Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 414: Lobotomies Part II - Assistant to the Bone Slicer

Episode Date: June 20, 2020

On the conclusion to our series on the history of lobotomies, we explore just how the procedure became the most popular mental health treatment of the forties, despite the horrific and unpredictable��side effects that came with shoving an ice pick up through an eye socket and wiggling it around in their brain, plus the reason why the lobotomy fell out of favor. 

There's no place to escape to. This is the last time. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Thank you for having me back. My name is Robert Milksman. I'm 91 years old and I want to say thank you to Dr. Freeman for giving me my eighth lobotomy. Just this morning and I have to say where am I? Who are you? What's on my body? I feel like I'm wearing Christmas wrappings. Well you are. You are today's Christmas gift. Now unwrap yourself in front of all these doctors. It's time for another lobotomy! Merry Christmas! Hey what's up everyone. Welcome to the last podcast on the left. I am Ben, the Staring at Marcus and we have again another week of lobotomized Henry Zabrowski. How lucky would we be to be lobotomized? Honestly we were just talking before the show. All three of us wished to feel nothing. I've been just researching lobotomies the last couple of weeks. Just every once in a while it hits me like that sounds so nice.

Yes I don't feel bad but I don't feel good. What is this? It's called peace? Peace? The idea of just like looking at my problems through a porthole in the center of my mind and not being on the other side of the porthole? Wow. Weird. What a concept. Alright everybody it is time for part two of lobotomies. By the way apparently I'm supposed to say I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than get a lobotomy. You did it wrong. I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. No! It's a Tom Waits line. Yes it is because I know for a fact because I sat last night truly and I did this. I poured myself three fingers. Garrison brothers bourbon thank you so much for sending it to me. I'm just going to fucking shout out to you. Are you only drinking free booze now? Yes as much as possible. I just think it's delicious. It tastes like fucking beautiful beautiful iced tea that makes you happier instead of all jumpy. I sat there and I played that song and I sat and I listened to it as I was drinking bourbon in my kitchen and I was thinking the message of if you take the lyrics of that song vaguely seriously

and you look at it and say yeah it's true yeah I'm drunk but you're crazy. Alright well I didn't realize it was a Tom Waits song people were just tweeting at me that their father would say I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than have or get a lobotomy. I did not. Tom Waits is more artistic. You gotta say frontal. No I understand what Tom Waits said. You derailed the entire show and our careers with this. Whatever lobotomies part two. So when we last left Walter Freeman the future lobotomist was in desperate need to discover some sort of treatment that would make a mark in the world of treating the mentally ill although Freeman was never what you would call an originator when it came to ideas. Case and point was Egas Moniz. When Egas went public with his new psychosurgery treatment which we talked about last episode the leukotomy Freeman saw his chance to use someone else's idea and take it in a new direction.

Good Artist Sparrow. Great Artist Steel. The best artist's murder. Yeah that's very true. Egas. Egas. Very good. Egas. Egas. Well I think technically I don't want to be like this but I believe it is Egas Moniz. Oh my god. That is true. I do believe it is that because he's Brazilian. Actually he's Portuguese. Oh my god. Yeah. Take that. Put that in your pipe and smoke that. Now there were other physical techniques to treat mental illness at the time besides the leukotomy and Freeman had tried them all. There was beau-seeing which was basically alternating between submerging a patient in water and punching them in the skull. And the best part is that if it doesn't make you not crazy anymore it also proves whether or not you're a witch. Yeah that's very true. Why do they treat people like drunkards in an old western saloon. What is going on. You just drown someone and punch them. And there was also hydrotherapy which was forcing a patient into a tub full of freezing water and immobilizing their body by covering the tub in a constricting canvas sheet

which only had an opening for the head to poke out. You know if you did any research into insulin therapy this shit is fucking brutal. They give you insulin until it takes your sugars down to zero. I guess the idea is to do a hard reboot on the human mind and it snaps you into a coma and then you go through either what's called wet shock or dry shock where wet shock is that you drool and sweat all the way through your clothes and through the mattress and it switches into dry shock. I guess once you run out of liquid where you start fucking convulsing they did it to Russell Crowe in a beautiful mind. No kidding alright. And speaking of restarting the system there was also shock therapy still approved by the FDA to this day in which relatively small currents of electricity are passed through the brain in order to trigger a seizure and ostensibly provide relief for all manner of mental disorders.

Shock therapy is making a comeback. No kidding. It's still used. I actually was watching a little commercial for shock therapy the other day with a bunch of like normal people. Nobody going like I gotta tell you what this lecture. Shock therapy. Really work for me like no they all look really well adjusted. If you want to have a seizure just stare at a strobe light have a little fun with it. What Walter Freeman took from a study of these treatments was that they temporarily alleviated some of the mental illness sometimes.

Because you're fucking shaking like you're going completely crazy. And Freeman figured that Igas Moniz's leukaotomy was a way to cure mental illness permanently. Sure. Now Moniz thought that by severing the neural connections in the frontal lobes using his specialized leukaotomy he could disrupt the detrimental and habitual emotional responses that cause the symptoms of mental illness. Hey Marcus. Yeah. Do you know one of our intrepid listeners. We have some of the best listeners in the world and last week I called the frontal lobes the titties of the brain.

And I had a listener send me an email saying that actually there are titties inside of the brain. What. There's a thing called the mammary. The mammary bodies. If you look at the thing of the brain it's this little subject of the brain and there's these two little lumps right on the underside of the brain. They were originally referred to as the testicles of the brain. But they have actually subsequently become to known as the breasts of the brain. Mammarily lights are they like hanging out with Senate bytes having sex with each other in hell.

No I don't know anything else beside what I just said. Great. Well by disrupting these responses these detrimental and habitual emotional responses Moniz theorized but could not prove that the brain would be forced to develop new neural pathways and these new neural pathways wouldn't be all gunked up with bad vibes like the old ones were. Hey Marcus don't talk like a fucking scientist here. And it talks like an understand. Now even though this hypothesis could not be more wrong.

Moniz still falsely reported that the leucotomies he performed cured agitated depression in five out of six patients who had received them. Those are good odds. But also a lie. So after reading Moniz's claims Freeman ordered a few leucotomes for himself along with a few cadaver heads to the business of learning how to perform these new fangled leucotomies himself. Take a look. Hello my assistant. The assistant to the bones slices.

Look at all of them. Dr. Freeman my favorite customer get your punch card Mr. Freeman. Get your punch card Dr. Freeman because tomorrow you get a set of balls for free. Who doesn't want a set of free balls. What magazine did this guy order this stuff out of. This is 1936. You can get all kinds of weird shit if you're a doctor. Working with his creature James Watts the terminally serious surgeon Freeman began to examine those cadaver heads in order to find safe pathways from the skull to the anatomical coordinates.

And he had identified as being the source of mental disorder because that's the thing. It's not like Walter Freeman went to Portugal and learned this unproven technique from Egas Moniz himself. In true American style Freeman and Watts just read what Moniz has published and thought shit I can do that. But better. So they got second hand information on this. They just read papers that Egas had published and looked at the diagrams. I don't need to go. I don't need to travel to Portugal.

I will say that there I imagine that the butts in Ohio are just as big if not bigger. And I can imagine that the brains are commiserate. Oh I love a good Ohio butt because they're big but yet flat. Like this beautiful earth of ours. And so once Freeman and Watts figured they had the procedure more or less figured out they found a patient willing to participate. And the person who volunteered was a housewife named Alice Hamott. I don't want a dress rehearsal of a brain surgery. I want fucking five years into the rep show of brain surgery.

But you know I don't know Henry because what happens a beginner's luck. I don't want to be the second one. Absolutely you want to be the first hand. Remember how fun that felt. Now as we said in the last episode. Leucotomies were a procedure of last resort. Something to do when the only option left was to lock the person away in an asylum until they died of their own accord. God damn it Marcus.

Now you've triggered Papa Roach. This is my last resort. I hate you. I can't believe you just seeded that into my head. Cut my life into pieces. No. No I will not cut your life into pieces. It could be debated as to whether or not Alice Hamott was one of those last resort people.

But she certainly had her challenges. She was suffering from prolonged insomnia, extreme anxiety and debilitating depression. Besides having anxiety bad enough to cause serious stomach ulcers and suicidal postpartum depression. Alice's brother-in-law had just murdered her sister then killed himself. So you put all this together. You put what's already going on in her brain with outside influences. She started to show some abnormal behavior. Didn't they have like stand-up comedy or something that she could have gotten into in the 30s?

