Beginning in the 1950s, you could take any patient into a local doctor’s office, pay $200, have an ice pick inserted through their eye socket and then hammered into their brain. The whole thing took less than five minutes and was considered as unremarkable as getting a flu shot. Called the ‘lobotomy’, Dr Walter Freeman had invented the procedure as a ‘miracle cure’ for any and all mental illness - he figured by cutting up the part of the brain that controlled emotion, he could stop people being so… emotional. Men would bring in their wives with post-natal depression. Parents would bring in children who occasionally misbehaved. America was officially dazzled by Dr Freeman’s lobotomy technique. But most patients who received lobotomies ended up severely brain damaged (because, you know, they had an ICE PICK shoved into their brain), with many needing 24-hour care for the rest of their lives, if they survived at all.
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BBC: ‘The strange and curious history of the Lobotomy’ (2011) - https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15629160
PBS documentary: ‘The Lobotomist’ (2008) - https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/lobotomist/
Howard Dully’s story on NPR (2005) - https://storycorps.org/podcast/special-remembering-howard-dully-of-my-lobotomy/
PBS interview with Howard Dully (2005) - https://www.pbs.org/video/american-experience-original-interview-howard-dully/
The Guardian: ‘He was so bad, they put an ice pick in his brain’ (2008) - https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/jan/13/neuroscience.medicalscience
Howard Dully wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Dully#cite_note-8
Dr. Walter Freeman wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Jackson_Freeman_II
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