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

Episode Date: November 7, 2019

In part two, Robert is joined again by Daniel Van Kirk to continue discussing Walter Freeman. 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. Play along at home. Grease something near you up with olive oil. I'm here in part one with Daniel Van Kerk. Daniel, how are you doing today?

I am great. I am so glad to be back for the conclusion of this story about a horrific man who justified his means. Yep, he's a bad man and speaking of bad men, we're about to talk about a president, although a president most people like. So I may be pissing some people off. John and Robert Kennedy are probably the two most famous brothers in American history. One was the president until he got shot, another would have been the president if he hadn't been shot. Both men have come to symbolize, fairly or unfairly, an era of just indecent governance in the United States of America. And one that will probably never come again. But the Kennedy brothers had a sister, as well as another brother named Ted, who we don't talk about much because of that lady he drunkenly killed.

This woman's name was Rosemary Kennedy, and her life was stolen by Dr. Watts, Dr. Freeman, and wild unchecked misogyny. Now, Rosemary's birth was, in the words of the Irish Times, complicated by medical misadventure. Depending on which source you read, you will hear different things about the exact extent of her intellectual disabilities. Some articles I've read say she was severely mentally handicapped and unable to lead a normal life. Others argue she had learning disabilities, but was otherwise bright and capable. I'm not a doctor, but I did teach Special Ed once, and it seems fair for me to say, whatever the precise extent of her issues, Rosemary Kennedy would have been capable of living a relatively independent life with some specific help. Now, you get very different versions of Rosemary's story, depending on which write-up you read.

For example, here's People. As Rosemary entered her late teens, her parents saw less of the affectionate dutiful and eager to please young woman they knew and loved, and more of her violent outbursts. She began screaming and yelling and throwing things. She was violent and throwing vases across the room. She was out of control, one person says. Now, that article paints Rosemary as a deeply disturbed young woman, and her lobotomy is tragic, but purely the result of her parents not having better options to care for such a disabled child in a more primitive era.

Another Irish Times article I found, which interviewed one of her biographers, a man named Irvine, takes a different route. Irvine has a more filled-out picture in his head. He sees her as stunningly beautiful. It was often said she was the most beautiful of the Kennedys, beautiful and poetic. She did have learning disabilities. It's hard to say how much, but she wrote letters. She kept a diary. She became a Montessori teacher for a while, and she taught young children.

Her favorite book was Winnie the Pooh, and she could read that to children. Me too. So, yeah, yeah, great book. He has the sense of a fairly normal, deeply loving young woman. Every letter that she wrote is shown drenched in this want for her father to acknowledge her and love her. Every one of those letters is heartbreaking. It's all about, I'm doing my best, and I hope this pleases you. She would send reports about her weight, because weight was a huge thing in the Kennedy family,

monitoring the weight of all the children. There's so much correspondence where Joe and Rose are just talking about the weight of their children. So, yeah. Meanwhile, an Irish Central article I found on her describes her this way. By kindergarten, Rosemary was called retarded in the lingo of the times, and such children were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image, it was a disaster. Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third or fourth grade intelligence,

and she was packed off to a boarding school for misfits. From there, she wrote her father a heartbreaking letter. Darling daddy, I hate to disappoint you in any way. Come to see me very soon. I get very lonesome every day. Now, Rosemary finally caught a break when her father became ambassador to Britain, and she thrived in a London convent school. But back in the States, Rosemary, who again was very attractive, began attracting admirers.

At 20, she was a picturesque young woman, a snow princess with flushed cheeks, gleaming smile, plump figure, and a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met. And of course, as Larson writes, her parents found her sexuality dangerous. And I think this gets to the core of Kennedy family issues with Rosemary more than anything. And it seems to me, based on what I've read, that the argument that she was mentally retarded is very oversold. I think she had learning disabilities. I think she was someone who had difficulty thriving in a normal school. But I think she was basically, it seems like she was basically a functional, intelligent person

who was a young, attractive woman, and people wanted to fuck her, and she wanted to fuck them, and this was not okay with Joe Kennedy. So I think that's the core of the issue. The Kennedys were a powerful, wealthy, high society family. Well, that's the other thing, you got to stay in line in that family. So she's not staying in line. She has some learning disabilities, and she's promiscuous and a woman. We can't take out this part of it, too.

Yeah, she may be having some mood disorders, so maybe she flies off the handle and gets like yelling and stuff, and they'd assume like, well, she's not happy in the family, so she must be broken. Yeah, and since she's a woman, it's easier to disregard her. Exactly. Which is not like she's going to carry on the name. Yeah, exactly. I think she was a strong-willed young woman who wanted to live a life that would have been inconvenient to the family goals,

and it's my opinion that this, more than anything else, sealed her fate. And before we go any further, I want you to take a look at this picture of Rosemary. It'll be on our website, too. Sophie, can you show that to Daniel? Oh, she looks like a... She looks fun. Yeah, she looks fun. She looks like a normal, healthy, young woman. I would describe her as looking playful and lively and coy,

like a willful young woman with a spirit behind her. Beautiful. Yeah, she definitely falls into a fun girl winter. Yeah, fun girl fall. Yep. Now, within mere months of this photograph, she would be reduced to a shambling ruin of herself by the treatments of doctors Freeman and Watts. The final decision on whether or not to perform the lobotomy on Rosemary was up to the family patriarch, Joseph, from People.

