Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Bastard Who Invented The Lobotomy

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

In Episode 94, Robert is joined by Daniel Van Kirk to discuss Walter Freeman, the father of lobotomies.FOOTNOTES: The Lobotomist Walter Freeman: The Father of the Lobotomy Rosemary Kennedy: the sad life of President Kennedy's younger sister Rosemary Kennedy: Telling the story of a forgotten daughter Inside Rosemary Kennedy's Disastrous Lobotomy – And How Her Father Chose Her Doctor Walter Freeman: The Father of the Lobotomy He was bad, so they put an ice pick in his brain... Joe Kennedy, Sr sought secret deal with De Valera on Irish ports during the War Mental Illness Is On the Rise in the U.S. for a Frustrating Reason The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness  My Lobotomy Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What? Not a morning person. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the show where we talk about the worst people in history, and I introduce the show badly. Today, we have an unusual morning recording at an ungodly hour. What is it, Sophie? It's 11.39am. I feel like I'm the first person who's ever been awake this early.

Aside from my guest today, of course, Mr. Daniel Bancur. Hello, thanks for having me back. How are you doing, Daniel? I'm great, my man. I am wonderful. Daniel, go ahead. No, no. Oh, I was just saying, I've been up for two hours, so I feel it. That's very impressive.

Do you like mornings? I do not, but I've recently found out that I am able to get so many more things done the earlier I get up, which would seem to be very simple math, but nothing that I had personally made any efforts to experience until recently in my life. I would say, on average, nowadays, I'm up around before eight, maybe sometimes six-thirty, but I am not a morning person. I hate sunrises. I love sunsets. Or Robert would say six-thirty. That's the middle of the night. Well, that is when I went to bed last night. It is? They're about maybe five-thirty.

Well, I appreciate you making this effort then, man. That's crazy. My sleep schedule is still all fucked up from the flight. Sure. Now, Daniel, we've established that you're sort of ambivalent towards mornings, leaning towards not liking them. How do you feel about brains? How do you feel about your brain? I feel pretty good about it. We do. Yeah, it's holed up pretty well. My memory is still very good.

And I haven't gotten to the point where I have to have a calendar. I would say I use it for about 50% of my stuff. I should be using it for a lot more, but mine's holed up so far, I think. Well, I think most people like their brain except for the moments when they hate them. And I think that probably for the listeners of this show, statistically, I've spent about 50% of their waking hours not liking their brain because this is a show for depressed people who like to hear about terrible things. As a general rule, that's our demo, isn't it, Sophie? I hope not.

Well, I deal with depression and I like screwed up fucked up shit, so I guess I'm in the right place. I mean me too. Maybe I'm describing the author of the show and its primary cast more than the listeners. I hope the listeners are happy, but I'm making an assumption here. Either way, you're here for them. As of a 2017 study by the Journal of Psychiatric Services, more than 8 million Americans suffer from severe psychological distress. Now, this is a blanket term for quote, feelings of sadness, worthlessness, restlessness,

that are hazardous enough to impair physical well-being. That sounds pretty familiar to me. And that number doesn't include all the Americans struggling with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, psychosis, depression, and a whole galaxy of other brain-based thingamajigs to deal with. And to some extent, it's always been this way. Huge chunks of people have always had brains that don't let them comfortably interface with mainstream society. Now, we're not great at helping people with mental illnesses in 2019, but a few decades ago, we were much worse at it.

And today, we're going to talk about the man who was perhaps the very, very worst of all at it. So, do you know the name Walter Jackson Freeman II? I do now. He invented lobotomies, and that's who we're talking about today. They're just like, well, we'll just remove it. Yep. We'll just scramble it up a little bit, actually. Oh, you yell too much?

We'll remove it. Oh, you had an unwanted pregnancy? We'll remove it. And not just the pregnancy part. No, actually, we will keep the pregnancy, but we'll scramble that brain up. Yeah. I'm sure we'll touch on some of them, but I've just heard horror stories of like, well, we had a sister, and then she just wouldn't stop arguing with her parents, so she went away.

She liked boys. And then we stuck a needle in her brain. Oh, what a time it was. Not all that long ago. Man, I am going to bunker down for this. Yeah. My dog is a registered therapy dog if you need to pet her. Okay, great.

Is she a registered lobotomist, Sophie, because I feel like there's a lot of money in that? No, but we'll look into it. We'll look into it. He was born on November 14th, 1895 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Walter I, was also a doctor, but not a very good one. He hated the work, and he did it only grudgingly. He was like an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and it was said that his ideal world would have been one in which people didn't have ears, noses, or throats, so he wouldn't have to work.

Well, his son kind of took that one next level, then. Oh, you want things just removed that you don't want to deal with? That's what I'm going to do, Dad. Now, Walter Jackson II's grandfather, Keen Freeman, was one of the most celebrated physicians of his age and was like the first doctor who did a bunch of important things. He was a legitimate trailblazing medical motherfucker. So, Walter Freeman II was a sick child, which was not unusual in an era where the average fistfight came with a better prognosis than the average surgery.

He developed enlarged lymph nodes when he was 14 months old, which his grandfather had to cut out. The surgery worked, but it permanently paralyzed some of the muscles in Walter's shoulder and head. Walter II also underwent a tonsillectomy and suffered from diphtheria, scarlet fever, the measles, whooping cough, the mumps, and pink eye. I don't want to say that God definitely wanted this baby dead, but I think the evidence speaks for itself. Yeah, they tried. Yeah, he did his best. Young Walter's first memory was of the head of a pickaxe breaking through the wall of his nursery

as the result of a home demolition that got a little sloppy, which is a pretty badass first memory. Oh, yeah, for sure. Also, not too far off of an analogy of what he would later do to people's own lives. And not too far off from a great scene in The Shining, which starred Jack Nicholson, who was also in one flu over the Cuckoo's Nest in a movie about a lobotomy. Ooh, that was a good knot. We tied a lot of things together. Now, the wonderful biography of Walter, The Lobotomist, notes that he also nursed a lifelong fear of horses, but never knew why. That doesn't come up again. I just think it's interesting.

