The horror of lobotomy

This story has been haunting me ever since I learnt about it. The horrors of the human mind seem nothing compared to a terrifying neurosurgical procedure in vogue during the 1940’s. Lobotomy is now a part of popular culture (as seen in The Ramones, the Velvet Underground and Tennessee William’s plays among others).

It all started in in 1935, when Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz pioneered his prefrontal leucotomy and was awarded a Nobel Prize for it in 1949. By severing the nerves that connected the prefrontal lobe with the rest of the brain, lobotomy was supposed to treat a wide range of mental illnessess, including anxiety, depression, or even undesired behaviour.

It was Pennsylvania-born psychiatrist and neurologist Walter Freeman who democratised lobotomies. While initially he worked with neurosurgeon James W. Watts, Freeman,  who never had a surgical training, developed his new technique: the ice pick lobotomy. He was looking for a quicker procedure and it seems he found it. Experimenting with corpses, he tried to find an alternative to drilling the skull, as it was commonly done. So he introduced an icepick through the eye sockets, reaching for the frontal lobe. To replace the icepick, he designed two new instruments,  the leucotome and the orbitoclast. He had to use a hammer to allow the leucotome to penetrate through the thin layer of bone into the brain and sever the nerve fibers to isolate the frontal lobe. The procedure would last just a few minutes.

Freeman at work

Freeman believed that his procedure would sort out the problems with overcrowded mental institutions. So, in a strange similitude with stories of vigilantes, mad preachers or snake-oil sellers, Freeman wandered around the country, in a van named the Lobotomobile, practising endless lobotomies.  Reports calculate that during the 1940’s and 1950’s, over 40000 lobotomies were performed on Americans.

Freeman’s famous patients

One of Freeman’s patients, Howard Dully, lobotomised at 12,  spent decades recovering from the surgery. After being institutionalised, incarcerated and having lived on the streets as an alcoholic, he got a college degree and researched his case,  co-writing the book My Lobotomy.

But of course, the most famous case is Rosemary Kennedy, younger sister of president JFK. Lobotomy was supposed to be the cure for Rosemary Kennedy’s mental problems, allegedly a slight mental retardation and violent mood swings. There is huge controversy regarding these claims: the Kennedy family had a higher than the average IQ. Rosemary’s diaries, published in the 1980’s, don’t exhibit any obvious trace of mental problems, either. But she wasn’t like the other Kennedys. Her father, Joseph Kennedy, probably feared that her behaviour could perturbate the charismatic aura of the family.

She was lobotomised by Watts and Freeman at the age of 23. During the operation she was conscious, as she had to be able to reply to Freeman’s questions (reciting prayers, counting backwards). It was a way of deciding that the operation was being succesful. When she no longer made sense, they were done. After the lobotomy, Rosemary’s mood swings stopped, but also her ability to live independently, speak coherently and control her bowels.  She died in a mental institution in 2005.

Rosemary was kept as the family’s darkest secret until her brother became president in 1960. A statement from the National Association for Retarded Children revealed that JFK’s ‘mentally retarded sister’ was kept in an institution in Wisconsin. After she passed away in 2005, the statement of the Kennedy said she was  “a lifelong jewel to every member of our family (…). Her mental retardation was a continuing inspiration to each of us, and a powerful source of our family’s commitment to do all we can to help all persons with disabilities live full and productive lives”. Observing photographs of her and reading her diaries makes the horror closer, more real. There was a time in which a moderately difficult behaviour was enough to allow a surgeon to poke into your brain, with no guarantee about the results.

Rosemary Kennedy, before and after the lobotomy

Everything is postmodern: Lobotomy and popular culture references

Suddenly, last summer (Tennessee Williams)

One flew over cuckoo’s nest (1975, Milos Forman)

The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror V

The X- Files: Unruhe

The Velvet Underground – Lady Godiva’s Operation

The Ramones- Teenage Lobotomy

Explore posts in the same categories: Horror, Science

Tags: lobotomy, mental illnesses, Rosemary Kennedy, Walter Freeman

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