Quote, Without his wife's knowledge, he took Rosemary to see Dr. Walter Freeman, a controversial neurologist, psychiatrist and professor at George Washington University, who had gained fame for popularizing lobotomies in America. He took her to the best at the time. And at the time, time, Reader's Digest Newsweek, everybody was touting the best thing for mental illness, the lobotomy. It was the cure-all. People were so eager for some help that they just grabbed onto it.

You see, that's Friedman from the last episode being smart about just playing into the press. He did. He'd gotten this shit into the press and fucking Joe Kennedy reads this in a news week as he's sipping fucking Manhattan's, his kind of Bunkport retreat or wherever the fuck it is. And if you need to wonder about how much Joe Kennedy cared about the agency or... Agency? She's a girl. Exactly, rights of a woman.

Not only is he taking his daughter to get her brain carved out, he's not telling his own wife that he's doing it. No, why would he? Right, exactly. Yeah, this is all a board. It's a double smack. Yeah. Now, Freeman diagnosed Rosemary with agitated depression and promised Joe that a lobotomy would put an end to her rages and render her happy and content.

What did he diagnose her with? Sorry. Agitated depression. This sounds like that shit where they're like, oh, what do you want me to call it? What do you want here, Joe? Yeah, she's not happy. And that's a problem. That means she's broken. Right, but the agitated is why we have to do something about it because it's just getting worse. The family's got money and she's not happy.

So the only thing to do is to break a brain. Yeah, Jesus. Okay, sorry. Yeah. In the fall of 1941, Dr. Freeman, assisted by Dr. James Watts, performed a prefrontal lobotomy on Rosemary at George Washington University Hospital. Rather than curing her, the lobotomy essentially erased Rosemary Kennedy. The procedure itself literally involved Dr. Watts scraping away at her brain tissue while Dr. Freeman asked her to repeat stories from her childhood and list the month of the year.

When she could no longer answer, the procedure was pronounced a success. Wow. Yeah. Tell us when we've taken enough. You tell us. Yeah, tell us when you don't remember who you are. Right, and then we'll be like, we got it. Perfect, we got her.

We got her. Because I wondered that too, like if somebody got their lobotomy, right? And then they were still, like in the last episode, the doctor who went out and got drunk still. Like would they be like, well, we got to go in and dig a little deeper, I guess. They often did that. Yeah. Not always. We'll talk about some other cases later.

But yeah, that was not uncommon. Yeah, so this one, they were like, let's get it all. Just keep talking to her. Let's get it all. Just get the whole girl out of there. Yeah. Just make her a shell. Now, Rosemary spent the rest of her life completely dependent on a small handful of caretakers.

Until her father's stroke, she lived isolated and hidden from the rest of the family at St. Colettas, a Catholic facility in Wisconsin for inconveniently disabled members of which families. When Jo finally stroked out, her nieces and nephews attempted to reintegrate her back into the family, but any hope she'd ever had of an independent life of forging an existence for herself was obliterated by Doctors Freeman and Watts. Eunice Kennedy would eventually create the Special Olympics in honor of Rosemary, and a 1987 story in the Saturday evening post brought the whole sordid tale to light. But that was far too late to stop the career of Walter Freeman from reaping an unspeakable toll in human lives.

By 1945, at the end of Freeman and Watts' collaboration, around 150 lobotomies were being performed annually nationwide. But in 1946, Walter Freeman introduced his revolutionary transorbital lobotomy technique and started teaching it to surgeons and non-surgeons all around this glorious land. By 1949, some 5,000 lobotomies were being performed annually. So that's great. Many of those were performed by Dr. Freeman himself, who started traveling the nation, showing off his skills to rooms full of doctors in the press.

And I'm going to quote now from the book The Lobotomist. In 1948, Patricia Darian, a student nurse at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, watched Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy at a nearby state hospital. She selected the patients for operation, she reported, by twisting their joints to determine their flexibility, not by reading or taking histories. After a special lunch in honor of the occasion of his visit, he occupied a conference room and had each patient shocked and photographed. When all was ready, he would plunge the leukotome in, Darian noted.

He wore no gown, mask, or gloves. Afterwards, he would sit the patients up and have them walked out of the room. He was very proud of the fact that the people walked in and walked out. None had to be carried, although one or two of them sagged badly on the way out, she remembered. After several operations, Freeman enlivened the demonstration by cutting nerve fibers on both sides of the brain simultaneously. Then he looked up at us, smiling. I thought I was seeing a circus act.

He moved both hands back and forth in unison, cutting the brain identically behind each eye. It astonished me that he was so gay, so high, so up, Darian recalled, the sequence of events as a living nightmare, a deeply disturbing performance. He's reached his final form. Yeah. Now, Frank Freeman, Walter's son, was occasionally enlisted to help his father in these lobotomy exhibitions. They would spend weeks at a time on the road, crossing thousands of miles, visiting numerous hospitals, and lobotomizing huge numbers of people.

In 1952, Frank helped his father perform a lobotomy. The process started when Walter immobilized the patient with a series of powerful electroshocks. And then, as Frank recalled, I was there to hold the person's legs down. We all went for a ride when he threw the switch. When the patient stopped seizing, Walter would lift the eyelid, jam his ice pick inside, and shatter the bone that separated it from the brain. He would carefully hammer away at gray matter until both sides of the frontal lobe had been disconnected. Frank recalled, I was kind of impressed.

