlies or doing
anything really crazy. And that was about it. Um. They
had certain um, certain techniques like shock therapy. Right, what
do they use? Uh they still use shock therapy here
and there actually so well you have like electro convulsive therapy,
(04:09):
and you had apparently they also used to use insulin. Okay, insulin, right,
we know how bad that is from I can't remember
one of our aging podcasts, right, Um. And they would
basically inject a hefty dose of insulin into a patient.
Um too, the okay, chuck my paper wrestling was going
(04:30):
to get the wrath. They they know we used crib sheets,
buddy um. So they inject a patient with the hefty
dose of insulin and um would basically shock their system,
possibly causing convulsions. There was another drug was just to
subdue them. Hold on, I'm getting to that. This is
the craziest part. This is this was the grasp that
(04:52):
medical science had on mental illness at the time. There's
another drug called metrozol which was a respiratory and um
circulatory stimulant, and the hefty doses it to produce shock
and convulsions. So if you'll notice, all three of these
produced convulsions shock therapy. And the reason that they did
(05:12):
that was because there was a suspicion that there is
a link between epilepsy, convulsions, and mental illness and that
if you had one, you couldn't have the other. So
by producing convulsions, they thought that they were treating mental illness. Unbelievable. Yeah,
so you could have just had epilepsy and that that
they would set you in the electro convulsive shock therapy
(05:33):
chair and to treat you. Yeah, they'd stick a little
paddle in your mouth and turn on the juice. Tell
you what, man, I like. I sometimes look back and say,
by the nineteen fifties, that would have been cool to
lift back then. But then you hear stories like this
and you kind of forget about the downside. Yeah, ect
is definitely one of the downside idea of this era,
right alright. So um, another problem with this was that
(05:55):
the mental um mental care. Wow, have you had lobotomy?
I had a little bit of and yeah, um no,
I had some metro's all earlier. I'm all jacked up. Um.
The the the state of mental hospitals in the US
in the in the thirties and forties was that they
were overcrowded, right, because I mean, if you can't treat anybody, really,
(06:18):
you can't treat their mental illness, which they come in
there in yeah, right. They wanted docile patients, they wanted
people that didn't cause trouble and really anyway that they
could get there was kind of okay at the time.
And this right, and this was also before drug therapy
was created. So in the thirties, nineteen thirty six, this
new procedure comes about, right, Well, it was the thirty
(06:43):
in Portugal you're right. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, that
was doctor Antonio IGAs Monies and Dr Almida Lima in Portugal.
H performed the first lobotomies by drilling holes into the
skull on either side of the preforntal cortex and injecting
alcohol in there to destroy the fibers connected it. And
(07:04):
this was actually based on UM an earlier study from
nineteen thirty three by a couple of Yale researchers who
removed the prefrontal cortex is from a pair of monkeys
and the other one Binky will say yeah. Um, these
two monkeys had their prefrontal cortex core texas removed and um.
(07:26):
The researchers found that they could still They still had intellect,
but they were lacking the emotion that led to violent
outbursts when they didn't get their way. Zecky, by the way,
I like Binky better. Um can we stay with Binky? Okay?
So the the doctor um, oh, the Portugue Fulton and Carlisle.
I'll know you're going back to Portugal. Yeah. Dr Moniz
(07:48):
saw Fulton present um. One of the Yale researchers saw
Fulton present his findings and he thought, huh, my mental
patients act like monkeys, you know, violent outbursts when they
don't you know, when they see things that aren't really there. Right,
So let me get my hands on a cadaver and
see what I can see, what I can work out
with the brain. So this early, this early, uh, it
(08:11):
was called the prefrontal lobotomy. Right, started out, like you said,
by drilling holes in the school and adding alcohol. And
the whole reason why chuck the prefrontal cortex. Why the
frontal lobe? What's so important about that? Well, the pre
funnel lobe. But cortex, Josh has a number of complex functions,
um called executive functions is what they're known as. We're
(08:33):
talking high level decision making, planning, reasoning, understanding. Personality, it's
personal expression, that right thing. So basically your personality, the
way you create things, the way you see the world
and how you react to the world, g emotions, Right,
this is all this is all generated here. It's originates
in the prefrontal court. And you're stabbing the front of
(08:54):
your head right now you speaking, uh. And so that
as we all know that the brain is connected, it's
all connected together, sending and receiving signals like like mass email.
And uh so, what you have here, You've got two
types of matter, gray and white matter. Gray matter includes
neurons and brain cells and blood vessels and things like that.
(09:16):
White matter is axons and nerve fibers, and they connect
the gray matter and carry messages with electric impulses. So
what the gray matters where these impulses are generated. The
white matter translates them or transfers them, transmits, It transmits
one of the trans uh so, a lobotomy. What that
(09:36):
does is it is intended to sever the white matter
between the different areas of gray matter, thus interrupting the
transmission essentially, right, And the problem um with dr monies
is technique. The early technique using alcohol is like you said,
the brains all connected, and alcohol being a liquid, it's
kind of hard to keep in one place. So it
(09:58):
started to go and destroy other area, is it, right,
A very good idea. But he was onto something. He
was onto something by destroying the white matter, right, yes,
So instead he decided to be a little more precise
and he kept with the whole drilling method is actually
based on an ancient um ancient method of brain surgery
called trepidation, right, which actually what gosh, we could. I'm
(10:20):
going to be in trouble here. We had a fan
right in and suggest trepidation and that's what got me
on the botomies in the first place. And I apologize.
So if you're out there listening, oh you don't remember
the fan, thank you, nameless fan. We love you, Binky,
thanks Binky or Becky uh um. Yeah. And actually in
(10:58):
the article how the botomies work, um, there's a cool
relief from a horonymous box Um painting of some early
physician trepanning a patient and he's got like a little
segment of the skull lifted off in the brain's exposed
and he's just poking around in there. Um. But okay,
so he's still dr Monez is still using the drilling method,
(11:21):
but now he's inserting instruments in there. He inserted this
one that sounded like, Um, it's a handle with a
little loopy wire that comes out. But yes, so when
you when you push it, when you push down the
back of it, the loop extends out, and then you
can pull it in and just basically removed hunks of
prefrontal cortex of white matter, right, And that's exactly what
(11:45):
hopefully it didn't matter. Yeah, you would sing UM and
it was successful. Well yeah, to to again, to varying
degrees and maybe not again because I think that's the
first time we've said that. But yeah, the the lobotomy
was successful to varying degrees, very varying degrees. But there
was this guy who went and saw UM dr monies
(12:07):
perform one of these. Yeah, this work gets good. And
this guy was named Dr Walter Freeman. And for probably
about what fifty thousand people uh in the U s Alone,
this meeting between these two men was the worst thing
that ever happened in the history of humanity, because that's
about how many people were lobotomized between for about over
(12:29):
about a seven year period in the US. Was it
just seven years? Wow? Okay, heavy work, So then there
was many many more actually um. But yeah, the Dr
Walter Freeman became an immediate UM evangelists. He was called
for lobotomies. UM. He he tried monies as technique with
(12:53):
a with a partner UM and did it successfully for
a while. But the problem is it was still surgery, right,
It required a surgeon to do it um operating room. Right.