Well Alice became fixated on her own appearance and would sometimes stand in front of the mirror for hours. Grimacing at her own reflection and refusing to move. Even after she urinated on the floor because she couldn't hold back her bodily functions any longer. Things got even worse when Alice started standing nude in her windows in order to expose herself to the neighbors. Okay now this is just starting to sound like me in that summer that I was just doing mushrooms, living in New York City with no curtains. Okay this is just a- this is growth. I don't know. This is kind of fun for the neighborhood kids.

You get to see the neighbor all nudy-toody. I don't like the term nudy-toody. It's awful. She is a highly mentally ill woman. I don't know. I don't know. It's the 1930s. It's no different between 1930s and today. Oh you don't think there's a difference? Not when it comes to being extremely mentally ill. Hmm that might be true. That could be true.

Well even though her family tried to stop her from doing these things they were fighting a losing battle. But okay remember this is 1936. Talk therapy is useless for extreme psychosis unless it's paired with the right medication. And the types of medications that would have held Alice Hommott were still decades away from being developed. That's why my- my shit I haven't really been able to scratch my fucking deep mental illness with talk therapy which is why I've been switching to not talk therapy but action therapy. Me, my therapist, hot wire a couple of fucking souped up Toyota Camry's. We fucking drift our way down to TJ and we're fighting the fucking cartels.

And guess what? When I'm out there fucking shooting fucking all of the cult members of Santa Muerte with my fucking 45 with a Virgin Mary on it I'm not thinking about the fact that I'm afraid of my own memories. Yeah absolutely. Gone in 84 seconds. I love that. So when the leucotomy came onto the scene Alice and her family figured what do we got to lose. So Hommott agreed to be the first person in the United States to try the experimental procedure. Because they figured either she's gonna die or she's gonna be in a mental hospital forever. Whether it goes well or not. If it goes well or if she survives and it doesn't work she's still gonna be in a mental hospital. If she does it and it goes badly and she's worse

she's still gonna be in a mental hospital. So I was like fuck it let's just try it. Do you want to be in the bone thugs in harmony? See at the Crossroads video where you're happily in heaven? Or do you want to be in Metallica's one? Because that's the only option for you. Because that's all I see is just the close my eyes I wish for you. I think again and again just all of that world. Yeah if I'm ever in a coma just play that song on repeat so I can really set the mood. Well the night before the surgery Hommott was given a preparatory enema. Which she was fine with. I'm sure she was. Very cathartic.

But when it came time to shave her hair the image-conscious Hommott tried backing out but Freeman assured her that he would keep as much of her hair as possible. Now this was a lie. Yeah I'll keep it in a fucking suitcase. He shaved her whole goddamn head the moment he could. But he figured the ends justified the means and besides he knew for Monance's research that Hommott wouldn't really give a shit after the surgery. Oh my god yeah he knew the ending of this story without telling her the ending. Yeah so once Hommott was knocked out after a brief confrontation with the anesthesiologist

Watts and Freeman began the procedure by drilling a hole with an auger over the frontal lobes on each side of the skull. With any luck this will be the cover of a Pantera album. Bar-B-On Driven. Then once the brain was exposed the aforementioned leukotome was inserted four centimeters inside the skull. Using the tool the doctors would press down on the plunger to cut out round cores of white neural fibers which Freeman described as having the consistency of warm butter. I'm so nasty. So you're disgusted that people at home are disgusted.

I first read that sentence as I was going through the outline. There's a part of me that just went hmm. It reminded me of we were just watching Top Chef right and they had a whole thing they went to Parma the home of Brigitte right and if you go and they have all of these big fucking hogs legs all cured up hanging up like fucking Texas Chainsaw Massacre but delicious and Natalie had to leave the room. Right. But I was so excited by it it made me so viscerally hungry.

Yeah well I don't know what to do. Yeah I think it's really awkward to fill out divorce papers in front of your husband you're about to divorce. We're very open. We're very open with each other. Very good. Well after cutting out three cores they did it again from a different angle. Cutting three more cores with the wire device. They did that four times for a total of 12 cores scooped out of Alice Hamat's frontal lobes using no more than guesswork. She's not a watermelon.

What is going on? What is the point of all of this? Well the point is to cure her anxiety. She's got extreme anxiety she's got extreme depression because that's what they that's just this is their theory because they don't know what the fuck the frontal lobe does not particularly. So they figure that pretty much all this bad shit is in the frontal lobe. So if we go in and cut out cores cut out little pieces of it little scoop it out just scoop it out a little bit. Then she'll be all good. I never want the doctor to be like we're scooping out.

We're going to scoop it out a little bit. We're going to give a little scoop it out. We're just going to see what happens if we just give it a little scoop it out. Yep scoop it out. Now after the surgery Hamat vomited uncontrollably and couldn't stop pissing herself. Good lord. So what okay literally was is it a success? When Freeman asked her if she still felt anxious she said no.

And when asked if she was happy or sad she said happy. Now there's a difference when you ask somebody how you doing right they go like you know what like I feel a little bit better. I feel you know obviously I feel a little slow maybe there's a bit of a headache you know like somebody talks like that. But then when you say or there's a difference when you say like how you doing they go I'm happy. What's better is that a better person? She vomits all over the place like Jeff Goldblum in a fly just melting everything around her and pissing herself non-stop. But when she was asked what had caused her anxiety in the first place she said she couldn't remember. And as she spoke she absentmindedly rubbed her face and arms with a paper towel as if she were drying herself even though she wasn't wet.

It made for some really controversial bounty commercials. Yeah I believe that. But that became like the hallmark of the lobotomy patient afterwards. Oh they wiped themselves even though they're not wet. Strange repetitive motions there was one there was one person who would just pretend like they were pouring a cup of coffee over and over again while they were talking. Weren't even aware that they were doing it and had no reason for doing it but they and they didn't know why but they still kept doing lobotomies. Make them a waitress that is so perfect you pop it in they dump it and they're always dumping so you can take it out when the coffee is empty and then put it back in. Replace it with decaf.

So you're saying turn them into a robot an automatic coffee machine. Turn them into workers that really love their job. This is a real CEO talking. This is how CEOs think. Now Hamat recovered reasonably well for almost a week but on the sixth day she became disoriented and couldn't really speak or write legibly. But that was okay because she didn't really care. Is it okay though? No no I am a little bit jealous.

I'm slightly jealous of this not caring thing. But she soon recovered from that as well and before she knew it she could go outside without being unreasonably concerned about her appearance and she was finally able to speak with a friend whom she normally found exasperating. So it worked. It worked. It helped her absorb Kramer. Yes I mean absolutely you got a nosy neighbor and now you can be friends with them. Yeah if Jerry Seinfeld had gotten a lobotomy there wouldn't be any need for the tension between him and Newman. Newman would just be out there yelling stuff we're doing all his bits and Jerry Seinfeld would just be sitting there going I'm happy.

Well it came with a price. There was a price for all this. Like most psychosurgery patients to come after Alice lost all spontaneity and wouldn't initiate anything unless prompted. Whether that be physical action or conversation. Yeah but the only thing she did spontaneously was get naked in front of the window. That's the most spontaneous thing you can do. No I know that but I'm just saying this to me I'm not a doctor. You are not a doctor.

It seems like a success so far. The stuff that is difficult is like I was watching some old footage of lobotomy patients and there's stuff where it's like you see a person standing with a picture right. Like they were like scribbling on a thing and a doctor like pokes them and pokes them and pokes them and then finally they realized like oh I'm trying. I'm supposed to show everybody the picture. Shows them the picture and then watching the doctor go like pull up on his facial muscles his mouth muscles going like smile smile. And then you see the body patients go like oh yes smile yes good. Because they're happy because they're happy to draw. It's the death of the soul.

Sure. That's another way to look at it. Yeah it's turning them into blobs creatures like they're not they have lost an essential part of their humanity. I'm really pro lobotomy at this point so we have got to figure this out. Well yeah that I mean I guess that that was one of the criticisms of the book the lobotomist by Jack Alhi was that they said that it was an apologist's view of the of Walter Freeman's life. And what did you say to that Henry. To me what we're talking about is actually just more granting the fact that Walter Freeman in the story is highly ridiculous. And that there are unintentionally funny moments which is why we covered the story throughout this whole this whole saga.

