The most notorious surgery of the 20th century is the lobotomy, and the most infamous practicioner of this operation was the neurologist Walter Freeman (d. 1972). For a couple of decades in the mid-20th century, Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies on mentally ill patients, developing a technique of entering the brain through the eye socket with a tiny instrument that resembled an icepick. Freeman’s “transorbital lobotomies” were for a time the cutting edge (see what I did there?) of treatment for those mentally ill patients who had been institutionalized.
Freeman might have been motivated by the fame he garnered as the inventor of the “icepick surgery” as the procedure was dubbed, but he was also idealistic. Severe schizophrenia, OCD, and other mental afflictions had no known cures at the time, and Freeman deliberately operated in disadvantaged and poor communities, often charging nothing for patients who couldn’t afford to pay. He collected annecdotal evidence of grateful letters from former patients, and took photos of pre- and post- operative people he had lobotomized that showed happy faces and successful lives because of his surgeries.
However, annecdotal evidence is not data. As time went on, Freemen attracted critics who spoke of his overzealous approach. Freemen boasted about how fast he could operate, about how he didn’t need to use anesthesia on his patients (they were given an electro-shock before the surgery), about how he didn’t even need to have a sterile field or wear surgical scrubs . . . Over time, Freeman began to push his operations as a preventative measure. He even operated on children — the youngest was four years old. Even more damning, a hard look at his cases showed that 15% of his patients had died, and many experienced a worsening of their symptoms.
Freeman’s surgical license was eventually taken away, but it was actually the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine that finally put an end to the widespread practice of the lobotomy.
The first picture is a drawing by Freeman of his technique. The second shows Freeman at work.
Source(s): NIH Record @NIHecord.nih.gov, Nov 1, 2019, “All in their heads: when faces made the case for lobotomy,” Carla Garnett. BBC 30 Jan 2021, Claire Prentice, “The brain operation described as ‘easier than curing a toothache’. _The Icepick Surgeon_, 2021, Sam Keen.