If Freeman was actually not a neurosurgeon. He was a neurologist,
required anesthetic. Yeah, so there there were some some drawbacks
to it in Freeman's of pin right, expense being one
(13:13):
of them. Time and resources. So he created something that
was a lot handier, a lot easier, and a lot quicker,
and that is what we call the transorbital or ice
pick lobotomy, Right, Can I say what this is? He
determined that if you took something which is technically called
(13:34):
an orbital class, but it really looks sort of like
an ice pick. You said it yesterday on our webcasts.
It's a nice pick. Uh, call it a rose by
any other name exactly. So you put this ice pick
over over the eyeball, but under the bone there what's
that called Between the eyeball and the eyelid, The eyeball
on the island until the back of the orbital bone. Right,
(13:56):
So once you get to the back of the ordable
orbital bone, there's a little resist sense there because it's bone,
and so enter a little silver hammer and so he
just tinks on that thing until it cracks through and
then he's got a pretty clean passageway to the frontal cortex.
And so you've got an ice pick sticking out of
your eye. He uh, he scrambles it up a little
(14:17):
bit once it's in there, and then he does the
same thing on the other side, and uh, ten minutes
later you're lobotomized, literally, so he do both sides right right, Um,
he got kind of good at this. Yeah, Dr Freeman
got really I guess you could say good at this,
or at least very fast. Um. In one two week
(14:37):
period in West Virginia, he performed lobotomies on people, and
in one day, he performed lobotomies on twenty five patients,
right one day and one day. So he's just basically
bringing him in and sending him out. He's exactly doing that. Actually,
I read an interview with one of his assistants at
the time and he said he would literally not take breaks.
(15:00):
As the patient left, another one would be brought in
ten minutes later boom. And I don't think we mentioned yet.
He he before he does this, he doesn't use anesthetic.
He knocks them out with electro shock, right. So it's
making use of two extremely primitive and violent techniques right time.
And the result was, like we said, varied, I mean,
(15:22):
it ranged anywhere from people being satisfied, and you know,
seemingly successful, like a highly emotional people suicidal all of
a sudden, being more docile and not so worried to
uh to death and people rendered vegetables literally. So yeah,
well doctor the map. Dr Freeman actually referred to lobotomyes
(15:43):
um informally as soul surgery. Yeah. I hate that. The
reason why is because he was basically removing what kind
of what makes us human. People could still function under
successful abotomy. People could still function, they could still talk,
but they weren't They weren't doing anything, they weren't bringing
anything to the table. There was no reason for them
(16:04):
to exist so much anymore for the personality surgery exactly right,
um and uh he would uh he did it um
again so fast, it's so so often. And he had
a touch of a showman to him that he basically did.
He had a lobotomobile in which he performed demonstrations. Right.
(16:24):
He toured the country, went all over the place. I
think he ended up doing. Estimates run from two thousand
to five thousand. Between nineteen forty six and nineteen sixty seven,
transorbital lobotomies UM in twenty three states in the US right,
he'd performed with both hands. He would stick the ice
picks in with both hands at once to add a
little flare, but showmanship. Yeah, so he was basically performing shows,
(16:46):
lobotomy shows. Um. And not everybody reacted well to these. Um.
There was seasoned surgeons who had seen tons of gore
and blood and horrible things in their lifetimes. Um would
commit watching these things. Some had to leave. Um. There
was a nurse whose account I read of watching a
(17:07):
lobotomy said, uh, the when he moved the ice picks
back and forth, it made the sound of tearing cloth. Um.
Later on in the USSR, which actually banned lobotomies, and
I think nineteen which is embarrassing. Yeah, well fourteen years
before we did right. Yeah. Um, a physician named Nikolai
(17:32):
or serinsky Sky thanks Dudski um he called. He said
that lobotomies violate the principles of humanity and change an
insane person into an idiot. Again remember a medical tournament
at the time. Um. So there I imagine that there
was something that affected you. Were you human being, like
(17:58):
a real human being? See being? This this rough violent,
um misguided or unguided procedure being performed that it would
affect you in some way, like some very primal party
of you would say, that's not supposed to happen, right, Plus,
there was no official scientific basis for this. It was basically, hey,
look at the result in some cases, that is what
(18:20):
they were kind of basing this whole thing on. And also,
as we were saying about Freeman being a showman and
doing it so fast, there was one visit to a
mental institution in Iowa. I don't remember what year it was, um,
but Freeman killed three people in one visit, and one
of the people this is so awful, um, he was
doing his little show off thing with the two picks
(18:42):
at once. Instead of as his own procedure dictated one
and then the other side. He he was doing two
picks at once. So the patients on the table um
with two ice picks sticking out of his eyes, and
Freeman says, I'm going to take a photo of this,
steps back to take a photo. One of the ice
picks slips and kills the patient instantly. So apparently Freeman
(19:04):
was said to have basically just packed up right then
and moved on to the next place without missing a
bead or staying geez, that packed up the lobotomobile. Yeah,
hit the you know one person he lobotomized, Josh, I
know you do. He lobotomized John F. Kennedy's sister, Rosemary Dr.