He made it look so easy. That's good, right? Well, I mean, yeah, it's so easy because he loves it. He's so, you know, like you were saying, do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life of hammering into people's brains with an ice pick. But he also seems obsessed with the celebrity of it. Like, he wants to, like, be the guy and come to your town and put on his brain show. He wants to put on a show.

He wants to do it with both hands so that you're really impressed. Right. See, they all walked out of here. Did you see him all walk out? That one needed to be carried. Yeah, well, he could have walked. Yeah, he was lazy when he came in. Yeah. Now, over the course of a very long career,

Walter would perform more than 3,439 lobotomies in 55 hospitals in 23 states. The entire time, he believed himself to be something of a heroic medical radical, pulling his discipline forward into the future. His motto was, lobotomy gets them home, which meant, in effect, that lobotomizing people allowed them to exist comfortably and without complaint in American society. It is impossible to know how many of Freeman's patients truly benefited from his treatment. His summaries of his results were always very biased,

and it's never possible to analyze them outside of the lens of his own opinions. Objective scientific analysis of the results of lobotomies in this period are essentially impossible to find. We know that at least 490 of his patients died as a result of his services. We also know that lobotomizing human beings was not simply a matter of medical necessity. The longer Freeman worked as a solo lobotomist, the more he leaned into the performance art side of the field. And I'm going to quote from the Washington Post now.

On people. That's the thing we can't forget. That there's always a person on the other end of this hammer and pick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His cross-country trips in pursuit of lobotomy patients and his self-appointment as the transorbital procedure's international ambassador only heightened Freeman's sense of professional solitude and caused him to commit serious errors of judgment.

More than once he worked the luke tome forcefully enough to break it inside a patient's brain. At Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa, he accidentally killed a patient when he stepped back to take a photo during the surgery and allowed the luke tome to sink deep into the patient's midbrain. Oh. That's all from Jack Alhi. Yeah, that's pretty fucked up, huh? Yeah.

Yeah. Also, we don't know what his scale is. It still might have been deemed a success by him. The guy's not complaining anymore. Now, many of Walter's patients were unable to walk away or really think after his ministrations. But this caused less of an issue than you might think. The bulk of his clientele were inmates at asylums

and the folks paying for surgeries didn't so much want those folks healed as they wanted them quieter. People in charge of hospitals often welcomed Freeman into their institutions because the lobotomized patients, some of them, you know, would go home because they'd actually be helped by the procedure and the others were generally easier to manage. Freeman himself wrote, the noise level of the ward went down, incidents were fewer, cooperation improved and the ward could be brightened when curtains and flower pots were no longer in danger of being used as weapons.

So it made him easier to deal with. Yeah, no more biting. No more biting, no more problems at all because they can't do anything anymore because he just erased them basically in a lot of cases. And we don't have to technically say we killed them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, hundreds of people were improved by his work. Hundreds more, it's less clear, and of course, hundreds and hundreds died.

But I feel like this in part one, it almost seems like though they're using the exception to prove the rule. Yeah. So it's like, there's some people that's benefited. So we should do this for everyone we think would need it. Exactly. Those numbers don't really match up. If 95% of the people are benefited from you, like, well, five of these people, 5% it might not work out for, I'm still not in favor for it, but I get what your logic is.

But being like, oh, a few percentage of people, this really small group, this really helps, well, then that doesn't mean we should be doing it for everyone. Also, when I hear how else I keep thinking, I was like, I'm sure this happened to people who were autistic, right? Oh, God, yeah, yeah. Because that was like, they didn't even know. Was autism even diagnosed in the 70s? No, no, no, no.

I don't think at this point, I think it was even after that that they really had a handle on it. But like, it's possible that's what was going on with Rosemary. They may have had like Asperger's or something like that. I really don't know. I don't think anybody does. Right. I'm going to guess a lot of his patients were autistic and they just got written down as imbeciles or retarded, which was like the lingo they would have used at the time.

And, you know, because they required different means to like reach and teach and like work with, you know, because they had a different sort of brain, they just sort of hammered into their brain until they weren't a problem anymore. Right. How many women wouldn't have gotten a lobotomy if they hadn't been married? That's a scary question. Because being married was a man saying, well, you're the problem. You aren't making the food.

You fight with me. You have your own thoughts, which I'm sick of hearing. But if they had just never, if they had become a, to use the lingo of the era, a spinster, they would have never gotten a lobotomy because they wouldn't have had an oppressive man in their life to be like, I'm sick of you. Yep. Yep. Marriage doomed them.

Yeah. That's fair to say. Wow. Probably hundreds of cases at least. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Freeman had plenty of problems with it.

Oh, actually, before, before we get into Freeman's problems, you know what's not a problem? Hmm. Our advertisers. Great. You know who won't lobotomize their wives? Who? The products and services that advertise on this show.

