RedHanded - Bonus Patreon Upcycle - Lobotomies: Piece of Mind

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Modern medicine’s come a long way since the days of old where doctors would drill a hole in your head for a cold, prescribe you a tobacco-smoke enema, suggest you brush your teeth with urine, or give you heroin as cough medicine. But things really did get a whole hell of a lot worse before they got better…  Lobotomies were performed on tens of thousands of psychiatric patients, misbehaving children, “hysterical” women, JFK’s sister, and the former First Lady of Argentina – all just in the last 80 years.  Press play, it's a no brainer... New merch at percivalclo.com! Code: REDHANDED10 for 10% off 2023 North American Tour Tickets: redhandedpodcast.com See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, the Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to the first of your special Christmas presents from all of us at Red Handed HQ. We have been very busy taking over the world, obviously, and this episode is one of our Patreon bonus episodes that we released earlier on in this year, 2022.

But we decided that we would give it to you all to keep you going over the Christmas season. Quiet podcast alone time is just as important as any festive feast. But before we send you off on a journey from trepanning to lobotomy via JFK's sister and Eva Peron, we have a very special announcement for all of you. We've been working away in secret on some brand new sexy merch and now that secret is out on friday the 16th of december we launched a brand new line of merch with a twist and that twist is that it's an exclusive collaboration with premium clothing brand percival if you know perci, then you will already know that they produce super,

super high quality clothing finished with beautiful embroidered designs. And the Red Handed line is no different. These designs, unlike your usual podcast merch, are just so wearable, stylish, and as always, top quality. You can take a look at the full range over at PercivalClue.com right now and use the code REDHANDED10 for 10% off your first order. This brand new limited edition premium version includes designs of Spooky Bitch, Not In This Economy, 42nd Generation or Satanic Witch and a simply red-handed design that is just perfect. So head on over to percivalclo.com now, that's percival, c-lval clo.com now and use code red handed 10 all caps on the red handed and the number 10 for 10 of your first order so grab that merch and hold on to your gray matter because it is time to get on with the show Hello, I'm Saruti.

Hello, I'm Hannah. Sorry, I forgot. No, I was like, oh, should I take that back? No, no, sorry. It's just because we just recorded shorthand and we don't do names on shorthand. So I was just like, well, what year is it? Who knows? The combinations, the permutations of all of these have gone completely out of the window. So it doesn't matter. You know who we are. So welcome to your bonus episode for the month of July. I am pumped for this episode, but I think it's going to scare me. It's about lobotomies. Oh yeah, the real good stuff. We're getting into it.

We're getting into it. So yes, we are looking at lobotomies today. The unbelievably grim medical procedure that was carried out tens of thousands of times across the Western world. And how something as obviously damaging as taking an ice pick to a person's brain was allowed to enter routine medical practice. But to do that, we've got to shoot back, all the way back to the real pasto times. I think the furthest we've ever gone the furthest back we have ever traveled in our time machine which is the power of our minds we are talking about prehistoric ancestors here and what they would do is they drill a hole into the skull of some poor bastard with a headache in an attempt to free the evil demons trapped inside if you are familiar with his dark materials

trilogy the beginning of northern lights is all about trepanning love it i love a bit of trepanning though if i had been around back then i'd probably just keep my headache to myself i'll just keep it quiet hope it went away go chew on some willow bark fucking hell because i remember i was obviously like a really fucking creepy little kid so i was reading about all this when i was very young anyway but i remember there is a horror film that is like a very unknown horror film that I would recommend. It's got Sean Bean in it.

Okay. And like some blonde girl and some woman, I can't remember. None of them are like known actors apart from Sean. And it's, I think it was shot on like the Isle of Man or something. And it's just like a little cottage on this island in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by sheep.