Freeman did in one. Uh. Rosemary was twenty three years
(19:24):
old and uh, early on her childhood she was shy
and easy going, they say, but as a teenager, shocker,
she became rebellious and moody, which and that's what struck
me in a lot of these cases is so many
of them, we're just normal human emotions, like anything from
postpartum depression to you know, an overactive child. You know,
(19:45):
it's just unbelievable. So she was lobotomized and uh afterward
was rendered Basically, she couldn't speak, she had the mental
capacity of an infant, couldn't control her bodily functions, and
the Kennedy family basically from that point on said that
she uh was mentally retarded, which they claimed that she
(20:05):
may have been before, but who knows. You want to
talk about another guy, Howie Chuck and I have a
shared hero. He is an indomitable three fifty pounds six
ft three bus driver who has this gentle tender personality,
and his name is Howard Dully. And at the age
(20:27):
of twelve, Howard Dully met Dr Freeman under unfortunate circumstances,
meaning Dr Freeman had a couple of ice picks on
him when they met, and um, Howard ended up under
Freeman's care because of his stepmother, right chuck, Yeah, he
It was the kind of the classic story the father
gets remarried to a stepmother who is not very patient
(20:48):
and understanding with her son. That sounded like, you know,
it sounds like he may have been a little ryanbunctious,
but what twelve year old boy isn't. And I think
you have some good notes, actual notes. Yeah, well in
Freeman's notes that Dully turned up later, and we should say,
how are Dully created this great radio piece that's an MPR.
You can actually find um by typing in my lobotomy
(21:10):
and Google. I think it's the first thing that comes up.
It's one of the most amazing things you've ever heard,
where he just goes and retraces the steps of his
lobotomy that he got when he was twelve and tries
to get to the bottom of what happened. We typically
don't recommend people go listen to other things that it's
not us, but that's how good it is, right, yeah, exactly,
it is that good. Uh, it's way better than us actually.
(21:32):
Um But he finds the Dr. Freeman's notes on his
case and apparently a stepmother pled her case to get
him lobotomized by pointing out that he daydreams a lot,
and when you ask him what he's daydreaming about, he says,
I don't know. Uh, he doesn't want to go to bed,
and when he does, he sleeps well. In my personal favorite,
(21:54):
he turns on the lights in rooms when there's broad
daylight streaming in unbelievable. I know that kid deserves the lobotomy.
But one of the things that I think one of
the reasons why you and I both look up to
Howard Dolly, it was because he has wondered his whole
life how different would he be Like I lived hard
(22:16):
and fast as a younger man, right right, Yeah, actually,
way way harder and faster. Um so, But I've I've
often wondered, you know, how much sharper would I be
had I not lived like that? But this is my
own doing, It was my own choosing. Howard Dolly had
to think that same thing, like, is there something wrong
(22:37):
with me? Is there a part of me missing through
no choice or fault of his own? We should also
say that, Um, when Howard's stepmother found that he was
not a vegetable, she just got him out of the
house and he became a ward of the state. So
he went all around lady. Yeah, so um again in
the end, he finds, you know, there there really isn't
(22:58):
something wrong within the he he's a pretty terrific persons
as he as it turned out, lobotomy or not right.
It took him a long time though. I mean he
battled addiction and various forms of mental illness his whole
life after this, and uh, I think going this the
special that air, and he wrote a book and went
and talked to his father. After forty years, he actually
finally spoke to his dad about it, and that seems
(23:20):
to have been the thing to get him over the
edge to not feeling like a freak anymore. As he
called it. Yeah, you can actually hear him working it
out in my lobotomy. Yeah, a big deep voice. Yeah,
he sounds kind of like Sam, not Sam Shepherdson. What's
the guy? Uh, the big Lebowski Sam Elliott, Sam Elliott, Yeah,
(23:40):
that's what are you reminded me of the dude. Yeah.
He also had that big mustache to sort of like
Sam Ellie, that handlebar biker mustache. So, uh, chuck. Whatever
(24:11):
happened to lobotomies? Why where? Why did they go the
way of the dinosaur? Just go? Well? Uh, A couple
of reasons. I mean, one, there was a lot of
gaining steam with the criticism of it because they found
that they were lobotomizing criminals. They were lobotomizing soldiers from
World War Two because criminals against their will sometimes right,
(24:32):
but they lobotomized soldiers because hospitals were overcrowded veterans unbelievable,
and so that that was kind of gaining steam. And
then the introduction of uh thorzine basically everything. Um. I
believe that somebody said that thorzine was to the treatment
(24:53):
of schizophrenia, that insulin I'm sorry, that penicillin was to
the treatment of infectious diseases, which is a pretty big comparison.
So thorazine was developed in nineteen fifty and as it
began to fall into widespread use. Um, lobotomy is kind
of fell out of widespread use, and Dr Freeman himself
(25:17):
he uh, he had one last one, one last lobotomy
in nineteen sixty seven, right, Yeah, he killed a woman
with the brain hemorrhage after the third try. I think
this is her third lobotomy, and uh, she wasn't just
you know, some mental patient in Iowa. This is a housewife.
And when she died of I believe of hemorrhage after
(25:39):
the procedure, that third procedure, that was it. He was
banned from surgery performing any kind of surgery from that
that point on and actually spent the rest of his
days until he died in nineteen seventy two, traveling the
country and the camper, which if it was his lobotomobile, yeah,
I don't know. He wasn't pitching it. He was actually
(25:59):
going around trying to um find. He was visiting old
patients to prove that he had done good, and he
had done some good in a couple of of cases,
in several cases, I imagined. His first one was a
woman I can't remember her first name, but it was
ian Esco and she uh, she was violently suicidal, is
(26:21):
described by her daughter. And afterwards she went on to
to live a happy, fulfilled life. Yeah, but you know,
every every successful case I read about, they would say
things like they weren't violently suicidal anymore and they were just,
you know, kind of happy, but it still seemed to
be that lights wrong. But no one's home thing like
the couple the er, yeah, the married couple was. The
(26:45):
husband had his wife lobottom eyes because she was so
emotional and she was suicidal as well. Yeah, and she
says that she was happy as a clam and he
was satisfied. He said that she came home and she
never calls any more trouble and she was just happy
and she could still back talk. Yeah, she could still cooking,
clean and do all the things she could do before.
And she agreed, I just haven't been worried about things
since then. And she was in her eighties. But you know,
(27:08):
you read that, and emotions are normal, mood swings are normal.