Yeah I believe you're scooping around the brain. There's going to be some humor there. Well Freeman considered Alice Hamot a wild success and not even a month later he scheduled his next leucotomy with a 59 year old bookkeeper without even considering that there might be long term effects from this procedure which there were. The second patient was Emma Ager who suffered from agitated depression. She'd spent the previous six months in bed experiencing hallucinations and weeping uncontrollably while living in constant fear of being poisoned. Like hopefully Stephen Miller lives his fucking life. Yeah Kim Jong-un perhaps. This time Freeman who again was a psychiatrist not a surgeon. He kind of biffed the surgery.

Oh I don't want to hear that. He got a little too wild with the leucotome and broke it off inside the woman's head. Oh God. And this would by no means be the last time he'd make this little oopsie. Wait so he what's the reaction. He was very excited. What's the reaction when you break something off in someone's brain. It sounds like my father trying to fix the outside TV during the one or two Super Bowl parties my mother allowed him to have in the home before she stopped it because she couldn't stand his friends because they're all fucking awful cops.

Right. And so he said just him going like try not to curse in front of the kids. So I could see him doing that. But after retrieving the broken tool the surgery had no more complications. And two weeks later Emma was in Freeman's words cheerful but lacking in motivation approaching her formally debilitating delusions as uninteresting distractions. Two months later she went back to work as a bookkeeper. So he made her a less boring bookkeeper than she was. That's a little more boring.

Lobotomies turn people into the most boring individuals on earth. They have no personality at all. No they become kind of like automatons. Yeah they're drones. And in fact like the CIA very much considered lobotomies as a way to deal with political agitators because it takes away any and all care that you have for anything. You don't go to work unless someone tells you hey you should go to work and then you go. Oh that's a good idea I should go to work. After Emma there was the construction worker who became a compulsive talker afterwards.

The OCD sufferer who relapsed in six weeks and would only wear her bathrobe backwards. Oh that's just called leaving the barn door open. That's kind of cool. And the schizophrenic who died in a mental institution 13 years later as a trash hoarder. But as far as freedom was concerned every single one of these was a win because as he put it no one died and no one got worse. That's it's all about lowering your expectations. Keep the bar low and then you're always a winner. But as he performed more leucotomies he felt the need to separate himself from egazmonus.

So he began to refer to the procedure as the lobotomy. You get it. It's all about branding. And yeah it is. It is interesting to hear that it's lobotomy. Yeah. Because the idea is like we say lobotomy quite a bit but it's you remember it's because we're shaving your brain cities. Yeah.

The lobes. You know an otomy is when you cut something and I like that's the suffix for a surgery in which you just kind of like cut something out. Ectomies when you fucking remove something. So yeah lobe. Otomy. Cutting the lobe. You guys doctors. You guys doctors.

Yeah as a matter of fact I am you better check it for testicular cancer. Come here. Yeah I got it. Oh my god I feel a lump. You have testicular cancer sir. You need to go to a real. I'm a confess I'm not a doctor. I'm a molester of adult men.

All right I'm a bit of one of those so you're actually going to want to get these checked out for certain. And so Freeman and Watts continued with the goal of 20 lobotomies by the end of 1936. Some patients turned from anxiety ridden messes to cheerful blobs. Some didn't change at all. And some died of hemorrhaging on the table. One of the more memorable fuck ups was Paul Hennessey. During his lobotomy Freeman was drilling through the skull when the bone unexpectedly gave way. And the auger was accidentally plunged deep into Hennessey's brain.

Oh my fucking god. Oh my god. What a day at the office. Good lord. But in a testament to the resilience of the human body Hennessey was just fine. And he checked himself out of the hospital hours later. However the procedure did not work as the manically alcoholic Hennessey went straight from the hospital to the bar. And Freeman and Watts had to drag him out themselves in order to save his life.

You think you're fucking better than me? You think you're better than me? You put a wishing well on my brain this morning. Yeah I'm having a couple of doers. Maybe even some Hennessey. At the end of 1936 Freeman and Watts decided to go big for the last lobotomy of the year. Instead of cutting out 12 cores they removed 18 from the brain of a 60 year old woman with depression. It's a special double feature. Within hours of waking up though she became paralyzed on her left side, lost the ability to speak, fell into a coma and died six days later.

Jesus Christ. Freeman and Watts decided that 12 at a time was enough. And if you wanted to do more you gotta wait. You can't do 18 at once. You gotta do 12 now, 12 in about a year, and 12 about a year after that. The problem is I got gritty y'all. I'm a core cutting motherfucker. That's all I do. Core cutting is my name. Damn my game. That's what I do. Concerning the mortality rate of those early lobotomies, six out of the first 23 were fatal. Out of the survivors, four patients were employed, four were competent housewives,

four had to be cared for by their families, and two were institutionalized. This is them checking in on them 10 years later. And here we go. I did some math here. So 8 out of 20, right? That we're fine. That's 40%. It's not good. I guess it's not bad. But I did some research, and Shaquille O'Neal, who was one of the worst free throw percentage, he was one of the worst free throw basketball players in the history of the game, his percentage point was 52.7%.

He made more free throws than Dr. Freeman did successful lobotomies. Well, but Shaq is also one of the greatest centers in the history of the game. Well, I mean, that's actually a good point. That's the thing is that Freeman should have stayed in his own lane because he wasn't a surgeon. Yeah, but then it's so much more fun to drift around. Even though those numbers aren't fantastic, Freeman saw nothing but blue skies ahead and his confidence in his own abilities only grew. On one operation day, James Watts, who was the surgeon, he was sick,

which meant that the surgery should have been postponed because Walter Freeman was not a surgeon, but Freeman figured, Shaq can't be that hard. No, you scoop it out. I'm a cork on motherfucker. So he went ahead and began the surgery alone. The only thing that kept him from finishing that day was another surgeon who looked in the window and saw a psychiatrist operating on a person's brain without supervision. Hey, hey, listen. All right. Do I come into your fucking office and take the dick out of your mouth?

Tell you what you do with your job. All right. Listen, you do you what do you do competent surgery? I'm a neuroscientist. Yes, yes. I get results. Yeah. Well, I don't think that you should really be in here. This is for doctors, medical doctors that know how to do surgery. Okay. Okay. How about this? We arm wrestle. I win. You give me back my ice pick. All right. Yeah, that's how it's done. But even though most men in the medical field were skeptical, if not outright hostile towards Freeman, the press was eating this shit up. And just see him walking down the hospital halls getting hip checked by doctors and scrubs. Just everyone would be like, fuck you. The New York Times reported that lobotomy was a surgery of the soul, but they were printing that in a positive way.

Oh, come on. Now, they didn't report on the lobotomy operations Freeman had already performed, but they instead opted to focus on a lobotomy Freeman had given to a monkey. Thing was though, Freeman neglected to mention that he'd killed the monkey. Well, I'll kill a monkey. I'll kill a monkey. Look how calm this dead monkey is. Say it doesn't work. Say lobotomies don't work. You see him fretting? No, he's rotting. Yeah, not scared at all. But building off this good press, Freeman began giving rousing speeches about the efficacy of lobotomies at American Medical Association meetings, sometimes using a clacker ratchet like a fucking carnival barker to keep their attention and make his points. He's really feeling himself at this time period because he starts to they kind of viewed the human brain as like an engine to a car. They thought that they could just go in there fucking flippity flop around and they could fix they could fix everything.

And Walter Freeman really talk about like a God complex. I think that he really started to see himself as like a perennial figure in medical history immediately and wanted to saw with it. Well, Paul Trady talks about the the trials of being a quote unquote great man. He's talking about doing again. I'm just saying, okay, please, Henry, please clarify when you start talking about dude, because nobody really knows. I knew. No, I know you knew. Marcus, you are not everybody. But he understands that like quote unquote, great men have to see themselves within the pantheons and history and see themselves with the fucking talking about dude. I am saying Walter Freeman tried to view the world that way and saw how he could position himself in a way to be a capital I important person in history. Yeah.

All right, I can see the God complex is messing with the brain taking souls away from people. He's been while there were plenty of failures with lobotomies. Freeman could sort of skate past those by focusing on the few success stories. For example, one patient was paralyzed by a debilitating irrational fear of shoes before the lobotomy, which that's a fucking big deal. If you're afraid of shoes, you can't go outside. Yeah, if you're afraid of shoes, if you start your day saying like loafers or ghosts to you, what is everything else going to be? How difficult is everything else? I think you got to go to the beach. No shoes on the beach.