People are terrified of something for no reason. And they can't let it go. Well, I'm also afraid of horses. Okay, well, that's not what we're talking about today. All right, well, you need to put that in. That needs to go in the book. Right. Are you scared of anything on an existential level that makes no sense to you? Well, if you're scared of it, doesn't it make sense to you?

Not always. I don't know. I'm very afraid of prison. Okay, that makes total sense. Yeah, that's what it makes sense to me, but it is like, when I just think about not being able to get out of somewhere that you are destined to, they're like, oh, we decide. I don't like it bothers me. That shows 60 days in. Have you watched that? No, that sounds like a fucking nightmare, though.

It's like they embed civilians into a prison system. The only person that knows that they're not an actual prisoner is the warden. And then the camera crew sets up as though they're doing a documentary in the prison, but they use that to do their confessional talking head moments. So they interview a lot of prisoners, but none of them assume, well, one of us isn't actually even supposed to be here. And their job is to last 60 days. And quite a few of them end up just getting beaten up.

Yeah, that makes sense. One was bad at his cover story of what he was supposed to be in there for. So once you just start lying to other prisoners, they assume you must be a pedophile. And that's why you're like no pun intended KG about what you got in there for. And that didn't end well for that guy either. Once everybody was like, oh, you're a pedophile. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. And then they don't care about that. That's what they think.

So you get beat up. Is there a huge cash prize? I don't know if there is any cash prize. I'm trying to think like you would have to be, I would only do it for enough money that I would be able to buy a cabinet in the woods. Like you would have to give me cabin in the woods money in order to like do that fucking thing. But that sounds like the worst. It would have to be nice woods.

So you for like 350, you would do it. No, like 500 is going to be the low end of that shit. I'm talking a nice cabin. See, one time when I toured Alcatraz, they let us go into the solitary confinement. And they're like, anybody want to check it out? And then I thought, you know what, lean in on your fear. So I went in and the guys shut the door. They're like, I don't know what you'd call it,

probably a park ranger at this point because of what Alcatraz is. And then the tour guide, whatever. And then he pretended that the door was stuck and he couldn't get me out. And I did not enjoy those few very short moments that felt like very long hours. See, I would live in Alcatraz if it could just be my house and I had a sack of rifles and an internet connection. That would be fun. I could take pot shots at Silicon Valley.

That would be satisfying. I would sign up for that podcast. You would need espresso to Robert. Welcome back to Robert on the Rock. It's another episode. Okay, we should probably get back to the podcast. So we were talking, he's scared of horses. Now, when Walter was a small child, his family moved to an area near Rittenhouse Square,

a once fancy but now slummy neighborhood. And this is again in Philadelphia. Now, Freeman would later recall it as a rather dingy place where nursemaids wheeled baby carriages and gossiped. Walter's family was quite well off and he came up with maids and cooks and nannies to attend to his and his parents every whim. He was not overly adventurous as a child and later wrote of himself, On the whole, I think I was a sensitive, imaginative boy, docile, shut in a bit and full of questions.

His parents nicknamed him Little Walter YY and the growing boy was particularly intrigued by the family business, medicine. He had a good relationship with his grandfather but almost no real friends. The only boy he played with regularly was his younger cousin, Morris. The book, The Lobotomous, describes their friendship as basically identical to a Calvin and Hobb strip. Walter and Morris nursed a mutual contempt for girls and made grand plans for the society for the prevention of useless girls, spugs for short. Distaining the company of other children, they set up another exclusive secret society,

just two member strong, which they called the Walrus Club. Yeah, that's like the fucking Calvin and Hobb strip. A hundred percent. Yeah. And they got a transmogrifier, wasn't that one of the things? Yeah, they traveled through times. Yeah, so did I. It's kind of a bummer if you imagine this is what happened to Calvin when he grew up. No, I'm not doing that.

No, don't do that. Don't do that. Maybe more Hobbs. I could see Hobbs getting into this line of work but definitely not. Scrambling braids. Now, Walter was a good student. He excelled in Latin and Greek and he won prizes for his scholastics. He was never any good at sports nor did he grow any more adept with the opposite sex as he blossomed into a teenager.

He found girls bothersome and later wrote, I think I actively disliked girls until I went to college. This is all going to make so much sense later. This is all going to make so much sense immediately. Okay. Walter Freeman was the oldest of six siblings, all but two of whom were boys. He did not get along well with them nor did he particularly care for his parents. Walter would later note repeatedly that he never loved his mother.

He was only a little closer to his father who took him and his brothers on regular hiking, fishing and camping trips. The elder Walter hated his medical practice and considered the outdoors his only refuge. He was a weird dude. Once when Walter II was caught skipping school, his father punished him by whipping himself in front of the truant officer. Wait, whoa. Yeah. Yeah. The dad whipped himself or he had Walter II.

No, he whipped it. The dad whipped himself in front of the truant officer. You made me do this to myself by skipping school. Yeah. And he did it in front of the cop. Whoa. Like, that's so fucked up. It takes like, you really have to process that shit.

Yeah, because you're always fucking up the kid's head. Yeah. You know that like. And the truant officer. Imagine that guy. He's like, look, hey, whoa, buddy. I just want kids to go to school. Why are we doing this?

All you got to do is sign the sheet, man. All you got to do is sign the sheet that I told you he wasn't at school. Put the whip down. Why did you bring a whip to this meeting? You don't need to do this. No one's asking you to do this. Sir, I just want you to know I'm also going to have to write you up for right for whipping yourself because I have to document that I witnessed this.

He missed a day of school. This isn't really a whipping situation. I wondered what you meant when you were like, cool, I'll bring my whip. Yeah, I have trouble getting my head around what kind of man does that? Oh, I know. And then I'm sure the truant officer was like, wanted the kid to leave. And then just like in Will Ferrell and he's pounding down, the dad was like, let the boy watch. Oh, that's horrific.

That's a mind fuck. Yeah. That's a galaxy level mind fuck. Oh boy. I bet that truant officer felt bad for that. In the future, he was like, you know what, you need to stop skipping school, but we're not going to tell your dad again. That truant officer let everyone skip.

