The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness Book

A fellow named Freeman said: "I've
A sharp little knife that I drive;
If you want to be dead
I'll bore holes in your head
And then you won't know you're alive."
- allen kringel

When one rates a biography are they in part rating the biographee's life? Walter Freeman, the pioneer of lobotomy in America, has that showman type personality that does well to keep one's interest. But his personality of unconventionality and showmanship makes more for a nauseating mix when his instrument of choice is the icepick.

Actually, I read this because I wanted something dry and factual to read. This didn't prove all that dry. As for biographies go, though, this didn't feel very special either. I went into this not really knowing much about lobotomy other than thinking it produced a rather indifferent, vegetable-like state in its patients. This isn't far from the truth for a lot of lobotomy patients. But in my head that didn't seem too far off from patients nowadays on pharmaceuticals with bad long-term effects, but of course being less permanent in course.

Lobotomy was risky in that the results were not really certain. Nobody at the time had a good understanding of the frontal lobes, and one could not even be sure what one was cutting away. It produces a lot of questions, most quite ethical and religious. This book didn't really delve into that side of it, unfortunately, because our star Walter Freeman hadn't any interest in the ethics of it. He saw patients wasting away in institutions as a waste of human potential, and saw time spent on proper scientific testing as a waste of time that could be spent putting patients back into functionality.

There are some rather grim images of Freeman performing transorbital lobotomies, in one instance in a dusty attic -- resting a carpenter's mallet he used on the patient's stomach like a table. Somebody witnessing this particular one said of it that it seemed more like a circus routine.

It would be easy to paint Freeman in a bad light because of his careless ways of operating. And he was undeniably quite careless. But there is something very humanistic and empathetic in his concern over how his lobotomy patients fared afterward. Freeman would travel hundreds of miles and hunt down patients that had long moved away, to visit them and follow-up on them. He also received hundreds of Christmas cards throughout the years from his patients.

Lobotomy "helped" a lot of people get out of institutions, and some to go about fully "functional" lives. In others, it was seizures, incontinence, and death. Ultimately, it's a rather unsettling read but to me it isn't the surgery itself but Freeman as a pioneer of it that is the most sad and unsettling. I learned that today there are a couple hundred psychosurgeries performed in the U.S. annually, but which far less primitive than Freeman's lobotomies.