But after Freeman and Watts futzed around with her brain a little, she fully recovered and eventually obtained a PhD in mathematics, although she attributed her success to psychotherapy rather than psychosurgery. But it didn't kill her. And that's the bar. That was that's the bar. But that was Freeman. That was Freeman's bar and he could spin things in such a way where, you know, he didn't have to talk about those six people that died on the table. Like didn't have to talk about the person who could only communicate with their feet after the fucking surgery.

I mean, honestly, in the 90s, they would just be on Leno. He didn't talk about all this, but he had like out of like every once in a while, there would be like somewhat of a success story. And so he could put that forward and the fucking news media focused on those folks on the positive. This is when the news media wasn't just about negativity. This is when the news media wasn't trying to divide us. They said yes to this. They said this is very good news.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They yes, they ended themselves into making lobotomies like totally normal and good for like a decade. Now, the AMA still showed resistance because Freeman, again, not a surgeon, was essentially destroying the brain. But Freeman had an answer for that, saying it was better to damage the brain, quote unquote, a bit than to do nothing. Yeah, you do the Robert De Niro School of Medicine. Always know the little bit.

Little bit. He's got to be a little bit. Little bit. Little bit. Yeah. I mean, in his defense, he's not filling it with firecrackers. You know, he's doing something there. You go in there, you see Dr. De Niro, you know, and he's saying the same thing.

You're like, I'll see him. I got nipples. May he milk me? You know what I mean? Little bit. Man, you are a great, you are a great actor. Wow. But once that damage was done, the side effects were wildly unpredictable and changed from

person to person. For example, one patient, an alcoholic, found that he could, after the lobotomy, drink half the whiskey and get twice as drunk. And nobody could figure out why. This surgery is paying for itself because you would not believe how much I used to spend on booze. Now I'm drinking half as much and getting twice as drunk. I love Dr. Friedman.

I love it. My wife has left me and I have not seen my own erection in five years. As far as consistent side effects went, the most interesting was that without fail, lobotomy patients completely stopped attending houses of worship post-surgery, led some to argue that lobotomy erased spirituality from the soul. Another win for his evilness for the ultimate deceptor, ill-sweet Satan. You are a 12-year-old. Yes.

But honestly, that is very bizarre. It really is? I mean, that's what some people say, that the frontal lobes are the connection to the collective unconsciousness, the connection to humanity, you know, and you know, houses of worship. It's a part of it. You know, none of us go to houses of worship, but it's definitely a part of spirituality and part of human connection.

And without fail, none of them ever went to church or any sort of house of worship or had any interest in spirituality ever again. That's very bizarre because you would think of people that just follow commands would love going to Catholic church. It is nothing but them telling you what to do for an hour. They would love to it because it's Neil, stand up, Neil, sing a song, eat Jesus' body, drink the blood, do the fucking blood, confess your deepest, darkest, naughtiest sins to this child molester.

Are you, Father Patrick, are you masturbating right now as I tell you about my sexual fantasies? Uh, yeah, why do you think there is this screen? Get in your own fucking cubby, all right, please? Respect my privacy. Oh, I had to tell Father Steve that I masturbated when I was in high school. What denomination? Catholic. I went to Catholic school.

Oh, God. God's always uncomfortable. They always like to hear those first. That's what I always found in my experience. It did seem like he was very receptive. Oh, there's nothing worse than Catholics. Not Catholics, but the Catholic Church is a bit strange there. Really good, Kessel.

Yeah. Really good commentary. It is a little strange. Well, sometimes if a lobotomy didn't take, people would have to have more than one, which very rarely, if ever, worked out. One woman who went in for a second was never able to do more than help her daughter clean the house, and another who had a second set herself on fire immediately after. That's one of those like side effects that they put in a super, super tiny font at the

very end of the commercial. You might set yourself on fire. You may be. You may be. Yeah. It may cause self-immolation. Yes. Well, isn't that something?

How'd she get all the fire in the gut? I guess she covered herself with gasoline or something. The book wasn't super clear about how she set herself on fire. Just said she set herself on fire. Maybe try to light a fart on fire. That's different. That's fun. Well, again and again, when the patient didn't respond, Freeman always believed that it had

been because they hadn't cut enough of the neuro fibers away. As a result, Freeman had done 300 double or sometimes triple lobotomies by 1956. I love this idea that the brain is like an enemy that needs to be conquered, that you need to hurt the brain to make it behave. Yeah. I mean, it's not that big. What is the brain? Six pounds or something?

Somewhere on there. Why is he? It just seems like he's really going after the whole thing. Yeah. Sounds like someone has a surplus of brain. No, I do not. I'd like to relieve you of that, thankfully, but I don't have, where's my goddamn ice pick?

I don't have that. I just have this. I have a cheese grater. You know what? Actually, I've been thinking about it and you just have some money on booze. So let's do it with the cheese grater. Well, that cheese grater actually ain't too far off from the gyrectomy, but we'll talk about that later.

But because the results of the lobotomy were so inexact, Freeman and Watts continued to experiment. Sometimes they would do surgery with only local anesthesia, meaning the patient was conscious and interacting with their environment the entire time. So Freeman could measure the level of disorientation while it was happening. In one case, a patient was going on and on about how they regretted not going to church the day before the surgery. All while Freeman was drilling a hole into her skull, making a sound that was compared

to tooth drilling, but worse. Well, let me just put it this way. After this is done, you'll stop regretting going to church. Yeah, it does seem like he's trying to change the radio station, which is like, nah, still talking about church. I want to do everything. I want to just think about this. Another time, Freeman asked a patient what was going through her mind while Freeman was

cutting away cores in her frontal lobe. Your spoon. She actually said a knife. Yes. Hey, I got it. I got it. I do the bits right here. Okay.

Don't you do bits at me. All right. I can make you a mouth-breathing rat person. Right now. I can do it in a second. All right. You want to be afraid of shoes? I'll put some of the other brains I scooped the other day.

I'll put them in there and I'll make you afraid of shoes, all right? Freeman's 83rd patient was actually able to hold a full conversation. This woman had become obsessed with her church minister and had come to believe he was trying to kill her with evil powers granted by the devil. Okay. So, as Freeman was operating, he rattled off numbers and asked for the patient to respond with their significance. 1066, she said that was the year that William the Conqueror entered England.

Oh. 606, she said that's the number of the serum cure for syphilis. Jeez. It is? Yeah. 57. 57 varieties of hines. What?

And so on and so forth. There was a whole bunch of them, like he was like 99.3, she was like the purity of dial soap. It seems- How does she know all this? It seems like she's really smart. Maybe she's a little lobotomy, maybe she's just like a genius. And when Freeman ran out of numbers, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer in German,

which she just kept doing until the end of the lobotomy. But- That is frightening. That is very frightening. Yeah, that is scary, especially- well, this is post-World War II, I guess. This is right in the middle of it, this is a smack dab in the middle. Well, maybe he was working for the government trying to find spies. The creepiest one, though, was when Freeman asked a patient after cutting cores out of

her lobes if her conscience hurt. Still on the table, she replied that she didn't know where her conscience was. It used to be down by her heart, but now she couldn't feel it at all. That's not good. You just made another poet. Yes, you did indeed. Guilty conscience, perhaps, gone away. Well, what it does- that's the interesting thing about it, is that lobotomies often removed

the conscience of the person who got it, but because they had no drive, they didn't do anything about it. It's not like they became serial killers or anything like that, they just didn't do anything. That's what they would say, is that they had very little regard for social niceties or anything like that. It was something that families would have to get used to because they had- all of that was gone. Anything that has to do with the connection to humanity is fucking gone forever.

Which is technically what they were searching for for a little bit was the idea of people were upset with the physical actions that people were doing while in the thrust of wildly untreated mental illness. They were doing all of these- they had physical side effects and public side effects, which is what they were just trying to eliminate. They were just trying to eliminate the act-outs, anything that would be honestly just straight up embarrassing or socially inappropriate, and then truthfully, a lot of it, hurtful to their family and friends and stuff like that, that type of abusive behavior as well,

but all it did was just cut out the behavior, kind of like Dave Coulier, with his wise words to cut it out at all times. I mean, they're all acting like the chick from The Exorcist walking downstairs while they're having a party, taking a piss and walking back upstairs. This does not alleviate social awkwardness, seems like it kind of advances it in some ways. But besides a complete loss of conscience, motivation, and spirituality, there were other side effects to this type of lobotomy that were almost universal.