He was like, I'm not going through that again. I am not doing that again. So as is probably not a surprise hearing that, Walter's father was no less awkward when it came to talking to his young adult son about sex. Years later, Walter recalled, I had been showing interest in the external anatomy of my young girl cousins. With the aid of his ancient textbooks on anatomy and gynecology illustrated with woodcuts, he dilated upon internal anatomy, reproduction, and especially venereal disease,

threatening to have me follow or even tempted by operatives who would report to him. I was thoroughly uncomfortable, but remained a virgin. He never alluded to it again. What? So if you're a young parent out there looking to stop your kid from fucking too early, this is one way to keep them a virgin for a very long time. Yeah, or watch a racer head. Or watch a racer head, yeah.

Okay, so he got way into his... He said straight up, I was really into my female cousin's anatomy. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, that's fucked up. I think in an earlier age in which boys and girls did not socialize, like you run into stories like that a lot in the early 1900s just because you weren't hanging out with any other girls.

So that's when people would have that real... It's messed up and a symptom of some unhealthy things in the culture, but I'm not gonna say that that right there is evidence that Walter was weird from the beginning. Maybe they were the only girls he spent any time around. I guess so when you say anatomy, to me it's like... It makes me feel like, I guess I in tone that he's more preoccupied. It's okay to wonder what's under their clothes, but don't start wondering what's under their skin.

I think that was just sort of a euphemism they used because again, nobody had good vocabulary to talk about bodies back then because everyone was fucked up and it was an even less healthy time. Right, there was no high girl summer or Midwestern boy autumn, which I'm currently a part of. Oh yeah, Midwestern boy autumn is good. South Eastern boy late summer slash early fall, which really doesn't give going until November.

Yeah, we've got a lot of them. I like slutty people April showers. That's my favorite time of year. Slutty people April showers. There has to be a porn star named April showers, right? Of course. Oh yeah, no, there's like 30. 100%.

Okay, I hope so. We're putting it in the universe if there isn't. I also call dibs if any of us get into porn. I mean, that's going to be the sequel podcast to this one. Oh great, great. Robert Evans makes a porno. It is not going to be popular. Back to Walter Freeman.

Walter graduated from high school when he was just 16 years old. He immediately started attending classes at Yale. He was academically excellent, but completely miserable. He was too young and immature to get up to any kind of animal house type bonding shenanigans with his fellow young men. And his utter disdain for women made most kinds of socialization impossible. It turns out it's not great to be in college at age 16. It's not the best time to do that.

He briefly worked for the Yale Daily News, but was let go after he spilled a bunch of alphabetized subscriber cards in front of his editor. He joined the swim team at one point, but refused to practice when anyone was around. He was able to see him with his shirt off. So you get a feel for the kind of young man Walter Freeman was. Not a comfortable one.

Now, in fairness, knowing about his dad, how could he possibly have been? His initial degree program was engineering, but this track was disrupted at the end of his junior year when he ate a bad batch of raw clams and caught typhoid fever. He spent months laid up with this and an assortment of other ailments that took up the entirety of his first semester senior year at Yale.

The long months he spent at hospitals and sick beds helped Walter realize that he wanted something different out of life. A career in medicine. Now, he'd initially not wanted to go down that road, due largely to the fact that his father had told him it was a terrible life. Don't be a fucking doctor as he whips himself. Right. Yeah.

So instead... This isn't about you. I'm whipping myself because someone else left a muffin out on the counter. This is their whipping, but I needed to talk to you. Also, he's third generation, so his dad probably was forced into it by his dad. Yeah. And so maybe this was his one thing where he was trying to be like, you don't have to do this and it didn't matter.

I feel like he's saying you don't have to do this while everybody looks at him whipping himself and it's like you really don't have to do this. Yeah, that's a good point. So Walter, seeing his dad was a miserable fucked up person, Walter instead looked towards his grandfather as a role model and enrolled in summer classes at the University of Chicago to catch up on medical school before...

or to catch up on like medicine and science related classes before starting medical school the next year. He excelled in this as well and attempted to rebuild his health by walking 30 minutes to and from campus every day carrying a heavy box of bones. You could just get bones back then. Yeah, he just decided he wanted to like get healthy and the way to do it was to carry around a lot of bones.

Right. And because he's a fucked up person, a rock isn't good enough. There were more bones than rocks back then. There were just people dying left and right. He stopped by H.H. Holmes' place and picked up some. Wait, what year is this? That doesn't check out. Yeah, actually, I think it might check out.

Late 1890s, I don't remember exactly when H.H. Holmes was fucked around. H.H. Holmes was the world ex-businessing fair of 1892. No, he would have been, he was born in 95. But there would have been a lot of bones lying around in the early 1900s. Bone heavy period. World War I was on. A lot of bones.

Shitloads of bones. Now, yeah, so he excelled in his classes and he was getting better, healthier thanks to his bone box. But in spite of all this, he got sick again very quickly and was soon bedridden. He later recalled, I wrote home saying I guessed God didn't want me to study medicine. In reply, I received a stern admonition not to think that way,

much less to mention it. Wait, Robert, he got sick again? Yeah, he was very sick. He was a sick, sick young man. Oh, man. This is, you're right, mother nature was trying to kill him. God was definitely trying to stop him from being a doctor. But he's a fighter.

He's a fighter. He is a persistent son of a bitch. He shouldn't have been. Let it go. No, he should not have been. Somebody should have walked in whipping themselves and been like, this is so that you can let it go. Just go.

Yeah, that's, I think that we have to land on the conclusion that if only there'd been more whipping in his childhood, he would have turned out better. Can I ask you a foreshadowing question that I don't- Absolutely. I don't expect you to answer yet because I don't know that we should even if you can. Okay.

It's just like we all wonder like what purpose does mosquitoes provide? Like what, what did they give us in the long run or whatever? Other than just bad stuff. I would love to know by the end of this episode, I already hate him. If at some point you're going to be like, well actually because of the lobotomy, we now have this positive thing in our world

and I'm anxious to see if that comes about at all. Yes. He was actually, this is getting ahead a little bit. Yeah, I don't want to do that to you. I'm just, that's what's already in my head. I'm like, I hope there's some benefit to this fucker. The spoiler I'll give you is that it turned out he was right for the wrong reasons

or at least he was right, but it led him to do the wrong things. Oh, like the little kid in a Bronx tale. I have not seen in a long time. Oh, he covers for, he covers for a mob guy and he asks his dad, Robert De Niro. He goes, I did a good thing, right dad? He goes, yeah, you did a good thing for a bad man.

