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Pretty moving radio piece from NPR - My Lobotomy. It lasts about 23 minutes.
When Howard Dully was 12 years old, his stepmother didn't like having him around. After shopping for child psychologists and having at least four of them insult her by suggesting that maybe she was the one that needed therapy, she finally came across Walter Freeman, the psychiatrist that invented the "ice pick" lobotomy (instead of cutting through the skull, he slid an ice pick between the eyeball and the eyesocket, and tapped the ice pick through the thin part of the skull with a mallet, then wiggled the ice pick around).
I read the book, which goes into a lot more detail about his life than the radio clip. Freeman actually took Dully and two other kids he'd performed lobotomies on to a psychiatry convention and gave a talk about child lobotomies. Freeman was pretty enthusiastic about ice pick lobotomies and seemed shocked that he got such a hostile reaction from the other psychiatrists present. He was lucky they didn't have fruit to throw at him (this being before someone invented throwing shoes).
This is just a bizarre radio clip. The interview with Freeman's son, the interview Dully conducts with his father asking for an explanation as to how he could let his new wife have his son lobotomized...
Being an entirely normal person for all appearances, there were a few that suspected that Freeman had second thoughts about performing a lobotomy on a child. They did an MRI to see if the lobotomy had really been performed, and the damage was shocking. Had it been done to an adult, he would have been in bad shape. Ironically, having a lobotomy at such a young age enabled his brain to remap around much of the damage.
When Howard Dully was 12 years old, his stepmother didn't like having him around. After shopping for child psychologists and having at least four of them insult her by suggesting that maybe she was the one that needed therapy, she finally came across Walter Freeman, the psychiatrist that invented the "ice pick" lobotomy (instead of cutting through the skull, he slid an ice pick between the eyeball and the eyesocket, and tapped the ice pick through the thin part of the skull with a mallet, then wiggled the ice pick around).
I read the book, which goes into a lot more detail about his life than the radio clip. Freeman actually took Dully and two other kids he'd performed lobotomies on to a psychiatry convention and gave a talk about child lobotomies. Freeman was pretty enthusiastic about ice pick lobotomies and seemed shocked that he got such a hostile reaction from the other psychiatrists present. He was lucky they didn't have fruit to throw at him (this being before someone invented throwing shoes).
This is just a bizarre radio clip. The interview with Freeman's son, the interview Dully conducts with his father asking for an explanation as to how he could let his new wife have his son lobotomized...
Being an entirely normal person for all appearances, there were a few that suspected that Freeman had second thoughts about performing a lobotomy on a child. They did an MRI to see if the lobotomy had really been performed, and the damage was shocking. Had it been done to an adult, he would have been in bad shape. Ironically, having a lobotomy at such a young age enabled his brain to remap around much of the damage.
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