For many patients, a lobotomy worked as a surgically induced childhood. Essentially, patients would start off at square one when it came to maturity and would turn into gigantic toddlers, to the point where their families were encouraged to give them teddy bears and dolls to soothe them. Dude, I want a lobotomy just so I can be a big baby and then you guys have to take care of me. No, you could do it. You could just be like one of those dirty nappy people like they do in the UK, or it's

like the dirty nappy stuff where your big, kind of weird, pasty man who likes to poop inside of his own diapers and then pay people to come clean it. Henry, I made poopy. Yeah! I'm putting you up for adoption. Well, the dangerous part of this is that you had full grown men with full grown sex drives, but the inhibitions and maturity of a toddler. That is disgusting.

Meaning that many would absentmindedly masturbate anywhere at any time with nothing more than a big, placid smile on their face. That's the part that gets me. The smile? It's the goofy smile. All right. As he's pulling on it, I remember seeing that around Wall Street, I was on the phone and I was walking through Wall Street.

Were you doing your Wall Street business? You were looking at the socks and things like that. You know, by itself. By itself. But it was a banana. It held up to my face. But I saw this group of Southern tourists scream. They went, ah!

And I looked at what they were screaming at. And there was a man with his shirt above his tits and his pants completely down around his ankles. And he was just swaying back and forth, just peeing everywhere. Right. That's what I think of. That's the old New York City Christmas tree. Across the street from a Madison Square Garden, I once saw a guy masturbating and shitting

at the same time. I love New York City! It's called, technically, that's kind of like a bi-athlete. Yeah! It's really impressive. Sometimes though, the patients would get aggressive and the nurses in charge were forced to train themselves in ways to hug, kiss, and tickle the overly amorous man toddlers. Because that's how they would calm them down, because it was just like, imagine a gigantic

man with the inhibitions of a toddler thinking, I want to go kiss, kiss, the nurse, nurse. And so they had to tickle them to kind of put them off of it. And when that didn't work, they fucking spanked them. Oh my goodness. You had to get like a fucking, honestly, there is a market for mommy nurses still. But these mommy nurses, oh, boo, that's got to cross some weird wires. Oh my goodness gracious, treating them like Rush Limbaugh, that's what, he used to do that there.

I was watching a documentary on him and he used to make his producer spank him when he got out of line and I was like, this is so disgusting. What? It's like, it's on YouTube, it's disgusting, he is disgusting. Anyway. Well once the patients were sent home though, if they were sent home, not everyone got to go home, they often overate in a way that went beyond compulsion. One patient polished off 4,000 calorie meals and would eat a pound of chocolate a day.

Well, that's why Dr. Watson and I have decided to change the name of the procedure from the lobotomy to the Caffe procedure. Whoa, he's depressed and sad, he's got to have his chocolate. I could see this big fat man child on Mori Povis, she'd be like, look what this toddler can eat. Eating all this shit would of course result in frequent uncontrollable vomiting, but as soon as she made room for more food, she immediately started eating again. Just having fun with it, just having fun with it, you know.

But as weird and fucked up as all this is, Freeman was convinced that he had found a permanent cure for extreme mental illness, and by this point Freeman was also the only game in town. The one of EGAS Monance's leucotomy patients hadn't taken too kindly to the personality changes following the surgery. And after that patient tried to kill EGAS, he shot him four goddamn times. No kidding. Yeah, after that EGAS, he's like, you know what, I'm gonna retire, I'm gonna get out.

That's the message he took from it, that's good, good for him. He got fucking shot, I think fucking 50 cent got shot four times. Yeah, it was nine times. Yeah. So, to establish himself as the singular expert, Freeman wrote a book about psychosurgery that was more pulp than medical text. This is a quote from a teaser that was printed on the cover of the book. Read the last chapter to find out how those treasured frontal lobes, supposed to be man's

most precious possession, can bring him to psychosis and suicide. This work reveals how personality can be cut to measure, sounding a note of hope for those who are afflicted with insanity. Whoa, and I love chapter nine, calories don't count on Sunday. Oh, it's a rest day for a reason. They decided because Freeman, his true strength was, and I'll bring it up again, branding. He knew in order to fucking bring this shit onto land, but in order to make this a thing, we need to fucking set the tone and write the textbook right now, even though we've

only done like fucking 50 of these. We need to write the textbook and get it set so that we are the ones that are the captains of this whole bullshit. We run the lobotomy game, and if you want to come into my fucking, if you want to come into my fucking system, you got to give up the big, the big lobotomy to Dr. Freeman. Right, I understand, it's a lobotomy mob here. Disappointingly though, despite rejection from the neuroscience community, the media took this supposed miracle cure and ran with it hard.

That's not good. And reviewing the book, the Houston Post took everything at face value, writing, quote, Having your brain cut hurts less than having a corn removed from your little toe. Excuse me, what was that? Having a corn removed from your little toe. Your little toe. How many times have you had a corn removed from your little toe, sir? Nine times.

There ain't no toe, no moat, you know what I mean. Were people actually in black and white then? In addition to that, there were former patients who were writing articles about how fantastic their lives were post lobotomy. One wrote that he couldn't have been happier, and this guy actually did live 10 more years without anxiety. Of course those symptoms returned, and he died almost immediately after his second lobotomy, but still.

It's 10 years. 10 years is 10 years. Look at that. He's got a solid 10 years. I know. I want more than 10 years. I want more than 10 years. Well, I mean, other people, however, had not a single positive result, but those people

weren't really getting covered in the press. One patient came out of his lobotomy with an unsettling, explosive laugh, like fucking Joaquin Phoenix in The Joker, and that was still present 10 years after his operation. I tell you what, I went to the doctor today and he told me, unfortunately, but my cancer has moved from my liver to my brain. I am devastated. All right, that guy went on to be bozo the clown. Another patient developed what was referred to as a bulldog reflex, which caused her

to uncontrollably clamp down on objects with her teeth, and she would refuse to let go. She didn't know why she did it. She didn't know when it was going to happen, but she just instinctively did it. She could have been on one of those world's strongest man competitions pulling a truck. That's kind of cool. The most controversial patients, however, were the children. Oh. Now, we're going to cover one of these cases in depth, as well as the most famous botched

lobotomy in history on our next Relaxed Fit episode. We want to give them the time they deserve without bearing them into the story, but Howard Dully, and then I don't even say the other one, same to, I guess we can maybe say it. Well, you know what I would say is that the people who know lobotomy lore, you know who we're talking about here. And you know who you are. So, come forward, but I will say the Howard Dully story of all of them is incredibly sad.

Yes. Yeah, they shouldn't be doing this to kids, that's what I say. In the case of Freeman's child lobotomies, they never worked, and in most cases, just made it worse. One child was made permanently incontinent, while another just straight up died. The youngest was four. Oh, come on, leave the kids alone. They would say that the kids suffered from, they would, I guess, diagnose them with schizophrenia

or some kind of antisocial disease, these kind of weird 1930s versions of what they called antisocial diseases. They just call them psychotic. They just didn't want to live in a segregated school district. They're four years old, they're not anything yet. Yes. I mean, because it doesn't, bipolar and stuff, that comes on later, right? Well, yeah, it doesn't come into late teens, early 20s.

Right. It didn't come on for me until like 22 or 23. If it even came on at all. But failures didn't seem to register with Walter Freeman, and he began the process of expanding the availability of lobotomies by asking himself how he could perform the procedure without all the musts and fuss of having a boring old surgeon in the room. Because he's always there correcting you, fucking saying all this shit you're doing wrong, telling you how fucking irresponsible you are, all this whore shit, man.

I'm not trying to fucking learn all this surgery shit. That's why you went to school. I do this one thing, man. Yeah. Sometimes you shouldn't look at the bright side. Sometimes you just kind of realize that there's a real, it's a real dark thing going on here. See as it was, lobotomies were expensive and required a whole support staff, as well as all sorts of fancy equipment.

Problem was, most mental hospitals weren't equipped for this, which got in the way of Freeman's dream of planting a lobotomist in every asylum. Predictably, this dream was not shared by Freeman's partner, surgeon James Watts. See, while Watts believed lobotomies should remain a last resort measure, Freeman was starting to think that lobotomies should be done early and often. Okay. I want you to be able to get a hamburger, a milkshake, a mattress, a shotgun, and a lobotomy out the same place.