Well, then I, then I want to hear about them because now I'm interested. Products. 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 got to 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 this hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. 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 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 iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about Walter Freeman and of course the issues that came as a result of him hammering ice picks into the brains of thousands of people. In 1947, Freeman operated on a Washington cop after the brain ice picking said cop hemorrhaged on both sides of his brain and in Freeman's words was never able to do more than the simplest tasks around the house. Even so, Freeman did a brisk business in Washington State. In the late 1940s, he met the actress Frances Farmer at Western State Hospital. She'd been a patient there for five years, largely as a result of behavior her parents considered wild and unconventional, but we today would probably just call being a human. We don't know for sure if Freeman lobotomized her, but some reports say he did and Frank Freeman says his father did. There's a picture that is almost certainly of Ms. Farmer's operation. It shows a man, Walter, in a sleeveless shirt with hairy arms and ungloved hams hammering a leukotome, the surgical device he invented to replace his ice pick, into a woman's eye as a crowd watches.

And there goes what would have been my Halloween costume. Yep, yep, tragic. Sleeveless hairy ice pick. By 1954, tranquilizers like chlorpromazine replaced lobotomies as the preferred treatment for agitated people in asylums. Freeman left Washington for Los Altos, California and for the next 18 years, he split his time between lobotomizing people and hiking. Actual medical science gradually left him behind, but Freeman continued his research on transorbital lobotomies. Because he loves it. He loves it. He loves it.

In 1964, he conducted an experiment on 14 disturbed mental defectives, mostly young schizophrenics. In a letter to a colleague, he explained that this experiment tested the efficacy of injecting hot water into the brain after stabbing it with an ice pick. I was prepared to accept two fatalities, but fortunately all the patients survived. What is he? I haven't invited to return next May. What is he, new tide? He's just trying to come out. He's like, well, but now we do this thing. That would just shoot some water in there. Oh my God.

I don't see how any of these patients could improve, but at least one can now be cared for at home. Again, his concern is that they be easy to care for, not that they get better really. You know what else? You remove the whole head. You can do whatever you want with that body. Real fucking easy to deal with. Real easy. They don't complain. You don't even have to feed them. Now, since Walter worked at a variety of different hospitals during this period, he enlisted a number of different nurses to help him in his thousands of procedures. One of these people was Helen Comer, a nurse in West Virginia for 34 years. I found her account in an article written by StoryCorps.

In 1954, I assisted Dr. Freeman in doing a transorbital lobotomy. I was a new nurse at the time, and I was drafted to work in there with him. Had no idea about what I was getting into, but I was curious and I wanted to see it, and I saw it. Oh my, the room was full of people. Everyone wanted to see what was going on. People from town and everywhere else came up to witness the occasion. He came, and I held the patient's head, and he did the lobotomy. He had an instrument. To me, it looked like a nail, a great big nail. It had a sharp point, and he inserted this in the corner of the individual's eye and banged it with a mallet.

I guess it was. And then he pulled from one side and pulled to the other. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to watch. I know that day we lost one patient because they couldn't stop the bleeding, and I can't remember if any others died. It wasn't what I thought it might be. To me, it was cruel, but that was just my opinion. I was just doing the job I was employed to do. Remember, I've seen all kinds of things in my line of work, so if I stopped and dwelled on each little thing, I'd be hurting. I remember he was relaxed. He was very calm while he was operating. He made it look easy to do.

I think he just had an extremely high self-confident personality. He didn't have any qualms. He wanted to prove that he was right. He was convinced that he was right. I thought, how can a man be relaxed just going blindly into a brain? But of course, I didn't have the authority to say, stop that. These patients were not young ones. I think they were all about 30 or 40 years old. I knew two of them. After the operation, I found that they had changed in their personality. My impression, which I remember still, was that they didn't ask any questions. Expression of deep turmoil in their heart or in their soul was subdued.

There was something missing, emotions, I would say. You know, if you were to converse with somebody, there's always a motion with it. Just take all of your emotion out of a conversation with somebody, and what's left? Uh, yeah. When they were like, oh, I can't believe you just kept doing it. I mean, and I know you've probably covered this, just the amount of people who had some sort of like, like they were a sociopath, and the medical field gave them that outlet. I mean, it happens in the military too.

I feel like Freeman might have been a sociopath. He's described as having a lot of difficulty like connecting to people with shallow affect. He kept trophies? Yeah, he kept trophies. I do think he thought he was helping people, but I think his understanding of what helping people was, was helping the people who had to care for these folks. I don't think he actually cared about the patients, because he was broken anyway.

That's how you do this. You just don't care. You just don't give a shit. You lack empathy. If anything, you do these things to people to like, sponge off of their emotion and their feelings and their reaction. Yeah, yeah. Now, the most common diagnosis for which Freeman prescribed brain scraping was schizophrenia. This does not mean that most of his patients were actually schizophrenic,

just that he hastily declared them to be schizophrenic before jamming an ice pick through their eye. Based on how well they could bend their joints. Yeah, yeah. Other common ailments treated via ice picking were chronic pain and suicidal depression. A 1937 New York Times article listed the various symptoms for which lobotomies were often prescribed. Apprehension, apprehension, anxiety, depression, insomnia, suicidal ideas, delusions, hallucinations, crying spells, melancholia, obsessions, panic states, disorientation, psychlesia, pains of psychic origin, nervous indigestion, and hysterical paralysis.

