The lunacy of lobotomy

A sadistic and idiotic fraud.

If any activity in psychiatry conjures up pictures of lunatic psychiatrists running around performing sadistic human experimentation on terrified patients, it is lobotomy.

And yet that is exactly what occurred. Not as some ‘Frankenstein’ secretly testing his mad theories, but for more than two decades from the mid-1930s on, performed by the ‘very best’ psychiatrists, sanctioned by psychiatric organizations in the West and avidly promoted by the media as the latest fad. Truly a circus of horrors.

Was the practice banned in the West like it was, even in the Soviet Union? No, it petered out with the introduction of psychiatric drugs as treatments which, even then dangerous, were considered a better alternative than smashing one’s way into the patient’s skull and tearing apart brain tissue.

There had been efforts of experimentation, attacking the brain in humans, however, this had not gained acceptance until leucotomy.

Leucotomy was initially performed by Egas Moniz who has the dubious distinction of being labelled the founder of ‘modern’ psychosurgery.

In turn, Moniz was inspired by experiments on chimpanzees by neuroscientist John Fulton. Fulton somehow claimed success for his experiments when the chimpanzees who were upset with his betrayal of agreements in experiments were “pacified” by the removal of the animal’s frontal lobes. ¹

After meeting with Moniz and correspondence, a United States psychiatrist named Walter Freeman renamed the procedure ‘lobotomy’ and performed it for the first time in 1936.

Freeman then changed Moniz’s procedure to instead of taking coring, slashing the interconnecting tissue from the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain. (Neither Moniz nor Freeman had any scientific basis for their procedures other than human experimentation and a personality failing of neither could admit they were wrong.) Nonetheless, the procedure required a neurosurgeon and Freman teamed up with James Watts to perform the act.

And a performance it was, playing to the media, Freeman the ‘showman,’ would invite the media and public to attend a lobotomy session. There is even a reference to Freeman killing a patient while posing for a media photograph thrusting the ‘ice pick;’ too far into the brain. ^{4 5}

“Freeman (1959) suggests that it is good to damage the intellectual capacity of the neurotic because the neurotic thinks too much” … “Speaking at the Washington, D.C. academy of Neurosurgery in 1965, Freeman accurately describes the effects of his surgery when he points out that lobotomy leads to some of the same results as the last stages of deteriorating schizophrenia. When such a patient is so demoralized and deteriorated by institutional life that he no longer gives the ward any trouble, then there’s no purpose to giving him surgery.”

P Brennin . The Return of Lobotomy and Psychosurgery. 1972. ⁷

By January 1946, Walter Freeman decided to make the procedure even easier and introduced a ’10 minute lobotomy’.

The first lobotomy instruments used on patients were ice picks taken from Freeman’s kitchen which were used to make holes in the household’s belts.

“As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. Freeman would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient’s eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face.”

Didbin. The Surprising History of the Lobotomy. 2021. ⁹

Freeman now dropped any need for a neurosurgeon and operating room and according to him, the procedure could now be done in any room where ECT could be applied to provide seizures. ¹⁰

Wolfhard Baumgartel, a physician who witnessed Freedman perform a lobotomy told StoryCorps:

“He wanted to prove that he was right, he was convinced that he was right. I thought, ‘How can a man be relaxed just going blindly into a brain?!’”

Storycorps. My Lobotomy. ^{11 12}

It is estimated that there were 80,000 persons subjected to lobotomy and possible far more, some 50,000 of those being in the United States primarily due to Freeman’s efforts.

Deaths directly from the procedure are reported as between 5% and 17%. ^{14 15 16}

Many studies to follow up on the victims found evidence of debilitating brain damage and deteriorating states years after a lobotomy. They had lost their capacity of insight and judgement. Some cases developed epilepsy. Some were unable to care for their children, unable to hold down a job or unable to feed themselves and had to be re-taught the use of a toilet. ^{17 18 19}