That's a one-stop shop right there. Well, he thought, he started thinking, like, if why are we waiting until this mental illness gets so bad before we give these people lobotomies? Why can't we give them lobotomies right at the beginning? So he's pre-criming this? Yes. He's like, once the smallest hint of mental illness shows up, give them a lobotomy and then we'll save years.

This man needs a lobotomy. Freeman's problem, however, was that if he wanted to perform lobotomies and teach other psychiatrists how to perform them in institutions, he needed to find a way to do it without opening the skull. Is there any government oversight going on here? He wants to teach other psychiatrists how to do it? That's the whole point. The whole point is to take the surgeon out of it, and thus the transorbital lobotomy

was born. See by this point, Freeman had come to believe that the therapeutic effects of the lobotomy came not from cutting out the cores, but by cutting the connection from the frontal lobe to the thalamus, which Freeman believed was transmitting the bad information. In order to do this without opening the head, though, Freeman took a page from an Italian doctor who was doing remarkable work in accessing the brain through the eye sockets. But no one said that he was just trying to figure out how to get spaghetti into the body faster without chewing.

Go through the eyes. It's like taking acid. You're supposed to put it in your eyes. Hell yeah. Although don't do that. Don't do that. Please don't do it. But they do say that works.

But don't do it. Yeah, barely. Don't do it. I mean, I hear it works and it's like the fucking like sweetest trip of your life, but don't do it. I'm not gonna ever do it. But Freeman combined that knowledge going in through the eyes to get to the brain with a good old fashioned ice pit.

Oh, this is so gross. Up the first ice pick that was used on lobotomies across the country came from the refrigerator of Walter Freeman's home. This is true. Oh, God, this is so horrific. We're using an actual ice pack that Freeman brought from his kitchen. He would insert the tool through the upper eyelid of the patient and slide the ice pick along the ridge of the nose until he reached the bone that separates our eyes from our

frontal lobes. I hate ice stuff. I can't. I used to. I can deal with teeth stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Ice stuff I can't deal with.

Then he would pick up a regular carpenter's hammer. Just a fucking hammer. Not even a surgical mallet. Just a hammer. And give the ice pick a little tap. I hate it. I hate it so much. Breaking through the orbital plate and leaving an opening to perform what he called the ticklish

part. Oh, God. He called it the ticklish part. Why? This is, it's hard to describe because he acted like it was an exact science. Yeah, he did. Sometimes Freeman would still use a leukotome to enter the brain and sever the connection. The little wire.

The. I hate this. I honestly, I, this is really one of my very few points where I feel it in my body. I hate ice stuff. I hate it. But when the leukotomes kept breaking inside the skull, which required actual surgery to retrieve the broken bits of metal from underneath the patient's eye socket. I hate it so much.

I hate it. But it adjusted. Now, he had a very fancy way of putting what he did into medical terms, but the basic action Freeman took to sever the nerve was to just wiggle the ice pick back and forth in the general area of the thalamus. Sight unseen. It's making my teeth clench. He's really.

He can't see shit. Right. He's doing this from the outside of the brain. And he would be like, yes, we're making a lateral move. And he would like show this technique where you would put the ice pick between his fingers and just kind of do a little kick like it's a little rock hat and just, it's just nice and it's fun and it's that easy. But yeah, he was just guessing.

Yeah. Where it was going. What it was doing. I just don't like this guy just guessing here. Then he would move over to the other eye and repeat the process for the other lobe. This streamlining of the procedure brought the total time it took to perform a lobotomy down from a little over an hour to seven minutes. Earning Freeman the distinction of being the Henry Ford of psychosurgery.

The thing is, Fords technically work. Yeah. Fixer repair daily. Yeah. Of course. Well, part of this streamlining was Freeman's choice to forego traditional anesthesia in favor of electroshock therapy. These people were not under anesthesia when he was jamming an ice pick in their eyeballs.

Not at all. So how do you deal with the screams? He would literally just knock him the fuck out. Yep. Using his own machine that he would take wherever he went. Freeman would sharply shock the patient knocking them out and within an hour after the procedure they would be sent on their way. I would rather go to Dr. Kvorkian.

Now, eventually Freeman's machine started breaking down and when the dials for setting the voltage and the timer broke, Freeman just started eyeballing the voltage and guesstimating the amount of time needed to shock the patient into unconsciousness. He also coined the phrase, let's take this to 11. Let's take it up to 11. He acted as if our brains were little carburetors. Yeah. Oh my God.

Now, since Freeman was, again, not a surgeon. Not ever once a surgeon. It's like, I mean, because seriously, I could put a mask on, I could put my little hat on and the apron. Sure. I could buy scalpels off of eBay. Does it make me a surgeon? Not necessarily.

If I'm cutting people though, do I then become a surgeon because I'm doing it with the costume on and the scalpel in my hands? You're closer than this guy. Well Freeman knew that no hospital would let him try the ice pick method in one of their operating rooms. Plus, he thought that the sterile standards of hospitals that prevented deadly infection were super annoying. Oh my God.

So he actually called it that germ crap. Oh that germ crap. In performing operations, he never wore a mask. He never washed his hands. Just refused it on principle because he thought it was annoying and he's like, why am I wasting my time doing this? I got shit to do, brother. Right.

Also, you ever seen the photos of him with his shirtless, his favorite thing? He had his shirtless thing. He wore sleeveless tank. They wore like a muscle tee that he would wear everywhere to show his spindly lobotomy arms because it's not a lot of workout. You're not getting a lot of crossfit action just going tink, tink, tink, tink, tink. So he had his little pudgy, little spaghetti arms and his bushy Freeman armpit hair everywhere. What was with the masculinity back then where it was just manly to be covered in human shit?

Like just to be like, I'm filthy, I'm a man. So for the first 10 transorbital lobotomies, Walter Freeman instead used his own office. Hey man, nothing cleaner than what you know. Yeah, I guess so. Now the first recipient of the transorbital lobotomy was a violent suicidal woman named Ellen Ionesco. Although she walked out of the office with two black swollen eyes just as everyone did. But in free pair of sunglasses though, he actually did give everyone a free pair of

sunglasses. See that's pretty cool and one of those hats that have the beer holders. Well her violent and suicidal tendencies disappeared. In fact, it was said that she and Freeman had a years long affair, at least until Ellen backsled and started showing her underwear to strangers. Ellen, Ellen, hey now, you stop showing those panties, right? Those panties and these brain shavings are for me, Ellen. I will not share you.

Because lobotomies, it was always a short term solution. They always backsled. Right. Yeah, it's almost like it didn't fucking work. At all. Well, it worked for a year. By the time of operation number nine, James Watts had finally had enough and he couldn't really ignore what was going on because he shared the office where Freeman was performing

all of his lobotomies. So he's just sitting there doing his taxes? He's just like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, oh fuck, oh fuck, mother spice. I accidentally put this up her butt, but I do this. I don't know man. Now Freeman tried alleviating Watts' concerns by bringing him in for lobotomy number 10. But Watts left in disgust when Freeman asked him to hold the ice pick while it was still in the patient's brain so Freeman could take a picture.

Look at how cute this is. Look how cute this is. It's like it's a little cocktail winner, how fun is this? So after Watts left permanently, Freeman replaced him with neurosurgeon Jonathan Williams, who was all in on office lobotomies. Once he had the proper yes man, Freeman started shifting lobotomies from last chance cases to people who were simply a bit much. So he actually did get a neuroscience dude with him though, right?

The only reason why the neuroscientist was there was one, to give it a little bit more clout and two, in case the leucotome broke off in someone's head so the dude could open up the fucking skull and get it out. That was it. Okay. He was literally there to pop the top if it needed to be. What was absolutely insane though is that the transorbital lobotomy, the ice pick method, actually had a higher survival rate and a higher success rate than the prefrontal lobotomy,

drilling holes into the side of the head, although success, it's a relative term. Because not only would it be, it's more of a well hidden procedure because you're just kind of, you're fucking with the inside bone, but it heals rather quickly and you're breaking all the blood vessels around the eyeballs, which created the, which became the trademark black eyes from using the lobotomy, like from getting a lobotomy, but if the transorbital, but the original lobotomy, the prefrontal, like they slight, if you watch video of it, they segment your head like a fucking orange peel and I made the joke last week about looking like the saddest version of Hellboy.