Nervous indigestion? Yeah. Now, if you know anything about the 50s and 60s CIA, you know that nobody fucked around with human brains in new and exciting ways without drawing their attention. In 1952, the agency hired Henry Loughlin, a psychiatrist, to report on the potential of lobotomies to help the God-fearing American government disable communists. I'm going to quote from the book Lobotomist again. In his classified report titled, Some Areas of Psychiatric Interest,

Loughlin commented that the procedure would be adaptable to intelligence work and noted that he watched Dr. Freeman perform 22 transorbital lobotomies with an average of about six minutes per operation. This included time for before and after photographs as well as the keeping of notes and records. From an empiric standpoint, the operative procedure is relatively simple and could be learned in a brief period of time by almost any intelligent person. In addition, he wrote, There is not great outward evidence of injury or damage to the patient besides the behavior changes in the black eyes.

The average pathologist performing an autopsy would have to be a keen and careful observer to detect changes in the brain substance made by the operator. Because I felt unable to disclose to Dr. Freeman the real basis of my interest, Loughlin notes, he could not solicit the lobotomy expert's opinions as to how the procedure might be modified for use by the CIA. Loughlin, who also professed an interest in the possibilities of taking hypnotic control of patients during the period of unconsciousness following electroshock therapy, formed his own opinions on the potential lobotomy presented as an intelligence tool.

To date, there has been considerable discussion relative to the possible use of the lobotomy type operation by this agency as a neutralizing weapon. Loughlin wrote in prefacing his conclusions, He described the role of the frontal lobes as one that allowed a person to pursue a cause and feel devotion to it. Certainly any crusading spirit is apt to be quenched, he reported. Community enterprise and activities in the way of social uplift, leadership, and executive abilities and activities are apt to be lessened after operation. On this basis, a zealous and fanatic communist, if lobotomized, might retain his interest in communism,

but his drive, zeal, and ability to organize or direct would be substantially reduced. So that's good. You take out the fight, baby. Also, I wondered if for interrogation use, like the CIA would be like, well, there's so much more agreeable, they'll tell you anything, we should lobotomize them, then interview them. I will say the good news is that even the CIA in this period had too many scruples to lobotomize people as a method of social control. What are we in the 60s by now? Yeah, the 60s.

So they're fucking with LSD, right? Yeah, they're ghosting strangers with acid, like gangbusters. Yeah, but Loughlin wound up recommending against lobotomies as a way to disable communists. And his main reason for doing so is that it would look really bad to scramble the opinions of people whose opinions differed from the U.S. government. Like if that got out, it would be bad. So it is here that I should note that on at least one point, Walter Freeman was on the somewhat defensible side of medical history. As I previously stated, there was a time when mental health professionals believed that all mental issues stemmed essentially from repressed memories and traumas and other things that a therapist could work out. Freeman was on the vanguard of doctors who argued that many brain problems were physical or chemical in nature and based more on circumstances of biology than things that had happened to the patient.

And Freeman and his fellows wound up being right. We know today that many mental health issues do stem from hormonal or chemical imbalances, things that can be corrected with medication or in rare cases surgery. Walter identified the problem in mainstream medicine rather correctly. He was just very wrong about its solution. And because he was such an advocate for his solitary practice of lobotomizing people, he failed miserably to advance his theory of mental illness with the times. In 1960, he treated one Howard Dully, an 11-year-old boy with what I would describe as mild to moderate behavioral issues. Howard fought with his brother, lied to his parents, and occasionally stole candy. He was rather withdrawn and antisocial, but certainly not someone a reasonable person would diagnose as in need of major brain surgery.

His behavioral issues, such as they were, stemmed from understandable causes. His mother had died of cancer when he was five. His father had remarried a cold and demanding stepmother who hated him. Howard was emotionally abused by her and ignored in favor of his stepmother's biological children. So he acted out more and more as he grew. That's it. He's acting out. He wants attention. Someone give me caring parenting. Yeah. And as he acted out, his stepmother responded by beating him and forcing him to eat alone.

This made his behavioral problems worse. And his stepmother decided that meant there wasn't something wrong with him. She started talking to psychiatrists and eventually wound up preferred to Dr. Walter Freeman. Now, by this point, Walter was a thoroughly fringe figure. Lobotomy was still practiced far too widely, but most medical professionals no longer believed it was anything but a deeply flawed last resort measure. But Howard's stepmother didn't care about that. When Walter interviewed her stepson, he saw evidence of profound disturbance. Quote,

He is clever at stealing, but always leaves something behind to show what he's done. Freeman recorded his notes from October 1960. Yeah, he wants to be caught. Yeah, he said, yeah. If it's a banana, he throws the peel at the window. If it's a candy bar, he leaves the wrapper around someplace. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it, he says, I don't know. He is defiant at times.

You tell me to do this and I'll do that. He has a vicious expression on his face some of the time. Now, based on a brief interview, Dr. Freeman declared Howard to be schizophrenic and prescribed one dose of scrambled brain for the young boy. When he met the famous doctor, Howard was struck by his round glasses, his suit and his stylish goatee. It made him look a little like a beatnik. He was warm, personable and easy to get along with. Was I fearful? No.

I had no idea what he was going to do with me. I'm going to quote next from a write-up in The Guardian. When Dolly awoke the next day, his eyes were swollen and bruised and he was running a high fever. He recalls a severe pain in his head and the discomfort of his hospital gown, which gaped open at the back. He had no idea of what had happened. I was in a mental fog, Dolly says. I was like a zombie. I had no awareness of what Freeman had done. Eight weeks after the doctor first saw him, Dolly came around from his operation in a state of numbed confusion. The hospital report stated that he had been given a transorbital lobotomy. A sharp instrument was thrust through the orbital roof on both sides and moved so as to sever the brain pathways in the frontal lobes.