It's agreed. But I do I do think that there
is a certain threshold and if you're violently suicidal, you know,
maybe a lobotomy was a better option. Yeah, But I
also want to know what the criteria for all this
was back then. There wasn't any so yeah, so put
that in your pipe. And but one of the most
(27:28):
unsettling things, one of the most unsettling things that I
found from this article is that lobotomies are still performed
today in England, right, the UK is one of a
few countries um where it's it's no longer called the
botomies because lobotomy is such a horrible stigma attached to it,
and for good reason, neurosurgery for a mental disorder and
(27:49):
m D and today apparently they use m r s
as guides to be more precise. But pretty much this
type of surgery, psychosurgery as it's called um is, it's
pretty much the same thing. It's destroying white matter connections
and you're removing people's emotional selves, right. I mean, there
may be something too to that, but certainly it was
(28:14):
so non specific and non technical to jam ice picks
and and just blindly move them back and forth. Said no,
wonder that was all kinds of results. So Chuck, we
are both kind of nuts. And I'm really glad it's
not like nineteen because yeah, yeah, my wife Emily and
I would both be on the the lobotomy table. I
(28:35):
think I drive you to the sea Freeman. Thanks, sure,
I appreciate that. Yeah. Well that's it. That's it for lobotomies, buddy. Yeah.
I encourage people to go out and listen to Howard
Dully's uh radio show there. It's really great. Hopefully you
guys enjoyed this one. You can read all about Lobotomyes
on how stuff works dot com. You know what to do.
(28:57):
Uh you know handy search bar, etcetera. Uh, and Chuck,
let's let's talk some audible stuff. So our sponsored audible
dot com hit it. Okay, So if everyone goes to www.
Dot audible podcast dot com slash stuff and sign up
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(29:20):
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around um the America's basically two archaeological sites and gets
(29:44):
the scoop on the most recent findings and finds that
there were way more people in the America's before Columbus
showed up than we realized. Uh and yeah, there's a
lag between the arrival of Columbus uh to Hispaniola and
the second wave that followed within the next fifty years.
The second wave found that this, you know, that was
(30:06):
Virgin Territory. There's almost no one there. Turns out it's
because about a hundred million people died of smallpox from
Columbus's first arrival between then and the second wave. It's fascinating.
That's right there. You just did one. Well, maybe we'll
do a bigger sewed on it, a bigger said, Yeah,
what about you you've been on Yeah, I'm gonna recommend
uh just quickly. Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Rapport. Oh,
(30:30):
I saw his portraits National Gallery portrait. It was Catonian recently.
It was awesome with his familiar scowl. Yeah, I love
that guy. So yeah. He has a very popular book
that he reads himself called I'm an American and so
can You. And that's all I need to say about that.
It's hysterical. Nice check. So you can get either one
of those titles for free by going to www. Dot
(30:54):
audible podcast dot com slash stuff and signing up and
that is Audible right there, baby, let's do a listener.
Let's do it, Josh. I'm just gonna call this. We
got a lot of great feedback for the high fruit
toast corn Syrup. Yeah, so much so that we're gonna
have probably like three podcasts in a row. We're gonna
(31:15):
be reading soon that mail. I don't know what it is,
we should I can bring back Haikus, Okay, all right,
So I'm just gonna call it intelligent listener mail because
Max is a smart guy, and I like these most
of all. I'm a graduating senior in the Business College,
but when I'm not in class or listening to podcast,
I almost always enjoy listening to philosophy. It's more or
(31:36):
less my passion. More specifically, I'm interested in world religion,
medical metaphysical theory, and man's relationship to nature in the universe.
So this guy is obviously smarter than you to say
that fruit dose, corn syrup or any other man made
chemical compound does not occur naturally. You're speaking with the
basic assumption that man is something different than nature. Unfortunately,
(31:57):
for those who can find themselves above nature in a
portance or authority, this is not the case. It's our
Western culture and religion that strengthens this point of view.
Man didn't PLoP into nature is a separate and flawed
phenomenon in a stupid natural universe. Man came out of nature.
Man is nature, Man is the universe. To borrow a
quote from my favorite philosopher Alan Watts, and you're seeing,
(32:20):
you're hearing, you're talking, you're thinking, you're moving. You express
that which it is which moves the sun and other stars.
So to perceive yourself as something different is only an
inability to identify yourself with the cosmos. So Josh Man's
manipulation of compounds is really the world's manipulation of itself,
or perhaps the universe manipulating itself. And that is certainly
(32:43):
a natural occurrence boom. And that is what happens when
I off handedly say something is man made nice? Well,
what's the guy's name? Max? And I think the philosophy too,
So I thought, what's gonna call? We dig you Max?
And we really dig anybody who sends us something, especially
if it's as intelligent as that. Uh. If you want
to show off your ginormous brain, send us an email
(33:05):
to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Saturday Stuff You Should Know
Select edition. Chuck here with my pick of the week,
all the way back to two thousand nine. Lobotomies. Man,
this one is ca crazy. This is one of us
is so good. I wish we could go back and
do it again for the first time. So much fun
to research, really interesting and grizzly history, medical history. Some
(00:22):
of my favorite stuff lies in those topics. And this
one is all about lobotomyes, man, oh man, just get
ready to learn about the frontal lobe ice pick lobotomy.
Actually used to do that. Welcome to Stuff you Should
Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
(00:43):
to the podcast. It's called Stuff you Should Know. Uh,
it's Josh and Chuck comes in Long Beach together. Now
you know you're in trouble. What's Chuck think? How long
you even sitting on that one week? That's good? Thanks?
Thank you, Chuck. How you doing well, sir? Are you
pretty good? Don't feel great? Actually, Chuck? I mean glad
to be alive? Yes, so, Chuck. Yes, I think this
(01:07):
could arguably pan out to be our greatest podcast ever. No,
I really don't think so, Chuck did the cheek thing
twice before this one was kind enough to do it
a second time. And I don't think we've ever had
a topic that Chuck and I were more intensely interested
in than this one. I know. It kind of just
came out of nowhere, and it's really well, not out
of nowhere, because it's historical, but um, in our eyes,
(01:31):
out of nowhere, which if funny, I say, in our eyes. Yeah,
a little foreshadowing from Charles Bryant. Nice one, Chuck. If
you will get off of L O L Cats for
a second and go check your iTunes, you'll find that
the title of this one is how lobotomies work, and
that's what we're gonna be talking about. Our lobotomy is
so fascinating, it really is. Lobotomy is kind of exist
(01:51):
in this little um segment of twentieth century culture medical madness.