It's true. It creates these two bulbs on either side of your head that these like two little mounds that would become kind of forever synonymous with, oh, you were crazy back in the day. Now, as the transorbital lobotomy gained traction, actual surgeons started sounding very public warning bells. One doctor issued multiple public warnings, saying that Freeman might as well use a fucking shotgun because it was quicker, but Freeman wasn't phased, firing right back by saying that transorbital lobotomies were much less traumatizing than shotguns and almost as quick.

Well, I thought he was going to just use a shotgun from hell on. He then denied performing lobotomies in his office and implied that James Watts fully supported his methods. The outcry against Freeman from the neurosurgeon community got even louder when Freeman started saying that psychiatrists all over the country should be trained in lobotomies, but Freeman was too fucking cool to be taken down by a bunch of fucking nerds. Yeah, look at me. Well, I do lobotomies so fast the sleeves fell off my shirt.

If you have an ice pick, you too can do your at-home lobotomy. I have an ice pick. Let me use just my hand, though. I'm sick of using the hammer to punch it through, and I want to put it through the eyeball. I want to put it through the top of the hand. You can also do that, sir. Oh, well, I'm a doctor. Freeman started performing lobotomies in front of audiences and even once did it live on

television. And by the end of the 40s, Freeman had won. The propaganda campaign worked, and lobotomies were being performed everywhere from the Mayo Clinic to Columbia University. Look at that. You know, it almost seems like every new technology is used to promote dumb shit. It does, right? The height of the lobotomies acceptance came in 1949 when Egas Moniz won a Nobel Prize

honoring his pioneering work in psychosurgery. After that worldwide stamp of approval, 20,000 lobotomies were performed in America alone over the following four years. That is way too many. That is way, way too many. It became synonymous with an easy fix, and a permanent fix to what was at the time untreatable rampant mental illness. They couldn't figure out what to do with people that would end up like, basically, the state

took over. Because in the end, the reason why they really adopted it is because it was saving the state money from having to house and feed all of these people that had basically become invalids over a period of time, where now they say, like, no, no, no, we're handling the situation very, very well. You just go, tic, tic, tic, tic, tic, and then they're back on the street. I think it's the kombucha of surgery, where everyone has just said, yeah, it's good. It's great.

But we all know it's not good. It's actually horrible. It's sea monkeys. It's fucking sour sea monkeys and juice. Of course, since lobotomies came to be accepted, other doctors besides Freeman tried pioneering their own methods of psychosurgery. One particularly awful method simply sucked away parts of the brain. So Freeman criticized the process, not because it didn't work, but because it was, in his

words, gross, saying the sound, saying the sound reminded him of running a vacuum cleaner over a tub of spaghetti. Oh, yes. So you have a, so Dr. Freeman, you have a memory of running a vacuum cleaner over a tub of spaghetti. Have you done that lately or? Yeah. That was the original version of Columbus Day.

That was what we used to do to celebrate. We used to get a smart vac to get, we used to get a shop vac and get as many jobs as we could and suck it all up, it was a good time, but then I found out about the crimes of Columbus. Yeah. No longer celebrating that, but I'll carve up your brain, I'll carve up your brain all fucking day. I don't give a shit.

Sounds like you're living in flavor town, my friend. Although America was by far the number one country for lobotomies, the UK, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and Brazil performed their fair share as well. Just about the only developed country who didn't give the lobotomy a whirl was Germany. I think that by then, yeah, Germany got pretty, they were, I mean, burnout. Yeah. Did we just, they did not do something wrong. What?

Huh? I'm saying they made a lot of mistakes. So we have to say that they did not do this, they didn't. The reason why they couldn't do lobotomies was specifically because of the Nazis. I don't. Because in 1949, Germany. No, we were in the forties and we were talking about the fifties. No, no, this is not the, even the sixties.

This is 1949. All right. Like Dr. Joseph Mengele wasn't even in South America yet. He was in like France. Yeah. There was still pretty fresh off of the whole Mengele thing, which is. Do you remember that, that little nudie-tootie is there anything? Yes, I know.

But all of that had led to the creation of a whole new set of rules that Germany had to follow when it came to the medical field. That was good. They didn't do lobotomies though. What was amazing though was that lobotomies could not be performed in Germany solely because Freeman's untested, unproven methods didn't meet the standards of the Nuremberg code of medical ethics. This is getting weird.

Yeah. But this didn't face Freeman because Freeman was finally getting everything he ever wanted. In 1949, Freeman decided it was time to take his show on the road and he started touring America in a Lincoln Continental that he called the lobotomobile. Honestly, that's the best part about the old lobotomobile is that you can take the top off. Yeah. I'm so happy I brought my whole family to this.

Hey, you want to lobotomize my wife? Yeah, I'll lobotomize her and then I'll get a load at the lobotom of her as well. Oh, this is a lot of fun. I'm really enjoying myself. Lobotomobile is amazing. Great branding. Good job. Throughout the 50s, Freeman visited 55 hospitals in 23 states, demonstrating lobotomies and

teaching the technique to psychiatrists wherever he went like fucking Johnny Appleseed by way of Dr. Frankenstein. That is such a scary way of putting it, Marcus. It's really true because we talked about this in the very beginning of the first episode, was that he really was a mad scientist and now we're seeing this where he is so desperate to make this his legacy and make this something and he's so driven and obsessed with this as a fix all cure all for any mental illness like literally anything like you need to quit smoking cigarettes.

Yep. Lobotomy. Really? Do you hate your job? Do you hate your job? Anything. Well, Freeman was most proud of, however, was that while he entered these institutions amidst a din of filthy, noisy psychotics, he left the wards full of patients who were

as quiet and docile as church mouses. Because they're deeply traumatized. Yeah, man, he used an ice pick to hit the mute button on their brains. Yeah. I mean, sure, their entire personalities were gone forever, but at least nobody had to deal with them anymore, and if Johnny Husband was having trouble with Josie Housewives anxiety, why Walter Freeman would swing by and take care of that too. Damn.

They call me evil Santa Claus. I agree with that. And whenever Walter Freeman could, he performed these lobotomies in front of live audiences in order to show everyone that he was the savior of the mentally ill, whether it be a schizophrenic or a simple neurotic. But it's kind of interesting. I went back to the old days of the medicine show, that it kind of was more of a throwback than anything, creating a pageantry, a theatricality to medicine and science, which is, in a way,

because one way he's kind of saying it, he's kind of being like a Bill Nye, right, where he's like, see, I'm making people be into science again, because you see a cool guy like me, you see my armpit hairs, see how quickly I make a bunch of people not be able to read anymore. This is incredible. But sometimes it went horribly wrong. Yep. In front of the audience.

Oh, okay. That's a hell of a show. In Berkeley, Freeman and his sons performed lobotomies on two women in front of 50 people. And while the first one went fine, Freeman caused hemorrhaging in the second, paralyzing the patient. But when the mistake was made, Freeman almost seemed to relish the opportunity to meet the challenge in front of a crowd, acknowledging the problem by loudly saying, quote, uh-oh, we've got trouble.

What's that? Uh-oh, we got trouble. Like, did your toddler just take a dump in church and you have to rush him out really quick? He says, uh-oh, we've got trouble. Well, he's got an ice pick hanging out of her head in front of a whole house full of people staring at him. Yeah.

This is the greatest performance of Don Giovanni I've ever seen. But. It's a dirty workaround. I'm always going to laugh at a dirty workaround. But Freeman also had to make sure he got paid. Instead of immediately fixing his mistake, he walked over to the patient's husband and told him it would be an extra thousand dollars if the husband wanted Freeman to alleviate the bleeding and save his wife from a life of paralysis.

He pulled a Dr. Venkman from Ghostbusters. Yeah, that's a good hustle he's got going on. After the husband said yes, Freeman removed an instrument from his bag that looked like a bicycle pump and popped a metal tube into the woman's eye socket so he could pump saline solution into her brain to flush it out. How is this making it better? This is the shit that really fucks me up because he literally just went like, okay. And he's just sucking this machine in and out of her head.

And after pumping for a bit, Freeman extracted a thick ball of hemorrhagic blood and did it again and again, just going, oh god. And tell the patient, he did finally recover. Okay, well I'm happy it worked. I'm actually, I wish it didn't work so we didn't get this positive validation. And Freeman did a big fucking smile on his face the whole time. And everyone was able to see the smile because he didn't wear a fucking mask during surgery. Just unfucking believable.

