Lobotomists

I was watching PBS the other night when they brought on the documentary "The Lobotomist." This documentary is about Dr. Freeman, the inventor of the lobotomy, and it documents this awful procedure. It was developed in response to bad publicity of overcrowded psychiatric institutions.

From the program:

On May 6, 1946, Life magazine published "Bedlam 1946," an exposé of two
state hospitals: Pennsylvania's Byberry and Ohio's Cleveland State. To a country
shaken by recent revelations of Nazi
atrocities, the pictures were deeply affecting. The crisis in state mental
hospitals motivated Dr. Walter Freeman to devise a simple version of the
lobotomy procedure, one that could be used on a mass scale.

"All of a sudden America sees these photos that look like concentration
camp photos. You see people huddled naked along walls, strapped to benches --
and it really is this descent into this shameful moment. And the country did
say, we have to do something about this." - Robert Whitaker, writer

So Dr. Freeman did something about it. He made patients quiet and easy to control by scrambling their frontal lobes, inserting ice picks through their orbital cavities. I'll spare you the pictures (see the PBS website for the graphic details).

I must emphasize that this documentary puts the procedure into perspective. They were desperate times and there weren't many options for many of these patients. However, now that we've developed many more procedures and medications, it is not a good idea, nor necessary. I've asked all my docs to make a pledge with me: they will not stick ice picks into people's frontal lobes. Nearly all of them laugh at me when I ask them that, which I take as a good sign. One older doc actually said to me quite gruffly "Oh, we haven't done that procedure in a couple of years, at least."