So I guess you could say right right, and pop culture,
because you still hear it being thrown around like boys
might lobotomize me, scramble my brain. But it's kind of
exactly the way it happened. Yeah, yeah, So, Chuck, you're
a lover of great cinema, right, of course, of course,
(02:14):
you've seen one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, right, I
have a poster you do. Yeah, A good one. Yeah,
the one in Jack Nicholson laughing with the watch cap on. Yeah,
it's a good one. Um. So, of course you remember
the pivotal scene of the movie where McMurphy is um
lobotomized for being unruly, tries to kill Nurse Hatchet because
nurse Ratchet. Nurse Ratchet, Hatchet. That was a Freudian slip
(02:36):
right there. It was she was a hatchet. Yeah. Um so,
uh she was mean and I'm totally with you. It
was a Freudian slip. Part that got me. I had
like eight chokes going in my head at once, and
I was like, I can't say that. I can't say that.
I can't say that. It's like the Terminator exactly right. Yeah.
Um so yeah. So he tries to kill Nurse Ratchet
(02:57):
because she was a terrible nurse and kind of evil,
very evil, And so he gets lobotomized and they don't
show the procedure. Don't worry if you ever want to
know what one was like, we're going to go into
grizzly detail a minute. Um. And he comes out just
kind of this drooling imbecile, which I have to remind
everybody was actually a medical term before it was imbecile,
(03:21):
moron an idiot? Were all degrees of mental retardation? Aren't
that weird? Yeah? Of course this is at the same
time that people were performing lobotomy, so it seems like
very archaic, even though it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, well,
let's set the scene. Okay, all right, so we're talking
in the nineteen thirties, and the nineteen thirties were a
terrible time to be nuts. Basically, you got locked up
(03:46):
in a straight jacket to keep you from eating your
own feces um or throwing it at orderlies or doing
anything really crazy. And that was about it. Um. They
had certain um, certain techniques like shock therapy. Right, what
do they use? Uh they still use shock therapy here
and there actually so well you have like electro convulsive therapy,
(04:09):
and you had apparently they also used to use insulin. Okay, insulin, right,
we know how bad that is from I can't remember
one of our aging podcasts, right, Um. And they would
basically inject a hefty dose of insulin into a patient.
Um too, the okay, chuck my paper wrestling was going
(04:30):
to get the wrath. They they know we used crib sheets,
buddy um. So they inject a patient with the hefty
dose of insulin and um would basically shock their system,
possibly causing convulsions. There was another drug was just to
subdue them. Hold on, I'm getting to that. This is
the craziest part. This is this was the grasp that
(04:52):
medical science had on mental illness at the time. There's
another drug called metrozol which was a respiratory and um
circulatory stimulant, and the hefty doses it to produce shock
and convulsions. So if you'll notice, all three of these
produced convulsions shock therapy. And the reason that they did
(05:12):
that was because there was a suspicion that there is
a link between epilepsy, convulsions, and mental illness and that
if you had one, you couldn't have the other. So
by producing convulsions, they thought that they were treating mental illness. Unbelievable. Yeah,
so you could have just had epilepsy and that that
they would set you in the electro convulsive shock therapy
(05:33):
chair and to treat you. Yeah, they'd stick a little
paddle in your mouth and turn on the juice. Tell
you what, man, I like. I sometimes look back and say,
by the nineteen fifties, that would have been cool to
lift back then. But then you hear stories like this
and you kind of forget about the downside. Yeah, ect
is definitely one of the downside idea of this era,
right alright. So um, another problem with this was that
(05:55):
the mental um mental care. Wow, have you had lobotomy?
I had a little bit of and yeah, um no,
I had some metro's all earlier. I'm all jacked up. Um.
The the the state of mental hospitals in the US
in the in the thirties and forties was that they
were overcrowded, right, because I mean, if you can't treat anybody, really,
(06:18):
you can't treat their mental illness, which they come in
there in yeah, right. They wanted docile patients, they wanted
people that didn't cause trouble and really anyway that they
could get there was kind of okay at the time.
And this right, and this was also before drug therapy
was created. So in the thirties, nineteen thirty six, this
new procedure comes about, right, Well, it was the thirty
(06:43):
in Portugal you're right. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, that
was doctor Antonio IGAs Monies and Dr Almida Lima in Portugal.
H performed the first lobotomies by drilling holes into the
skull on either side of the preforntal cortex and injecting
alcohol in there to destroy the fibers connected it. And
(07:04):
this was actually based on UM an earlier study from
nineteen thirty three by a couple of Yale researchers who
removed the prefrontal cortex is from a pair of monkeys
and the other one Binky will say yeah. Um, these
two monkeys had their prefrontal cortex core texas removed and um.
(07:26):
The researchers found that they could still They still had intellect,
but they were lacking the emotion that led to violent
outbursts when they didn't get their way. Zecky, by the way,
I like Binky better. Um can we stay with Binky? Okay?
So the the doctor um, oh, the Portugue Fulton and Carlisle.
I'll know you're going back to Portugal. Yeah. Dr Moniz
(07:48):
saw Fulton present um. One of the Yale researchers saw
Fulton present his findings and he thought, huh, my mental
patients act like monkeys, you know, violent outbursts when they
don't you know, when they see things that aren't really there. Right,
So let me get my hands on a cadaver and
see what I can see, what I can work out
with the brain. So this early, this early, uh, it
(08:11):
was called the prefrontal lobotomy. Right, started out, like you said,
by drilling holes in the school and adding alcohol. And
the whole reason why chuck the prefrontal cortex. Why the
frontal lobe? What's so important about that? Well, the pre
funnel lobe. But cortex, Josh has a number of complex functions,
um called executive functions is what they're known as. We're
(08:33):
talking high level decision making, planning, reasoning, understanding. Personality, it's
personal expression, that right thing. So basically your personality, the
way you create things, the way you see the world
and how you react to the world, g emotions, Right,
this is all this is all generated here. It's originates
in the prefrontal court. And you're stabbing the front of
(08:54):
your head right now you speaking, uh. And so that
as we all know that the brain is connected, it's
all connected together, sending and receiving signals like like mass email.
And uh so, what you have here, You've got two
types of matter, gray and white matter. Gray matter includes
neurons and brain cells and blood vessels and things like that.