Freeman actually got so proficient with lobotomies that he turned it into a stage trick, cutting the neural fibers on both sides of a patient's brain at the same time, smiling at the audience while he moved his hands back and forth in unison. He's doing some Harlem Globetrotter stuff? Yeah. This overconfidence predictably ended in disaster. Although Freeman never, ever faced consequence. In Iowa, a patient died when Freeman stopped in the middle of the procedure to take a picture.

And the instrument left in the patient's skull sank into his brain, killing him instantly. What is the slip? Just a slip and you're dead. All right. But Freeman was quite proud of making lobotomies available to everyone. While many people would be charged $2,500 for a private office lobotomy, Freeman, when he went to West Virginia, charged the poor population there $20 a procedure. I guess that's nice.

No. I guess. No, it's not nice. It's not because it's not like Freeman had any value for human life in any way whatsoever. All Freeman craved was recognition and the opportunity to make a name for himself in the medical field. He at first, in the very beginning, his impulse was this idea of like, we can clear out these mental institutions. Like we can clear out the asylums.

We can figure out how to do it. And then at some point, whatever original and good intent he had just faded into him fucking being up his own asshole. It turned into straight sociopathy. I see. For example, in Alabama, Freeman was contacted by the Tuskegee Veterans Hospital, which is infamous for collaborating with the federal government to leave specifically black patients with syphilis untreated until death just to see what would happen, all while pretending

to treat them. It is one of the most brutal chapters in American history, what happened at that hospital. That makes it pretty fricking brutal. It lasted from 1932 until 1972. Oh my, that's just, that's horrible. And in the middle of this quote unquote study, Freeman was asked to perform lobotomies on 50 of those men, again, just to see what would happen. Freeman not only said yes, but told them that he would do it free of charge.

It seems like it's state sanctioned murder. This is federally sanctioned murder. Yeah, it was. They viewed them as sacrificial lamps. Jeez. Thankfully though, at least one person at the Institute decided that this was a bridge too far and Freeman's visit was canceled. Just as the lobotomy was starting to fall out of favor with the general public.

But it did not fall out of favor because of Freeman's rotten ethics, or because he would often fuck up procedures in front of dozens of people, or even because the public started listening to trained medical professionals about the dangers of the lobotomy. Instead, Walter Freeman was felled by the steady march of science. In 1954, the FDA approved the use of thorazine for the treatment of psychiatric illness, which worked as a kind of chemical lobotomy. Yeah, it makes you go sleepy time. Yeah.

In fact, it actually worked much better because it eliminated hallucinations and calmed schizophrenics with nothing more than a pill, giving the same peace and quiet to mental wards that was previously only possible with lobotomy. And best of all, if thorazine didn't work, you could just stop taking thorazine. Yeah. Well, I would say anything is better than jamming an ice pick in someone's eyeball. Anything. Almost anything is better.

Almost anything. Now, at first, Walter Freeman was supportive of thorazine. But when he started seeing the lobotomies were on a steady decline, he changed his opinion to say that medication was nothing more than a temporary stop gap. He wished. Yeah. And of course, after thorazine came lithium, reserpene, respratol, amitriptyline, and diazepam. Which of these have I taken?

I'll never tell. It's at least two of them. Is the net in the closet? Yeah. The net is in the key. Yeah. Yeah. The net's here.

No, it's almost like. One thing I'm going to say, Kissel, if you're going to want to go ahead and put kind of a door in the front of that net, right instead of just smashing the glass because I don't want you to cut your feet. Yeah. Yeah. I'm begging for the net. It is almost like we're held hostage by Marcus's mental issues.

Just have the net near. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're all held hostage by each other's mental issues. Yeah. Yeah.

He wants the net too much. Yeah. The pure chemistry of last podcast left is held by our mutually assured destruction. It's not good unless we're all holding a gun to each other's heads. I love the ending of the thing. As far as what happened to Freeman, he was offered a leave of absence in lieu of tenure at George Washington University. Oh, what is he, a cop?

We'll give you a paid vacation. If Freeman had been employed there for 25 years, after that, Freeman set up a private practice to continue performing lobotomies in Los Altos, California, because to this day, lobotomies are still legal all over the country. You can give a lobotomy. Yeah. Psychiatrists can still give a lobotomy if they have permission. Wow.

There is still some call for it, but I don't know what that is, and I don't know why you would need one, but I imagine it's extreme circumstances that you would get something, and I imagine it's very different now, because now you have magnetic view, like you could do the thing where you could see inside the brain and see what you're doing at least. Yeah. I would assume ice picks are no longer used in a hammer. I would hope anyway. I don't know.

But after falling into a brief disgrace after trying again to perform lobotomies on psychotic children, Walter Freeman performed his last transorbital lobotomy in 1967, giving one of his old patients a third lobotomy, which killed her three days later. And that, of course, was Mama Cass. Aw, I love Mama. I love Mama Cass. Why you bring her into this? I don't know.

If you want to learn more about Mama Cass, go buy our special. Yeah. That's podcastlive.com. It's almost like you're seeing us live, but you're not, because we're alone together. Don't you fucking start, I'm not alone alone. I single other word. I don't want to hear the word difficult times. I don't want to do creative challenging times.

I don't want to hear any of that shit anymore. Well, five years after his last lobotomy, Walter Freeman died of what I hope was a very painful case of colon cancer. Still convinced that transorbital lobotomy was the best treatment for mental illness and unaware that he would one day be considered one of the cruelest quacks of the 20th century. Seriously, wow. Holy shit. And that's the fucking history.

That is the short history of lobotomy. If you really want the full story, read The Lobotomist by Jack L. High. That is the hell of a story. Thank you so much for doing all of that disgusting research. Thanks to the researchers as well. Of course. Thanks for our research assistants. That was, what a, I cannot, I know we've covered everything under the sun that's horrific,

but man, going into detail about the eye and just hearing the noise, and you can just feel it. You can feel what that would be like. Can you imagine hearing the, like, inside your brain? Damn. This man really should have been prosecuted, but I guess that didn't quite happen. Well thank you guys so much for listening to our series on lobotomies. And again, as Henry and Marcus said, we have a relaxed fit next week, and we'll give you

some more details. No, not next week. We've got a regular episode next week. Oh no, next week we've got, I'm very, very excited, very, very excited about getting back to a favorite topic of mine. Me too. It's time. Yeah, we're doing a full episode on fudge.

Oh my God, I am in a roast, but no, no, don't cry, Henry, I'm sorry, you look great. I'm actually the fat one. I need to lose weight, I need to get better. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. And yes, again, we have our live show, so you can get that on LastPodcastLive.com. We have some new merch on LastPodcastMerch.com. We have the book. Yeah.

If you want to get the book, please, thank you all so much for sharing those pictures on Instagram, of you reading the book. It's amazing. I didn't know if so many people read. I wanted to call it the fronts and butts of serial killers and just making a picture book. The book number two. That's book number two, which I'm very excited about.

So yes, thank you all so much for supporting all the shows here on LastPodcast Network. No dogs. You want to learn about music. Marcus is there to teach you that. We got TopPap or the up-to-date political stuff. We got kind of fun for wrestling. We have our Patreon series, WizBrew, you know all the shows and so check them out. You know all the fucking shows.

We just want to say, and again, because the getting a titties of the brain email, I just love our fucking listeners so god damn much. They are a funny, funny group of people and I want to say thank you so much for supporting us all over the years while we're here, fucking yucking it up and apocalypse radio. Absolutely. We keep doing it again and again and again. Absolutely. And of course you can always email us.

SideStoriesLPOTL at gmail.com. We will read those on SideStories. Okay everyone. Hope you're doing okay out there and having a nice, as much of a nice time as you can. Don't forget, hail yourselves. You say hail Satan. Oh my god. Hail Satan.

Hail again. Magustalations. Did you just get lobotomized? I do just get lobotomized. We have been doing the same sign-off for eight years. I just, I forgot. I don't, I kind of feel like we do. This, it's like this episode ended at the perfect time.

Because I think your brain was just like shutting down. Back to sleep. And it's like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But I know now, and instead of hailing me today, how about we hail each other.

All right. Let's do this. That's what hail yourselves is for. Not hailing yourself. Well, that's, that is. That would be I'm just hailing me. Just me. I'm hailing me as me.

Yeah. As Henry. I need you, I still would like that. But, hey this sign-off is derailed. This is... This is bad. It is a bit of a semantic conversation but, I think it's important.

It's important. But what is important? What are we talking about? I need a lobotomy. This show is made possible by listeners like you. Thanks to our ad sponsors, you can support our shows by supporting them. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to lastpodcastnetwork.com.