Dr. Freeman's bill came to $200. Dolly was his youngest ever patient. Extraordinarily, he survived. Now, Howard would go on to live a full life, eventually. But first, he suffered through years of homelessness, mental illness and a deep confusion as a result of the damage done to him. He would grow into a school bus driving trainer and a living monument to the resilience of the human brain. But one cannot help but read his story and wonder how much less painful his life might have been if a shit-heeled doctor hadn't driven an icepick into his fucking brain. Gleefully. Yeah.

Gleefully. Gleefully. With panache. And also the like, uh, seems like schizophrenia to me. That works. So schizophrenia, I can definitely do this. He stole a candy bar. Classic schizophrenia. And that bitch, that bitch of a stepmom was like, whatever, I don't care. I just brought him here to get his brain taken out. So, and she's probably mad, or I'm so long fucking dead, hopefully, but she's mad that it seems to have been on the air, like the side of things where somebody didn't lose all capacity for life. Yeah. He was still a person, unfortunately, for her.

Right. Much to her, I'm sure, dismay. Wow. Yeah. Now, you know what won't declare you a schizophrenic for stealing a candy bar and scramble your brains with an icepick? Tell me. The products and services that support this show. Oh, then I want to know about them. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Here we go. 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 got to 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. Nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. 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 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking about Walter Freeman in the twilight of his career, you know, the 60s and shit.

As medical science starts to pull away from Freeman's practices and towards more humane methods of treating them mentally ill. And I guess more humane methods includes literally everything that doesn't involve an ice pick. So while this was all going on in his field, Walter doubled and tripled down on his claim to fame. He spent increasing amounts of time doing what he called shrink baiting, essentially trying to trigger more respectable physicians and writing limericks about his professional enemies. He was known to declare that he would rather be wrong than boring. That's so true. That's on his tombstone. That's on his tombstone. Now, this desire to buck tradition led him to eschew other basic aspects of professional medical niceties from the Guardian.

He had a buccaneering disregard for the usual medical formalities. He chewed gum while he operated and displayed impatience with what he called all that germ crap, routinely failing to sterilize his hands or wear rubber gloves, despite a 14% fatality rate. Freeman performed 3439 lobotomies in his lifetime. And we haven't talked about any malpractice suits at all. No, not in the 60s, man. Now, in case you aren't aware, a 14% fatality rate is essentially criminal. Any modern surgeon who killed that many patients with what they consider to be routine operation would be investigated on the suspicion that they were some sort of serial killer.

But of course, Walter Freeman was not really a surgeon. He was just a doctor who'd found a lazier way to perform brain surgery using a tool from his kitchen. God damn it. Frank, now a retired security guard. And I think it was meant to sound positive, but it's just unintentionally horrifying to me. He is a friendly giant of a man. This is talking about Frank. He's a friendly giant of a man dressed smartly in a double breasted dark blue suit and a burgundy tie kept in place by a thin gold clip.

He was a marvelous father, Frank said, sitting in a room filled with crossword dictionaries and Dick Francis novels. He loved his children and always made time for us out of his busy schedule, taking us camping every summer all across the country. Frank recalls being invited to observe a lobotomy when he was 21 and vividly remembers having a little crack as the orbital plate fractured. It only took about six or seven minutes, and dad kept up a running commentary. Indeed, the original ice pick used for the first transorbital lobotomy came from the Freeman family kitchen drawer. We had several of them, says Frank cheerfully. We used them to punch holes in our belts when we got bigger. I'm enormously proud of my father.

I do think he's been unfairly treated. He was an interventionalist surgeon, a pioneer, and that took guts. Apple tree fall. Yeah. For him to like, oh, you know, he did a good thing. Isn't that great? Look here, look, I got an ice pick in my kitchen right now. We could go poke anybody's eye.

We used it to poke holes in our belts, and my dad used it to poke holes in brains. This is fine. Yeah, this is fine. This is fine. Yeah. Now, thankfully, he wound up a security guard rather than a brain surgeon, which I think would have been a better career for his dad, too, in retrospect. 100%. 100%.

I liked his dad more when his dad was sick all the time. Yeah, yeah, he really should have stayed that way. Now, in 1967, Freeman was visited by Helen Mortensen, one of his earliest patients. She had received two lobotomies from Freeman, one in 1946 and one in 1956 after a relapse. In 1967, she relapsed again, likely as a result of her brain repairing itself. Yeah. And she went into Walter for a third lobotomy. This was conducted at Herrick Memorial Hospital in Berkeley, California.