(09:16):
White matter is axons and nerve fibers, and they connect
the gray matter and carry messages with electric impulses. So
what the gray matters where these impulses are generated. The
white matter translates them or transfers them, transmits, It transmits
one of the trans uh so, a lobotomy. What that
(09:36):
does is it is intended to sever the white matter
between the different areas of gray matter, thus interrupting the
transmission essentially, right, And the problem um with dr monies
is technique. The early technique using alcohol is like you said,
the brains all connected, and alcohol being a liquid, it's
kind of hard to keep in one place. So it
(09:58):
started to go and destroy other area, is it, right,
A very good idea. But he was onto something. He
was onto something by destroying the white matter, right, yes,
So instead he decided to be a little more precise
and he kept with the whole drilling method is actually
based on an ancient um ancient method of brain surgery
called trepidation, right, which actually what gosh, we could. I'm
(10:20):
going to be in trouble here. We had a fan
right in and suggest trepidation and that's what got me
on the botomies in the first place. And I apologize.
So if you're out there listening, oh you don't remember
the fan, thank you, nameless fan. We love you, Binky,
thanks Binky or Becky uh um. Yeah. And actually in
(10:58):
the article how the botomies work, um, there's a cool
relief from a horonymous box Um painting of some early
physician trepanning a patient and he's got like a little
segment of the skull lifted off in the brain's exposed
and he's just poking around in there. Um. But okay,
so he's still dr Monez is still using the drilling method,
(11:21):
but now he's inserting instruments in there. He inserted this
one that sounded like, Um, it's a handle with a
little loopy wire that comes out. But yes, so when
you when you push it, when you push down the
back of it, the loop extends out, and then you
can pull it in and just basically removed hunks of
prefrontal cortex of white matter, right, And that's exactly what
(11:45):
hopefully it didn't matter. Yeah, you would sing UM and
it was successful. Well yeah, to to again, to varying
degrees and maybe not again because I think that's the
first time we've said that. But yeah, the the lobotomy
was successful to varying degrees, very varying degrees. But there
was this guy who went and saw UM dr monies
(12:07):
perform one of these. Yeah, this work gets good. And
this guy was named Dr Walter Freeman. And for probably
about what fifty thousand people uh in the U s Alone,
this meeting between these two men was the worst thing
that ever happened in the history of humanity, because that's
about how many people were lobotomized between for about over
(12:29):
about a seven year period in the US. Was it
just seven years? Wow? Okay, heavy work, So then there
was many many more actually um. But yeah, the Dr
Walter Freeman became an immediate UM evangelists. He was called
for lobotomies. UM. He he tried monies as technique with
(12:53):
a with a partner UM and did it successfully for
a while. But the problem is it was still surgery, right,
It required a surgeon to do it um operating room. Right.
If Freeman was actually not a neurosurgeon. He was a neurologist,
required anesthetic. Yeah, so there there were some some drawbacks
to it in Freeman's of pin right, expense being one
(13:13):
of them. Time and resources. So he created something that
was a lot handier, a lot easier, and a lot quicker,
and that is what we call the transorbital or ice
pick lobotomy, Right, Can I say what this is? He
determined that if you took something which is technically called
(13:34):
an orbital class, but it really looks sort of like
an ice pick. You said it yesterday on our webcasts.
It's a nice pick. Uh, call it a rose by
any other name exactly. So you put this ice pick
over over the eyeball, but under the bone there what's
that called Between the eyeball and the eyelid, The eyeball
on the island until the back of the orbital bone. Right,
(13:56):
So once you get to the back of the ordable
orbital bone, there's a little resist sense there because it's bone,
and so enter a little silver hammer and so he
just tinks on that thing until it cracks through and
then he's got a pretty clean passageway to the frontal cortex.
And so you've got an ice pick sticking out of
your eye. He uh, he scrambles it up a little
(14:17):
bit once it's in there, and then he does the
same thing on the other side, and uh, ten minutes
later you're lobotomized, literally, so he do both sides right right, Um,
he got kind of good at this. Yeah, Dr Freeman
got really I guess you could say good at this,
or at least very fast. Um. In one two week
(14:37):
period in West Virginia, he performed lobotomies on people, and
in one day, he performed lobotomies on twenty five patients,
right one day and one day. So he's just basically
bringing him in and sending him out. He's exactly doing that. Actually,
I read an interview with one of his assistants at
the time and he said he would literally not take breaks.
(15:00):
As the patient left, another one would be brought in
ten minutes later boom. And I don't think we mentioned yet.
He he before he does this, he doesn't use anesthetic.
He knocks them out with electro shock, right. So it's
making use of two extremely primitive and violent techniques right time.
And the result was, like we said, varied, I mean,
(15:22):
it ranged anywhere from people being satisfied, and you know,
seemingly successful, like a highly emotional people suicidal all of
a sudden, being more docile and not so worried to
uh to death and people rendered vegetables literally. So yeah,
well doctor the map. Dr Freeman actually referred to lobotomyes
(15:43):
um informally as soul surgery. Yeah. I hate that. The
reason why is because he was basically removing what kind
of what makes us human. People could still function under
successful abotomy. People could still function, they could still talk,
but they weren't They weren't doing anything, they weren't bringing
anything to the table. There was no reason for them
(16:04):
to exist so much anymore for the personality surgery exactly right,
um and uh he would uh he did it um
again so fast, it's so so often. And he had
a touch of a showman to him that he basically did.
He had a lobotomobile in which he performed demonstrations. Right.
(16:24):
He toured the country, went all over the place. I
think he ended up doing. Estimates run from two thousand
to five thousand. Between nineteen forty six and nineteen sixty seven,
transorbital lobotomies UM in twenty three states in the US right,
he'd performed with both hands. He would stick the ice
picks in with both hands at once to add a
little flare, but showmanship. Yeah, so he was basically performing shows,
(16:46):
lobotomy shows. Um. And not everybody reacted well to these. Um.
There was seasoned surgeons who had seen tons of gore
and blood and horrible things in their lifetimes. Um would
commit watching these things. Some had to leave. Um. There
was a nurse whose account I read of watching a
(17:07):
lobotomy said, uh, the when he moved the ice picks
back and forth, it made the sound of tearing cloth. Um.