Like it was the right thing, but you did it for the wrong person. Yeah. Well, it's a little different than that, but we'll get there. Okay. So after a second tonsillectomy, Freeman's health improved and soon he was off to medical school.

Bones in hand. Bones in hand. During the First World War, he was drafted into the Army Medical Corps and he became a Sergeant while he continued his education. He was demoted once for threatening his company commander with a shoe, but otherwise had a solid service record. Nor not, we can't skip this.

With a shoe? With a shoe, just a little shoe fight. You've had a couple. I've never had a shoe fight. We all have the odd shoe fight. Ike and Tina Turner. That's the most popular shoe fight of all time. Yeah, it was just like an argument

and he like picked up his shoe and yelled at somebody and didn't realize they were his commanding officer. It's less interesting than you'd think. It's funnier when you just summarize it that way. True. Now, Walter graduated as a doctor in 1920. The second in his class. By this point, he'd become so enamored with medicine

that every other aspect of his past had followed by the wayside. Medicine, he wrote, held my interest to the point where I excluded many other things. In fact, I was barely aware of my family. Do not recall what they were doing or where they were during this period. So, Walter has fallen fully into medicine. And speaking of falling fully into something,

Daniel Van Kirk. It's time for us and our audience to fall fully into the products and services that support this program. Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. Let's whip ourselves in front of the audience to convince them to buy these products that support the show.

Imagine me wailing on myself with a cat of nine tails. It makes me sad, but I didn't come to school and so now you have to hurt yourself. Yeah, now I have to hurt myself. Product. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass,

and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space.

313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today

is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match

and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So when we left off, Walter Freeman had fallen in love with medicine

and had forgotten what his family was even doing. He was so enthralled with his new career. And in his father's case, what he was doing was dying of liver cancer. Now, Walter could not really have cared less about this. The only thing he did to help his father during this period, because he was living at home still, was periodically shave him with a straight razor.

He refused to soften his dad's stubble in warm water before shaving him because, quote, the task was distasteful and I finished it as quickly as possible. I'm sure my mother would have been more gentle, but she considered shaving a man's job and I was the only one at home. So, like, I'll shave you, dad, but I'm not gonna, like, make it pleasant for you

because I want to get done with this shit quick. Great, great kid. Now, although his dad was kind of fucked him up, so fair, I guess. You have to whip me. I can't do it myself. I can't get shaved without a whipping. As a medical intern, Walter was somewhat uneven. He excelled at neurology,

but proved less apt at handling what he called scutwork, like transporting urine samples for analysis. Sometimes he would pour samples down the drain just to be rid of them. He was fascinated by neurosurgery, but too bored of the details of it to actually learn to perform surgery. He was fascinated by illness,

but almost bored by the actual human beings he had to treat. He was, in short, a very strange dude as this passage from the lobotomist makes clear. Soon another patient commanded Freeman's curiosity. A young man who arrived at the hospital with his penis in dire shape and, flamed and dark, the organ was encircled by a ring that the patient's girlfriend had thrust over it

but wasn't able to remove. Wait. Freeman ended... Yep. We're talking, like, 1920s cock rings? I think we're talking a normal ring that she put on his cock and it became a problem when he got hard. No. Yeah, that's why you use the, like,

the bendy rubber ones and not, like, a normal metal ring. That's one of our sponsors today. Yes. Josiah & Sons, old-fashioned Amish cock rings, the only cock rings that are made entirely out of wood. If you want the most pain a cock ring can put you in, you want a Josiah & Sons cock ring. That was too perfect.

Now in redwood. Yeah. So a guy walks in and says, hey, I got a, I got a, and you know that that conversation was awkward because much like you just talked about, no one was using good, like, healthy, like, jargon for each other to talk about themselves

or their anatomies. I don't think anyone uses the word penis in that entire conversation. It takes 20 minutes. He's like, I've gone problematic in my nethers. Yes. So, uh, and Freeman ended the patient's agony by filing through the ring and twisting it free with forceps.

The boy asked for the ring, but I told him it was a specimen and that I would have to keep it, Freeman wrote. I had the ring repaired and the Freeman man crest indigraved on it. For years afterward, Freeman wore the specimen on a goat chain. Later in his career. If we were in an episode of Mine Hunters, this is what we would call a trophy.

Yeah, that's fucked up. Yes. I'm a fashion starter, though. I like that ring. Oh, you do. Took it from a deck. That crest aftermarket. Because this used to be a broken ring.

How so? Well, a gentleman came in, had it in his nethers, I took it off, and now I proudly present it. Wow. Oh, man. Wow. Real quick, think about this. There's a chance, unless he was buried with it,

that ring is out there somewhere. God, I hope so. If you have Walter Freeman's cockering necklace, I would pay good money to have it. Me too. I don't know what I would do with it. We'll find a use for it.

If you could start collecting things from your episodes and you'd be like the collector in Guardians of the Galaxy in the Marvel Universe, we're like, oh, that's actually from the episode where we talk about it. I bet somebody doesn't even know what they have. If I get a TV show,

that would be the premise. It's me hunting down artifacts of terrible people. We'll start with like an original copy of one of Hitler's favorite fantasy novels. Yes. Saddam Hussein's typewriter. All the great, all the hits.

The hits. Elron Hubbard's, I don't know, boat. Or like that first episode I did where we talked about the Nazis in Hollywood. Like even an old, like, Lemley's, like, movie car. Oh, hell yeah.

Yeah. The city of Pittsburgh. Oh, man, there's a lot of things to collect. Okay, sorry, I have derailed this. But that, I mean, how could I not? We just went full-on doctor conferring. It's a wild tale, yeah. So Walter spent a year in Europe

doing medical residences in France and performing medical testing on animals. He was fascinated by the four-hour task of opening the creature's skull to remove its brain. Walter's first thought was that a jackhammer would have been the ideal tool to remove it. This thought process spawned a lifelong fascination

in finding unique ways to break into skulls and access brains. He is into that. Hey, do what you love. Do what you love and the money will follow. Yeah. His first major job came courtesy of his grandfather, Keane, who used his connections

at his grandson a gig as the senior medical officer in charge of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. This was a psychiatric hospital, and working there gave Walter a direct look into the horrific ways 1920s America treated them mentally unwell. St. Elizabeth was essentially a giant box

filled warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but filled with sick people instead of antiquities. There were very few real treatments for psychiatric disorders, so patients were just locked in there together until they either died or lied well enough to claim that they had had a spontaneous remission. So that was healthcare back then.