And unfortunately for Helen, Walter severed a blood vessel in her brain. She died three days later from the operation, and Freeman's surgical privileges were revoked. He lived for five more years, during which he performed no additional lobotomies. He died from cancer on May 31, 1972, at the ripe old age of 76. Between 1936 and the late 1950s, the wave of lobotomies Walter ignited led to more than 40,000 lobotomies, and perhaps more than 50,000. Some aspects of the techniques Dr. Freeman pioneered are still in use, but only on a profoundly limited scale. Less than 20 brain operations per year, on average, are performed in the U.S. to treat psychiatric disorders. Most of these use lasers or radiation to lesion off small sections of a particular chunk of the brain,

primarily to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder or Parkinson's. Transorbital lobotomies are no longer practiced, and most of the young men and women, Dr. Walter Freeman, I suspect, have long since followed him to the grave. And that's the episode. Wow. So they're still done, but I'm sure nowadays somebody washes their hands beforehand. They're not sort of brain surgery to deal with any sort of psychosis. Some of the things he pioneered are performed on a very limited basis,

or are part of more humane treatments, but again, like 20 people a year receive something vaguely similar. And they're not even that similar. It's just that they remove similar parts of the brain because it does help certain people. But again, you look at how many thousands of operations he performed, and the actual need seems to be somewhere like maybe a couple dozen people a year benefit from a vague form of what he did. He liked it. Right. It's like when you take your car to get an oil change and you can tell they just want to change brakes.

They're like, oh, they need new brakes. Do you really? Well, that's what we do here is brakes. So that's what we're going to say you need. I think a lot of it was that he was good at performing a lobotomy, and most people couldn't do that sort of work without breaking down, because it was just horrifying to a normal human being to shove an ice pick into a skull. Yes. And Freeman didn't give a shit, and he didn't like working with other people. So he was able to do this alone, and he was the best at it, and that's all he wanted from his career.

So that's the only thing he really did. Right. And he didn't grow up with much of an affinity for the female gender. So he was more than happy to shut up a wife. Oh, yeah. Your wife's talking. Sounds like schizophrenia. Right. Yeah. Yeah, that's wild. That's horrific.

That's pretty bad, dude. If the fact, when do you think, so it probably should have really ended by like 65? Yeah. I mean, he stopped, 67 was his last one. I think it probably should have stopped by the 50s. Okay, 50s. Yeah. I guess you could argue it's understandable.

No, she was like the late 40s, I think. Oh, that's right. I keep thinking, I was thinking of the person that was in 62. But yeah, she was in the 40s. That's right. They started in the late 30s. You could argue that there was maybe a decade there where just if you assume medical science is going to have some really rough patches just because it's hard to figure shit out.

Maybe a decade where people would have done this before realizing, oh, this actually is just turning people off and not fixing any problems. Right. But it went on for a long, and most doctors by the 50s certainly were aware that like, this is not the thing you do for everybody who's got a mental illness. There's better treatments, but he kept right on rolling almost to the 70s. Wow. Like he damn near made it to disco.

Well, thank God for that. Yeah. Thank God that we stopped it before disco. Yeah. Yeah. That would have really tarnished America's brightest period. Also, I love when we get to give the CIA credit for things they didn't do. Yeah.

The CIA was like, this seems real fucked up, which should tell you all you need to know. We're just going to abduct people off the street and give them toxic doses of LSD. Right. That seems like the humane option. Wow, man. Like in between assassinating democratically elected leaders and running death squads, the CIA looks back at this and it's like, oh boy, that's going to piss people off. Right.

If we do this, that's going to really look bad. We're not looking to get into that ice pick game. Yeah. We don't want to be monsters. No. And it's too much evidence. Yeah. LSD wears off.

Yeah. Yeah. So, Daniel. Yeah. How are you feeling? Well, educated. First of all, so I appreciate that. I'm so surprised that some people went on to live normal lives.

I love that Howard went on to actually like kind of be okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so many horror stories in this man's life. Yeah. He's a living like a living monument to how resilient human beings can be. He had like a family. He like lived, it seems to have been a pretty happy life after he got, you know, over some

things and was like, you know, training school bus drivers. That's not an easy job. That's an important job. He was apparently good at it. But it's like you said with that woman. That's amazing. The brain repair can repair itself. Yeah.

I did the best that it could. Geez. Yeah. It seems like it did great in his case. Did Watts happened to like really end up distancing himself then from Friedman? No, I think he, you know, he had some major arguments with the man, but he always regarded him as a brilliant pioneering doctor. Just somebody who he think took things a little too far and was a little bit too cavalier.

But like he really respected him, it seems. I'm not an expert on Watts. No. Not on this one. Yeah. So you feel happy after this? I mean, I'm happy that I'm living in a better medical time. Don't you feel like we're not doing anything right now medically that we're going to look

back? I'm sure somebody's going to be like, actually, and then I'm like, oh, no, I think we're doing lots of shit that we're going to look back on. It's really fucked up. Oh yeah, man. I think we're doing a ton of stuff that is going to be looked back on as deeply problematic. Not as, I don't think we're doing anything on a mass scale that's nearly as bad as the mass lobotomies that we're being performed back then.

But I think we're doing a lot of fucked up shit. I think particularly what's going to be looked at in the future as as bad as lobotomies are on that level is how we deal with people who have, there's evidence that a lot of violent criminals, like people who are in prison for violent crimes, have head injuries. Yeah, I was going to say CTE. Yeah. They looked at that Aaron Hernandez case and that the Boston Globe did the spotlight team. Profoundly damaged.

Yeah. Yeah. I think we're going to look at our treatment of prisoners as an essentially rooted in our inability to recognize or our desire to not give a shit about a lot of types of mental illness and not treat it and just lock it up. And I think that that is something that will be viewed on the same scale as lobotomies are today. Yeah, I would agree with all that.