Later on in the USSR, which actually banned lobotomies, and
I think nineteen which is embarrassing. Yeah, well fourteen years
before we did right. Yeah. Um, a physician named Nikolai
(17:32):
or serinsky Sky thanks Dudski um he called. He said
that lobotomies violate the principles of humanity and change an
insane person into an idiot. Again remember a medical tournament
at the time. Um. So there I imagine that there
was something that affected you. Were you human being, like
(17:58):
a real human being? See being? This this rough violent,
um misguided or unguided procedure being performed that it would
affect you in some way, like some very primal party
of you would say, that's not supposed to happen, right, Plus,
there was no official scientific basis for this. It was basically, hey,
look at the result in some cases, that is what
(18:20):
they were kind of basing this whole thing on. And also,
as we were saying about Freeman being a showman and
doing it so fast, there was one visit to a
mental institution in Iowa. I don't remember what year it was, um,
but Freeman killed three people in one visit, and one
of the people this is so awful, um, he was
doing his little show off thing with the two picks
(18:42):
at once. Instead of as his own procedure dictated one
and then the other side. He he was doing two
picks at once. So the patients on the table um
with two ice picks sticking out of his eyes, and
Freeman says, I'm going to take a photo of this,
steps back to take a photo. One of the ice
picks slips and kills the patient instantly. So apparently Freeman
(19:04):
was said to have basically just packed up right then
and moved on to the next place without missing a
bead or staying geez, that packed up the lobotomobile. Yeah,
hit the you know one person he lobotomized, Josh, I
know you do. He lobotomized John F. Kennedy's sister, Rosemary Dr.
Freeman did in one. Uh. Rosemary was twenty three years
(19:24):
old and uh, early on her childhood she was shy
and easy going, they say, but as a teenager, shocker,
she became rebellious and moody, which and that's what struck
me in a lot of these cases is so many
of them, we're just normal human emotions, like anything from
postpartum depression to you know, an overactive child. You know,
(19:45):
it's just unbelievable. So she was lobotomized and uh afterward
was rendered Basically, she couldn't speak, she had the mental
capacity of an infant, couldn't control her bodily functions, and
the Kennedy family basically from that point on said that
she uh was mentally retarded, which they claimed that she
(20:05):
may have been before, but who knows. You want to
talk about another guy, Howie Chuck and I have a
shared hero. He is an indomitable three fifty pounds six
ft three bus driver who has this gentle tender personality,
and his name is Howard Dully. And at the age
(20:27):
of twelve, Howard Dully met Dr Freeman under unfortunate circumstances,
meaning Dr Freeman had a couple of ice picks on
him when they met, and um, Howard ended up under
Freeman's care because of his stepmother, right chuck, Yeah, he
It was the kind of the classic story the father
gets remarried to a stepmother who is not very patient
(20:48):
and understanding with her son. That sounded like, you know,
it sounds like he may have been a little ryanbunctious,
but what twelve year old boy isn't. And I think
you have some good notes, actual notes. Yeah, well in
Freeman's notes that Dully turned up later, and we should say,
how are Dully created this great radio piece that's an MPR.
You can actually find um by typing in my lobotomy
(21:10):
and Google. I think it's the first thing that comes up.
It's one of the most amazing things you've ever heard,
where he just goes and retraces the steps of his
lobotomy that he got when he was twelve and tries
to get to the bottom of what happened. We typically
don't recommend people go listen to other things that it's
not us, but that's how good it is, right, yeah, exactly,
it is that good. Uh, it's way better than us actually.
(21:32):
Um But he finds the Dr. Freeman's notes on his
case and apparently a stepmother pled her case to get
him lobotomized by pointing out that he daydreams a lot,
and when you ask him what he's daydreaming about, he says,
I don't know. Uh, he doesn't want to go to bed,
and when he does, he sleeps well. In my personal favorite,
(21:54):
he turns on the lights in rooms when there's broad
daylight streaming in unbelievable. I know that kid deserves the lobotomy.
But one of the things that I think one of
the reasons why you and I both look up to
Howard Dolly, it was because he has wondered his whole
life how different would he be Like I lived hard
(22:16):
and fast as a younger man, right right, Yeah, actually,
way way harder and faster. Um so, But I've I've
often wondered, you know, how much sharper would I be
had I not lived like that? But this is my
own doing, It was my own choosing. Howard Dolly had
to think that same thing, like, is there something wrong
(22:37):
with me? Is there a part of me missing through
no choice or fault of his own? We should also
say that, Um, when Howard's stepmother found that he was
not a vegetable, she just got him out of the
house and he became a ward of the state. So
he went all around lady. Yeah, so um again in
the end, he finds, you know, there there really isn't
(22:58):
something wrong within the he he's a pretty terrific persons
as he as it turned out, lobotomy or not right.
It took him a long time though. I mean he
battled addiction and various forms of mental illness his whole
life after this, and uh, I think going this the
special that air, and he wrote a book and went
and talked to his father. After forty years, he actually
finally spoke to his dad about it, and that seems
(23:20):
to have been the thing to get him over the
edge to not feeling like a freak anymore. As he
called it. Yeah, you can actually hear him working it
out in my lobotomy. Yeah, a big deep voice. Yeah,
he sounds kind of like Sam, not Sam Shepherdson. What's
the guy? Uh, the big Lebowski Sam Elliott, Sam Elliott, Yeah,
(23:40):
that's what are you reminded me of the dude. Yeah.
He also had that big mustache to sort of like
Sam Ellie, that handlebar biker mustache. So, uh, chuck. Whatever
(24:11):
happened to lobotomies? Why where? Why did they go the
way of the dinosaur? Just go? Well? Uh, A couple
of reasons. I mean, one, there was a lot of
gaining steam with the criticism of it because they found
that they were lobotomizing criminals. They were lobotomizing soldiers from
World War Two because criminals against their will sometimes right,
(24:32):
but they lobotomized soldiers because hospitals were overcrowded veterans unbelievable,
and so that that was kind of gaining steam. And
then the introduction of uh thorzine basically everything. Um. I
believe that somebody said that thorzine was to the treatment
(24:53):
of schizophrenia, that insulin I'm sorry, that penicillin was to
the treatment of infectious diseases, which is a pretty big comparison.
So thorazine was developed in nineteen fifty and as it
began to fall into widespread use. Um, lobotomy is kind
of fell out of widespread use, and Dr Freeman himself
(25:17):
he uh, he had one last one, one last lobotomy
in nineteen sixty seven, right, Yeah, he killed a woman
with the brain hemorrhage after the third try. I think
this is her third lobotomy, and uh, she wasn't just
you know, some mental patient in Iowa. This is a housewife.