Oh, you're head's sick, huh? Well, we're going to put you in a miserable box until you decide you're healthy. Yeah. Yeah. Walter Freeman found this new charge horrifying. He was sickened by the 4,300 inmates of his asylum, and he wrote,

the slouching figures, the vacant stare or averted eyes, the shabby clothing and footwear, the general untightiness, all aroused rejection rather than sympathy or interest. So he's horrified and not sympathetic with these people. Yeah, he doesn't feel bad for them at all.

Yeah, yeah, they're just, he's just disgusted by them. Now, since the inmates of this asylum were too pitiful to deserve Walter's sympathy, he instead focused on learning about the brain of the psychotic, as he called it, which is again, was like the general, it's a specific term now,

was just the general term for anyone that was like not fitting into society back then. Yeah, you couldn't conform. Yeah, Walter's goal was less to alleviate discomfort and more to help these people return to life as productive members of capitalist society. I looked around me at the hundreds of patients

and thought, what a waste of manpower and womanpower. So again, not particularly sympathetic to their suffering. No, but I like the gender inclusiveness. He is very gender inclusive, yeah, yeah. Towards this end, he experimented with differing oxygen levels and their impacts on the brain of manic people.

He also pioneered a new, easier method of collecting spinal taps from the lobotomist. Instead of recruiting help to secure patients in a deep bend while sitting, then inserting the needle of a collection syringe between the vertebra, Freeman employed what he was fond of calling the Jiffy Spinal Tap.

Without assistance from other staff members, Freeman directed patients to sit backward on a chair and deeply bend their neck over the chair back. Carefully navigating the opening at the base of the skull, he then pushed a needle into a reservoir of spinal fluid located just inside of the skull. The needle was nicely close to the base of the brain.

Even a slight error in the insertion of the needle could permanently injure the patient. So to Walt, he's just showing off. And this risk was worth it because it allowed him to work alone without close collaboration with colleagues. Now a mature adult, Walter was still very much a loner and he preferred his own professional company

to acting as part of a team, even when that went meant a greater risk to the patient. Walter opened a private practice while working at St. Elizabeth's to further his research as Professor of Neurology at George Washington University. By the early 1930s, he had a well-earned reputation as a psychiatric pioneer.

Now, Walter was largely responsible for the introduction of several exciting new treatments, insulin shock therapy, which plunged patients into insulin shock to try and correct schizophrenic symptoms. He also experimented with metrozol, shock therapy, and electroconvulsive therapy.

The essential goal of all these treatments was the same, to slap sick people out of their issues by horribly traumatizing their system. Wow. So he's that kind of doctor. He's like, ah, these people have a problem. We just need to fuck them up enough that they they get their shit together.

The only time I know of something like this working is in heat stroke, because you instantly need to be put into an ice tub right away. Like we need to shock you out of the thing you're in. But the idea that we could take anything psychologically and essentially smack you out of it

through one form of mild torture or another is insane. Did this ever work enough that somebody was like, I think this is the way to do it? So there's a couple of things going on here. One of them is that

electroconvulsive therapy is still at a very small scale use today. There are certain people with certain fairly rare problems that it can help. So I'm sure there were some people who had very severe psychiatric distress who were helped by the electroconvulsive therapy, a tiny fraction of the total.

And I'm sure there was a larger number who were, while they had issues, were also able to realize like, oh my god, they're going to keep torturing me if I don't pretend to be better. And so they would just like, okay, I'll be better. I won't let you know I'm suffering.

Isn't that kind of like the mouse in the maze? Oh, I just got to stop this so that that doesn't happen to me anymore. You're learning through like, you're learning through just like havelovian dog type shit of like this just happens to you every time.

So you just learn to like stop being loud, but nothing's changed. Yeah, that's kind of, I think what goes on with a lot of these people. It's a mix of the tiny amount who like legitimately do benefit from it because electroconvulsive therapy can be helpful. And a larger number who are like, oh, this is

awful. I'll just stop complaining. Yeah. I don't want to go through this anymore. Right. Now, it was 1935 when Walter Freeman first ran into the treatment that would come to define his practice and the great bulk of his adult life. That year, he attended a presentation

in London by a researcher who had experimented with damaging the frontal lobes of chimpanzees just to see what happened. The results were more or less what you'd expect. These brain damage chimps became quiet, listless, and active. Freeman and a Portuguese neurologist, Igus Moniz, were both

fascinated by this. Moniz right away headed back home to Portugal to experiment with severing the frontal lobes of human beings. The thinking was that if this procedure could calm chimpanzees down, it might have the same effect on people suffering from a mental illness that led to radical swings in personality and mood.

Stuff like a bipolar disorder. That's exactly what I was going to say. A whole bunch of different things. Because again, a lot of stuff that we now recognize are separate things. We're all lumped together back in that day. If you were like a schizophrenic, or if you had a seizure disorder,

or if you were bipolar, they might just say lump all those people together is the same thing. They weren't great at this yet. In 1936, Antonio Moniz had perfected his treatment, the leukotomy, which involved drilling two small holes in the side of the head in order to sever connective tissue that attached

the frontal lobe to the rest of the brain. Now at the time, there were two main theories of psychiatric illness. The first, which was pushed by guys like Freud, was that psychiatric ailments were all basically the result of buried memories, misplaced desires, past traumas, things that you could sit down and work out

with a psychotherapist over a small mountain of cocaine and on a comfortable couch. The other theory was that these illnesses were caused by emotional signals from the brain that were so strong they simply overwhelmed a person. Now obviously, neither theory is entirely right.