I think I was trying to think like a specific procedure that we're like, oh, you never do that anymore. But yeah, no, that's all, you're right on the nose with that stuff. Yeah, I think there might, I don't think it compares in terms of the scale, but I think like one of the things a lot of people with autism complain about with groups like autism speaks is that their goal is to like eradicate autism. And a lot of people argue like, well, but wait, I'm perfectly happy. I just have a different kind of brain and I think about the world differently.

And your desire to eradicate me is kind of like eugenics and horrible. And I do think that we will increasingly recognize that like trying to wipe out autism is incredibly fucked up and that instead we should be focusing on like helping these people integrate with everyone else. And like, yeah, but I don't think the scale of that. And I don't think like that's not, it's a sliding scale. I think it's worse to jam ice picks into people's brains. I just keep thinking of the show, the Nick, did you watch the Nick?

No. I do highly recommend it. Clive Owen, Chris Sullivan, who's now on the show, This Is Us, I think it's Soderbergh, but it was on Showtime and it's all about like the medical advancements in the like teens and twenties and just seeing like what they were trying to figure out and the chances they were taking that ended up working and like the advancements they would find just even how to like do a transfusion and stuff like that. So I just kept thinking of that because my whole thing is like when something very delicate

and very tricky, maybe that's redundant, but ends up being like common. I always wonder how many times, what was the trial and error process that scares me like what was the trial and error process for Walter Jackson Friedman and whatever and those people are gone. I mean, and those monkeys are gone. It's, you know, there's an extent to which we were going to try lobotomies. Of course. It was going to happen and it's not bad, you know, even though some people were going

to be horribly affected by it, it had to happen for medical science to advance. It didn't have to happen on this scale. It's like we were going to realize that like Ritalin could be helpful in treating certain kinds of like ADHD. It didn't have to be wildly overprescribed to children at the level it was in the 1990s and stuff. Not that I don't think, obviously, I don't think giving Ritalin to kids is nearly as bad as thousands of lobotomies with ice picks and unwashed hands, but there's always going

to be some sort of like, we figured out this new thing, it helps some people. Let's massively over apply it. That's kind of how human beings are. But if like that's part of why the scientific method is supposed to work the way it's supposed to work, where scientists are supposed to kind of pull their ego out of it and look at like, okay, well, now we have data saying we're actually doing this way too much and we should stop. But then you get a guy like Freeman who bases his whole identity on the fact that he's the

best at this thing that we shouldn't really be doing. And then it doesn't stop. So it's this kind of problem where in an ideal world, if we treated science the way we're always supposed to treat it, somebody would have walked up to Freeman in like the late 40s or early 50s and been like, actually, this is being done way too much. And he would be like, ah, damn, okay, well, let's figure out something better, but instead he doesn't. Yeah, because he just wants to do this thing.

He wants to fuck with people's brains. He likes it. And see what happens. Yeah, exactly. Also, are you a Song of Ice and Fire guy at all? Oh, yeah, I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big fail of the books.

It also makes me think of Kwyborne, the character, because there's always that too in medical history where there's like, because I look at it and there's more, I'm sure, but just in the sake of this conversation, like I look at like, there's people who learn what medicine works and they dedicate their life to helping people. And then there's the other type of person who has no problem just poking around, putting things together and then seeing what comes of it. And a lot of times you get advancements out of that or you find out something that works. But they might not necessarily be the same type of traditional doctor who wants to help

someone. They're very curious and have the ability to just dig around in people's innards to see what can work where. And that always creeps me out too. Yeah, isn't that great? Yeah. Yeah. You want to plug your plugables, Daniel?

I do. People should go to DanielVanKirk.com. There you can see all of my dates and where I'm going to be. I've got December 2nd, I'm doing a show at Largo. On November 22nd, I will be headlining in Petaluma, California and other tour dates and things as well. But most importantly, you can get my album. Thanks, Diane.

It drops on November 15th. If you're hearing this before then, you can pre-buy the album at the Apple Store app in your phone or go to DanielVanKirk.com and you can click through to there. When you do that, you'll get an instant track called Don't Be a Dick, which I'm proud of. You'll get the whole album on November 15th and go to DanielVanKirk.com for all that. Or listen to me on my podcast, Dumb People Town, which I do with the Sklar Brothers or Pen Pals, which I do with Rory Scoville. Cool.

Yeah. Well, I am Robert Evans. You can find me on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com, where the sources for this episode will be, including Jack L. High's wonderful book, The Lobotomist. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at at BastardsPod. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. You can find love in your heart as long as you're willing to put an ice pick into your brain.

Again, this is my encouragement to all of our listeners to grab an ice pick and start lobotomizing. Be a hero like Dr. Freeman. Do not. Sophie, can we urge people to carry out unlicensed surgery? No, but you could plug your other podcast. I have another podcast. Mm-hmm. We do have another podcast.

With our friends. Yeah. Yeah. The Worst Year Ever with Katie and Cody from Some More News. We talk about the 2020 election, which will be The Worst Year Ever. So if you want a lobotomy to feel like sweet release, listen to The Worst Year Ever. This week we talk about Tulsi Gabbard. So that one's fun.

Nice. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on this show, man. I love coming back and learning. Yeah. Thank you for coming, Daniel. Thank you for learning, and thank you for spreading the gospel of the ice pick. 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 podcast.

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 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 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 Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.