And when she died of I believe of hemorrhage after
(25:39):
the procedure, that third procedure, that was it. He was
banned from surgery performing any kind of surgery from that
that point on and actually spent the rest of his
days until he died in nineteen seventy two, traveling the
country and the camper, which if it was his lobotomobile, yeah,
I don't know. He wasn't pitching it. He was actually
(25:59):
going around trying to um find. He was visiting old
patients to prove that he had done good, and he
had done some good in a couple of of cases,
in several cases, I imagined. His first one was a
woman I can't remember her first name, but it was
ian Esco and she uh, she was violently suicidal, is
(26:21):
described by her daughter. And afterwards she went on to
to live a happy, fulfilled life. Yeah, but you know,
every every successful case I read about, they would say
things like they weren't violently suicidal anymore and they were just,
you know, kind of happy, but it still seemed to
be that lights wrong. But no one's home thing like
the couple the er, yeah, the married couple was. The
(26:45):
husband had his wife lobottom eyes because she was so
emotional and she was suicidal as well. Yeah, and she
says that she was happy as a clam and he
was satisfied. He said that she came home and she
never calls any more trouble and she was just happy
and she could still back talk. Yeah, she could still cooking,
clean and do all the things she could do before.
And she agreed, I just haven't been worried about things
since then. And she was in her eighties. But you know,
(27:08):
you read that, and emotions are normal, mood swings are normal.
It's agreed. But I do I do think that there
is a certain threshold and if you're violently suicidal, you know,
maybe a lobotomy was a better option. Yeah, But I
also want to know what the criteria for all this
was back then. There wasn't any so yeah, so put
that in your pipe. And but one of the most
(27:28):
unsettling things, one of the most unsettling things that I
found from this article is that lobotomies are still performed
today in England, right, the UK is one of a
few countries um where it's it's no longer called the
botomies because lobotomy is such a horrible stigma attached to it,
and for good reason, neurosurgery for a mental disorder and
(27:49):
m D and today apparently they use m r s
as guides to be more precise. But pretty much this
type of surgery, psychosurgery as it's called um is, it's
pretty much the same thing. It's destroying white matter connections
and you're removing people's emotional selves, right. I mean, there
may be something too to that, but certainly it was
(28:14):
so non specific and non technical to jam ice picks
and and just blindly move them back and forth. Said no,
wonder that was all kinds of results. So Chuck, we
are both kind of nuts. And I'm really glad it's
not like nineteen because yeah, yeah, my wife Emily and
I would both be on the the lobotomy table. I
(28:35):
think I drive you to the sea Freeman. Thanks, sure,
I appreciate that. Yeah. Well that's it. That's it for lobotomies, buddy. Yeah.
I encourage people to go out and listen to Howard
Dully's uh radio show there. It's really great. Hopefully you
guys enjoyed this one. You can read all about Lobotomyes
on how stuff works dot com. You know what to do.
(28:57):
Uh you know handy search bar, etcetera. Uh, and Chuck,
let's let's talk some audible stuff. So our sponsored audible
dot com hit it. Okay, So if everyone goes to www.
Dot audible podcast dot com slash stuff and sign up
to get one free download from audible dot COM's fifty
(29:20):
thousand plus titles of audio books, stand up comedy, spoken
word speeches, pretty much anything you can listen to is
right there. And I was on their browsing just this
morning and I found one of my all time favorite
books by Charles Mann Good One Great. One man runs
around um the America's basically two archaeological sites and gets
(29:44):
the scoop on the most recent findings and finds that
there were way more people in the America's before Columbus
showed up than we realized. Uh and yeah, there's a
lag between the arrival of Columbus uh to Hispaniola and
the second wave that followed within the next fifty years.
The second wave found that this, you know, that was
(30:06):
Virgin Territory. There's almost no one there. Turns out it's
because about a hundred million people died of smallpox from
Columbus's first arrival between then and the second wave. It's fascinating.
That's right there. You just did one. Well, maybe we'll
do a bigger sewed on it, a bigger said, Yeah,
what about you you've been on Yeah, I'm gonna recommend
uh just quickly. Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Rapport. Oh,
(30:30):
I saw his portraits National Gallery portrait. It was Catonian recently.
It was awesome with his familiar scowl. Yeah, I love
that guy. So yeah. He has a very popular book
that he reads himself called I'm an American and so
can You. And that's all I need to say about that.
It's hysterical. Nice check. So you can get either one
of those titles for free by going to www. Dot
(30:54):
audible podcast dot com slash stuff and signing up and
that is Audible right there, baby, let's do a listener.
Let's do it, Josh. I'm just gonna call this. We
got a lot of great feedback for the high fruit
toast corn Syrup. Yeah, so much so that we're gonna
have probably like three podcasts in a row. We're gonna
(31:15):
be reading soon that mail. I don't know what it is,
we should I can bring back Haikus, Okay, all right,
So I'm just gonna call it intelligent listener mail because
Max is a smart guy, and I like these most
of all. I'm a graduating senior in the Business College,
but when I'm not in class or listening to podcast,
I almost always enjoy listening to philosophy. It's more or
(31:36):
less my passion. More specifically, I'm interested in world religion,
medical metaphysical theory, and man's relationship to nature in the universe.
So this guy is obviously smarter than you to say
that fruit dose, corn syrup or any other man made
chemical compound does not occur naturally. You're speaking with the
basic assumption that man is something different than nature. Unfortunately,
(31:57):
for those who can find themselves above nature in a
portance or authority, this is not the case. It's our
Western culture and religion that strengthens this point of view.
Man didn't PLoP into nature is a separate and flawed
phenomenon in a stupid natural universe. Man came out of nature.
Man is nature, Man is the universe. To borrow a
quote from my favorite philosopher Alan Watts, and you're seeing,
(32:20):
you're hearing, you're talking, you're thinking, you're moving. You express
that which it is which moves the sun and other stars.
So to perceive yourself as something different is only an
inability to identify yourself with the cosmos. So Josh Man's
manipulation of compounds is really the world's manipulation of itself,
or perhaps the universe manipulating itself. And that is certainly
(32:43):
a natural occurrence boom. And that is what happens when
I off handedly say something is man made nice? Well,
what's the guy's name? Max? And I think the philosophy too,
So I thought, what's gonna call? We dig you Max?
And we really dig anybody who sends us something, especially
if it's as intelligent as that. Uh. If you want
to show off your ginormous brain, send us an email
(33:05):
to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com
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Josh Clark
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