But the theory that guys like Freeman would adopt, which was that it was a bunch of signals from the brain was closer to right than Freud's theory, because it explains stuff like seizure disorders or schizophrenia and stuff, which are not, you can't talk

therapy, someone with schizophrenia out of having issues. It's a problem with signals their brain is sending and they need some sort of medication. I think sometimes surgery helps. But like so Freeman is on the right track. What he and other scientists who adopt this school of thought

are realizing is that you can't talk your way through all of your mental problems, which is correct. There are mental problems that have to be dealt with on more of a chemical, physical level. So that's what I say when I say he was right about sort of what the issues were.

But then we get into what he decided the treatment should be, which was not correct. But he was on the right track when he figured out what was going on with people. He was closer to right than a lot of mainstream doctors. So Moniz's

leucotomy seemed to provide relief to a number of patients and I should note that there are variants of this procedure we use today. Patients suffering from some types of seizure disorders sometimes have parts of the brain disconnected from one another to stop or reduce the frequency of said seizures. We still do use brain surgery

that's kind of an evolution of the leucotomy to treat people today and it can be very helpful to again a very small number of people who suffer with these disorders. So Moniz was experimenting with real medicine and he was very responsible with the implications of his treatment. When he received the Nobel Prize for it

in 1949 he insisted the leucotomy was only to be used as a treatment of last resort when absolutely nothing else could provide a patient with relief. So Moniz, not going to say he's a bad guy, he's one of the early experimenters with what would come to be known as a lobotomy. But he's doing it because

number one he recognizes it does help in some cases and he's very clear about like we only do this if there's no other chance of them living a normal life. Or if we want to fuck with a chimpanzee. That was the other guy. Oh that's right, sorry. Moniz just watched that and was like oh shit this might

help people. Now Walter Freeman paid attention to the work of Antonio Moniz but he was not convinced the leucotomy ought to be a last resort for suffering people. As the manager of an asylum he was deeply frustrated by how much time and manpower it took to subdue patients dealing with psychotic

episodes, schizophrenic breaks, manic phases, etc. The idea that all this could be calmed by just chopping up their brains was deeply appealing to him. Yeah, so start there. Yeah, that'll make it wait. My job's so much easier. I have 4300 people I'm sick of.

What if I just break them? Just line them up. So Freeman developed a modification of Moniz's procedure and renamed it a lobotomy in much the same way as Oreos modified the Hydrox cookie. And like Oreos, Freeman's procedure was destined to capture the vast majority

of the market share for such a product. And like Oreos, you gotta get to that middle good stuff and get that out. You gotta get that out. Now I'm gonna quote now from Jack L. High who wrote the lobotomist and also wrote this piece for the Washington Post. To him, the intoxicating thing about psychosurgery

Moniz's coin term for psychiatric surgery was its potential to sever the links between the over excited emotions of an unhealthy thalamus and the behavioral functions of the prefrontal lobes of the brain. If it worked, the destruction of these nerve fibers would prevent the thalamus from poisoning patients' thinking. He absorbed the details

of Moniz's work and, with neurosurgeon Watts, became figuring out how to adapt the Portuguese physician's techniques. Freeman and Watts used brains from the hospital morgue to practice the coring of sections of the prefrontal lobes with a leukotome, which is the device they used for that. By the summer of 1936,

they were ready for a live patient, a mishammit from Topeka, Kansas. Now, mishammit was 63 years old. She suffered from depression. She had frequent hysterical fits and difficulty sleeping. Freeman talked with her and concluded that a lobotomy was the only way for her

to avoid spending the rest of her life in a mental hospital. Much of the impetus behind this seems to have been her husband, who was tired of dealing with a wife who needed help herself rather than just preparing meals for him and staying quiet. Freeman and his new partner, Watts, scheduled mishammit for an appointment

on September 14th, 1936. Now, the first lobotomy did not start off well. Mishammit tried to back out when she learned the procedure would require her to shave her head. Many of her mental health issues focused around an obsession with her thinning hair, so this was obviously a matter of grave concern for her. Whoa!

Yeah. We're doing the one thing she's already upset about. Oh yeah, yeah. So, Freeman and Watts assured her they would only have to shave off a few small sections of her scalp. This was a lie, obviously. Once they'd forcibly anesthetized her, they shaved her bald. Freeman recorded

that her last words before going under were Who is that man? What does he want here? What is he going to do to me? Tell him to go away. Oh, I don't want to see him. Yeah, well, that's how crazy people talk. So sit still. I don't think that... Oh, yeah, that's him. Yeah, I think she's very reasonable here.

Oh, 100%. That's my point. Once you've been labeled, we're going to do this to you. No matter what you say, they're like, well, you would talk like that. You're crazy. You need help. You're a loony loon. Yeah. With Freeman watching, Watts drilled six holes atop Miss Hammett's skull and

inserted a leukotome, a device that essentially hold the brain into each hole. Both doctors worked together on lesioning the brain with Watts, the actual surgeon, managing the whole affair. And as odd as it sounds, the lobotomy seems to have helped Miss Hammett. At least, she and her husband both reported that it helped.

Freeman wrote in his autobiography, five years, according to Mr. Hammett, the happiest years of her life. As she expressed it, she could go to the theater and really enjoy the play without thinking of what her back hair looked like or whether her shoes pinched. And it is entirely possible that this is an accurate representation

of how Miss Hammett felt. Many of Dr. Freeman's lobotomy patients experienced relief from some of their symptoms. That said, even the positive experiences with lobotomies are clouded by deeply disturbing questions of consent and structures of oppression. Wait, they're saying that... Sorry, sorry, I just really... They're saying it

actually worked. Yeah, she experienced relief. That was not wildly uncommon with his patients. Yeah, but if she's worried about her shoes and stuff, it kind of sounds to me like, and I know we're near professional, and so please take this with a grain of salt, anyone who hears my voice. But maybe she suffers

some sort of like OCD. She was like worried about... And so, the lobotomy just made her not really care about anything. So, they're like, oh, things are better. Well... No, you just don't care about anything. That's not... I guess you're not doing the thing you did, but

I don't know if that falls in the category of better. But for them at the time, they were saying that is a success. For them at the time, this woman was complaining, now the woman's not complaining, we fixed her. Okay, well... It's a different... Yeah, we're going to get into that a little bit more and how problematic all this was, but

again, it's important you know that at the time, this looked to, again, the men who were the only ones whose opinions mattered in the situation, as if they were making people like Mrs. Hammett better. Gotcha. Now, you know what will make you better, Daniel Vankirk?

