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TALK/Getting inside the head of ‘The Lobotomist.’ Freeman was no ‘monster’
When Jack El-Hai began researching his book about the infamous Dr. Walter Freeman, he came to Philadelphia, where Freeman had left a career’s worth of documents and personal papers. Several years later, with the book written and on shelves across the country, El-Hai returned to Philadelphia, and to Penn, where Freeman had learned medicine. But in the years that passed between the two trips, El-Hai’s opinion of Freeman—the inventor of the lobotomy and, therefore, one of the most reviled figures in modern medicine—changed radically. “ When I started this book, I probably knew as much as what you know about lobotomy,” El-Hai said during a reading at Penn Bookstore on Feb. 9. “I thought lobotomy was this frightening procedure you would give someone to punish them.” El-Hai also admitted he presumed Freeman was some sort of “monster”—an insane physician who destroyed lives with his gruesome operation. But it wasn’t long after El-Hai began his research that he discovered Freeman was no monster at all. The picture that emerges, then, in El-Hai’s new book, “The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness,” may surprise some readers. “Lobotomists don’t have to be scary, or scary looking, at all,” he said. “Not mine, anyway.” El-Hai says Freeman was stubborn, and his unyielding endorsement of lobotomy—despite evidence late in his career that proved drug therapy to be significantly more effective—was irresponsible, El-Hai said. But for all of Freeman’s faults, there’s no questioning the fact he cared for his patients. In fact, El-Hai says he discovered Freeman to be a caring, concerned doctor who truly believed his revolutionary operation could help the thousands of people imprisoned in U.S. psychiatric wards. Digging through Freeman’s personal effects, El-Hai discovered hundreds of letters and cards from families, thanking Freeman for saving their loved ones from mental illness. “All of that coalesced into my picture of the man: A brilliant physician, but one who advocated for lobotomies far past their time,” El-Hai said. Freeman believed mentally ill patients suffered because the section of their brain called the thalamus was overactive, and that by severing the thalamus from the brain’s frontal lobe, those signals could be stopped. In the early variation of his surgery, Freeman would drill through the side of a patient’s skull, then insert a sharp item into those holes to cut the connections between the frontal lobe and the thalamus. Later in his career, Freeman would simply cut into the brain by inserting a knife between a patient’s eyeball and eyelid—a procedure he could complete in minutes. In some cases, the operation did exactly what Freeman hoped it would. Freeman performed thousands of lobotomies between 1930 and the 1970s, with some successful and some not. “This was not a case of a monster doing bad things to people,” El-Hai said. “There were shades of gray between the black and the white.” |
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