American Experience on PBS
I just watched an episode called The Lobotomist. It was about Dr. Walter Freeman, who performed lobotomies on over 3,000 mentally ill patients from 1936 to 1967. He began by working with neurosurgeons in 1936, actually going into the brain with surgery…. but in 1946, he noticed an influx of mentally ill soldiers coming in from the war. So he wanted to find a fast, inexpensive way to perform lobotomies. He started doing “icepick lobotomies,” or going into the frontal lobe through the eye socket with a small icepick (it took about 3-4 minutes per lobotomy and he sometimes did as many as 15 in one day). With this, he toured the US, going to different mental institutions and having them line up their worst patients for lobotomies. Many patients died at his hands, but nobody did anything about it because they thought it was a miracle procedure. When the medical studies started coming out in the 1960’s, it became clear to most in the medical community that lobotomies were doing more harm than good. As his career went downhill, he moved to California to re-vamp it. While there, he started performing lobotomies on children under the age of 18. The children were mainly just having behavioral issues that any normal kid has. He was barred from practice in 1967 when a patient had a brain hemmorage on the operating table. He spent the rest of his life travelling all over the United States, desperately trying to find his patients from 1936 to then, trying to find out if the lobotomies really did help.
And now I am terrified and sad. It’s hard to explain the feelings I had while watching this on TV tonight. But it’s good to understand where we’ve been. Even today, we should be wary. We shouldn’t believe everything we hear. This went on for 30 years, and the media and mainstream medical world turned a blind eye to the deaths and the absolute destruction of lobotomy survivors. For 30 years. The inventor of the lobotomy was given a Nobel Peace Prize, for crying out loud. We need to understand where we’ve been.
You can watch this episode on PBS here for free. There’s also a good deal of other episodes to watch here, about things like the assassination of Lincoln and other important events in our history.