The products and services that advertise on this show. Nice. Yeah. Can we go to them? Can I learn about them? We can. Here's the capitalism lobotomy. Undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys,

we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass,

and you may know me from a little band called InSync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine,

I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one who really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev,

is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story

of 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you

that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial

to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! Now, as I said before we rolled out,

the positive experiences and the lobotomies that you read about when you read about these early operations were all clouded by very disturbing questions of consent and also structures of oppression that existed back then and still exist today. During my research, I came across a story

core interview with one of Walter Freeman's patients, Patricia Mowen, and her husband. Patricia, her husband's name is Glenn, by the way. Patricia was lobotomized in 1962 and I'm going to read the transcript of this husband and wife talking about her procedure. And again, this is considered to be like one of the stories

of, like, a success, but I'll read this to you and you tell me if you think there's something fucked up going on here. I bet I will. Glenn Mowen. My name is Glenn Mowen. I am 79 years old. I signed the release for Pat's lobotomy. Patricia Mowen. We have not talked about it since I had the lobotomy. I don't think ever.

My husband is not a great communicator. Glenn, I don't talk to her any more than I have to. Patricia, Glenn, be nice. Both laugh. We'd been married about 13 years and it just started. I cried all the time. I was just mentally no good. Glenn, one night I came home and she said well, I've done it now. She'd taken a whole bottle

of some kind of pills. Patricia, that's when the doctor decided it was time. Glenn, he told me this was the last resort. I didn't know what else to do. Patricia, Dr. Freeman said you can come out of this vegetable or you can come out dead. And I guess I was miserable enough that I didn't care. Glenn, I was kind of worried because of the operation

of severing a nerve in the brain. It sounded kind of wild to me. Patricia, he was afraid he was going to lose his cook. Glenn, and I don't like to cook. Patricia, I remember nothing after I saw Dr. Freeman. I don't remember going to the hospital or having it done or how long I was there. That's all gone. Glenn, we were coming

back from San Jose after the operation and Pat informed me that she couldn't wait to get home because she wanted to file for divorce. Patricia, hmm, I don't remember that at all. I don't think I said it. Glenn, I think I just went on driving and ignored the situation and began to wonder myself how much good did this operation accomplish? Really,

I can see no changes in most areas except where it was much easier to get along with. Patricia, you didn't see any change in the way I kept the house or the way I... Glenn, hmm, no. Patricia, I was more a free person after I had it. Just not so concerned about things. I just went home and started living, I guess is the best way I can say it.

I was able to get back to taking care of things and cooking and shopping and that kind of thing. Glenn, delighted at the way it's turned out. It's been a good life. Wow. Yeah, that's... there's a lot going on there. My favorite. I hope on Glenn's Tombstone,

who we know is definitely dead by now, it says, I ignored it and kept driving. I ignored it and kept driving. That's probably how he lived a lot of his life with her until he had to deal with her ass because she wouldn't do the thing she was supposed to and kept complaining about wanting more pills. She

wasn't happy cooking and shopping so he drilled a hole in her brain and then it was fine. You know what, I'm also going to claim ignorance here, my friend. I was under the assumption before we started this that if you got a lobotomy, you were just a shell of a person that you were a vegetable or you died.

Like... That happened a lot. But some people just kind of went into I don't know if euphoric but just a laissez-faire feeling towards life after a lobotomy. They still were very cognitive. They just didn't really

have any argument nerves left. Yeah, separating the frontal lobe in the way that they did kind of separates you from your concerns in some ways. It stopped people from feeling or thinking as much. You're just very agreeable. Yeah.

That was kind of the best case scenario with some of these people. But some did they detach too much or go too deep and that's when you get catatonic? Yeah, we'll get into that. I mean, it wasn't an exact science and they weren't always good at it.

That just blew me away to hear that exchange that's been sitting here the whole time thinking every lobotomy ends with just a feeling of you're gone. A lot of these people went on to live productive lives. A lot of them were rendered catatonic. It kind of depended on how the operation went.

Like the thing is, brains are weird. I've known people who have been shot through the head with rifles and wound up fine. We're definitely not getting a rifle in the studio then. Yeah, well, I mean, they wound up fine. It's just,

it's kind of a crapshoot with brains. It's wild the amount of things that they can go through and suffer no noticeable effects and it's wild the number of things that can happen to them that seem minor and just change the person forever. For sure. Like it's a fucking crapshoot. Yeah, look at the NFL.

Look at the NFL, exactly. Now, Mrs. Hammett's lobotomy in 1936 proved to be the beginning of a decades-long career carving into the brains of human beings. He and Watts were one of medicine's most dynamic duos following that operation. They established an office at a home in Washington, D.C.

and gradually refined their technique, replacing Moniz's leukotome with an object Jack L. High describes as resembling a butter knife. They also switched around the positioning of the holes from which they cut into the brain. When patient symptoms persisted, Watts and Freeman would perform multiple lobotomies and make deeper cuts into the brain.

One patient, a lawyer suffering from alcoholism, escaped the hospital after his operation and was found drunk in a downtown bar. One patient showed up after his surgery and threatened to murder the doctors. Two pulled guns when Freeman recommended they undergo lobotomies, so it was not always a smooth process. From early on,

Freeman viewed proper PR as critical to gaining widespread adoption for his new technique. He and Watts started setting up a lobotomy booth at the annual AMA convention in 1939, crafting displays designed to draw the attention of journalists rather than impressing other doctors. He later wrote,

I found the technique of getting noticed in the papers. It was to arrive a day or two ahead of the opening of the convention and install the exhibit in the most graphic manner and then be alert for prowling newsmen. Now, Jack L. High notes that Freeman used handheld clackers to get the attention of reporters with loud noises. He and Watts even lobotomized

a monkey in 1939. This spectacular event dominated coverage of the convention. Freeman wrote, that night our monkey died, but Watts and I made the headlines, even though we did not get an award. And so begins all presses could press.

I mean, that's what he's going for here. That's what he's going for. Well, the monkey died, but people seem to be interested. Now, 55% of the first 623 surgeries Watts and Freeman carried out had what they described as good results.

32% were fair and 13% were poor. 3% died during or immediately after the surgery. And if you take Freeman's word for it, those are good results. More than half of people had a good result of the operation. Particularly considering these tended to be

patients who had exhausted conventional treatment options. However, Freeman never went into detail about what he considered to be a good result, nor did he update his results when patients relapsed, which was extremely common. But remember, he was happy with the result of that monkey dying. He was, he was.

Put it on the press. Yeah. Now, nurses reported that patients of the duo often needed to relearn how to eat and handle other basic tasks. They soiled themselves, flirted bizarrely with orderlies, and would sit staring off into the distance for hours on end. Walter Freeman considered these

positive changes. The fact that lobotomy patients were dull, quiet, uncoordinated, and lazy was, he felt, an improvement over manic episodes and excessive activity. Many officials at mental hospitals felt the same way. Freeman Watts patients were much easier to deal with on a long-term basis since many of them just sat around

quietly. By 1945, Walter had started to experiment with new methods of lobotomy. He was frustrated by the fact that the procedure required a skilled neuro surgeon. That meant he could only perform the operation when Watts was around, which dramatically limited the number of people he could properly lobotomize. This was a problem

because he'd come to believe that lobotomies worked best for patients in the early stages of their illness. If people waited too long, he feared, the lobotomy might not really help. So he's like, we got to get into this shit faster. This needs to be like the first thing we're doing for sick people. You're feeling

down today? Sit in this chair and shave your head. I'll be right there. Now, Walter started looking into the research of other doctors, and he found an Italian surgeon named Amaro Fiamberti. Armano had developed a new procedure for reaching the brain without drilling careful holes in the skull. Instead,

Armano broke into the skull through a soft bone at the rear of the eye socket. Working on corpses, Freeman developed a method of accessing the frontal lobe of the brain through the eye socket, using an ice pick from his kitchen. Working in secret, so Watts wouldn't find out, Freeman

started performing solo lobotomies in January of 1946. He operated out of the office he and Watts shared, but during hours when he knew his partner would not be in the building, Freeman ice picked nine human brains in short order, sending his patients home in a taxi cab. Next,

according to the Washington Post, Freeman later wrote that during his 10th transorbital surgery, he called Watts to his office to assess the operation. Watts later claimed, however, that he entered Freeman's office unsummoned and found Freeman pushing an ice pick in the eye socket of an unconscious man. Freeman audaciously

asked Watts to hold the ice pick so Freeman could take a photograph. Whichever account is true, no one disputes the result of this encounter. Watts threatened to break off their partnership if Freeman persisted in performing lobotomies himself and treating them as office procedures done without surgical gloves or sterile draping. For the remainder

of his association with Watts, Freeman did these operations outside the office. So that's cool. Now, Watts and Freeman would later fall out professionally over the issue of transorbital lobotomies. Although Watts retained a deep respect for his partner, he couldn't get over his belief that brain surgery

ought to only be carried out by a competent brain surgeon, not random guys with an ice pick. So controversial. What a crazy stance and Freeman was like, you are far out there. No, have you seen this ice pick? Children should be able to fix cars and non-brain surgeons

should be able to put ice picks through people's eyes. I believe that. Now, a book the two men authored on the subject of lobotomies includes this paragraph. The authors regret to announce that they have been unable to reach an agreement on the subject of transorbital lobotomy. Freeman

believes that he has proved the method to be simple, quick, effective, and safe to entrust to the psychiatrist. Watts believes that any procedure involving cutting of the brain tissue is a major operation and should remain in the hands of a neurological surgeon. This is when you're in a relationship with somebody and you're like, I don't even know why we're fighting

about this. Yeah. Why are we even fighting about this? I'm just ice picking some motherfuckers. Like, why are you angry? Right, right. We shouldn't be having this fight. Yeah. That's crazy. This book, psychosurgery and the treatment of mental disorders and intractable

pain made an enormous splash in the world of medicine when it was first published in 1950. The tome featured language not often used in works of medicine like the term scrawny freight cats used to refer to a group of patients. This lurid prose, along with the Gauche marketing technique used by Freeman

to attract the press, alienated many mainstream medical professionals. But the book was popular and cemented Freeman's status as a radical physician working on the cutting or perhaps poking edge of medical science. On the eve of his 52nd birthday, he wrote, I have a feeling of competence and assurance that is

almost grandiose. Maybe it comes from superb health and maybe from the fruition of dreams that have proved within my grasp. But anyhow, I'm sitting on top of the world. So that's good. He's happy. Yeah, he's happy. What more do you want? In our next episode, we're going to talk about the second phase of Walter Freeman's career.

We're also going to discuss the most famous patient he and Watts ever operated on, the poster victim of lobotomy and sister to President John F. Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy. But right now, Daniel Vankirk, it's time for you to plug some plugables. I want to let everybody

know I have my first comedy album coming out. It's on Blonde Medicine. That's the label. And it will drop on November 15th, Friday, November 15th. It's called Thanks Diane. I recorded it in Los Angeles at the UCB Theater. And if this

is before the 15th when you're hearing this, you can go to danielvankirk.com and pre-order it or just go to the iTunes store app on your phone, specifically the iTunes store app. And you'll be able to pre-order it there. But on 1115 or anytime there after, you can get it anywhere that you get your music

or listen to such things. I should say music, but it feels like it's also for comedy. But it's called Thanks Diane. And go to Daniel Vankirk for all of my tour dates, as well as my own podcast, Pen Pals or Dumb People Town. And I'm Robert Evans. And you can find me here on the podcast

you're currently listening to. So please keep listening to this podcast. You can find our sources on behindthebastards.com You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and at BastardsPod. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. You can also find a lobotomy

if you show up at my door and pay me $45. I have an ice pick. You cannot be doing these. Brain surgeons need to do these. I feel like anyone can do these if they have an ice pick. We should be even having this argument. I feel like

Daniel, I respect your opinion on this, but I disagree with it. Well, and I respect your expertise, but I think you need to wear gloves. Oh, gloves? You mean coward's hands. All right, that's the fucking episode. Buy a t-shirt on t-public

and go off into the world and perform on licensed lobotomies. Or not. Nope, Sophie. We're pro lobotomy now. Or not. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date,

time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow

hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest?

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.