And there's a ghost. And the ghost was of a former sheep farmer who trepanned all his sheep and trepanned his kid oh it's pretty good okay i think it's called like the dark i'll find it i'll put a link in the episode description don't lie if you're mad about it no i won't i won't i'll try but i've given you a good enough description that if you want to find it you can find it because i obviously won't do that sean bean trepanning probably sean bean trepanning sheep you'll find it so this gruesome technique which we've already given the game away uh it was called trepanning still is called trepanning and it's generally considered to be one of the oldest surgical procedures in history

archaeologists have actually found trepanned neolithic skulls in france that are over 7 000 years old evidence of this grim practice has been found the world over, from the Aztecs to the ancient Chinese and the Romans. Astonishingly, though, it seems like the survival rate of drilling a hole into someone's actual head is way higher than you may think. Prince Philip of Orange was trepanned 17 times. And he only actually died as a result of a poorly carried out enema,

which messed up his intestines. Wow, that's something. Which, would I take that over a hole in the head? I don't know, I think if I was given a choice, I'd have to go hole in the head. Yeah, I mean, the holes in the head didn't kill him. The enema did. Yeah. So one huge modern proponent of trepanation, trepanation? Trepanation. Trepanation, Of trepanation is the Dutch librarian Hugo Bart Hughes. Three first names. Zero killer.

All librarian. Also, I love this guy's just like, I'm a librarian, but I'm a big fan of this. I'm going to really push for this. Yeah, with zero medical training. Just drill a hole in my brain, baby. Go for it.

So Hughes was refused a medical degree from the University of Amsterdam for his advocacy of lsd research which i you know fine we've come full circle now i feel like everybody's everybody's into that everybody's looking into it i went to a very interesting talk about psychedelic drugs and their use for treating psychiatric conditions it was fascinating and he actually what's that got what who's maria juana marijuana marijuana maria juana

you should just leave that in actually because i was reading the script and then it just has a random line where it says he named his daughter maria juana and i was like who's maria juana like why is that relevant to this story i see and i was just looking at her across the table waiting for the penny to drop pennies dropped pennies dropped into the hole in my head so hughes actually drilled a hole into his own skull there you go you know you've got to walk the walk he certainly did walk the walk. Right into a fucking wall after a hole in his head. But he did this in 1965 using a foot-operated electric dentist drill. Oh my God, I can't cope. That is some fucking nightmare shit.

And then he went on to write a book about the perceived benefits of trepanning titled Borehole. Sure, why not? What happened to you? Hughes. What happened to you, Hugo Bart? Well, I think it's the story of a man who wasn't allowed to become a doctor and had to become a librarian and then was really angry

about it. Jesus. I actually know someone who had to have a borehole. She had a stroke and in Celebration, Florida, which is a town built by Disney, she was there having dinner. She was at my mum's wedding, actually. Yeah, she had a stroke in a restaurant and had to go to hospital and they drilled a hole in her head, which now she's fine.

Well, there you go. What do I fucking know? And Hughes was also fine because in the end, he only actually died of heart disease at the age of 70 in 2004. So what we're saying is everyone, get a dentist's drill off Amazon. If you want to, it might not kill you. Yeah. You might just die of some sort of horrible stroke or cardiovascular disease much later in your life yeah so he didn't die of the hole in his head but he did leave behind numerous writings on trepanation which influenced

british-born ethan educated oxford graduate boris johnson i'm kidding joris bonson no this guy's name is joey mellen and he followed in hughes's footsteps so why did he drill a hole in his head in his own words it was to get permanently high that sounds horrible yeah i saw in a youtube interview with a guy who used to manufacture lsd and accidentally spilt it and he's like it's a living hell like my eyes are kaleidoscopes all the time yeah no i think being permanently high sounds fucking awful no no no thank you fun fact though which is unsurprising considering where he went to school and then university joey mellon had two sons rock basil hugo fielding mellon and cosmo birdie fielding mellon and in 2011 rock rock basil got himself a cabinet position in the conservative kensington and chelsea council but was forced out after grenfell this all sounds so pasto he was there

when grenfell happened yeah yeah fucking hell well he's still around because today he's the director of a new psychedelic venture studio company and they're devoted to providing safe and wide access to psychedelic medicines. Great, maybe you should have done some training on fucking cladding, my friend. So, trepanning was of course crude, but it was the very first form of psychosurgery. A field that got a lot worse before it got better. Because just 80 years ago, a psychosurgical procedure was carried out around the world that was far more barbaric than trepanning, far more arcane and far more devastating even. This modern procedure was so fucked up in fact, that the Soviet Union was one of the first global powers to ban it, arguing that it was contrary to the principles of humanity. The USSR made their position clear on the global stage

when Soviet psychiatrist Nikolai Osoresky announced at the World Federation of Mental Health that lobotomies turned an insane person into an idiot. So what is a lobotomy, exactly? The first ever lobotomy was carried out in 1935 by Portuguese neurologist Antonio Igaz Moniz. He believed that by damaging the connection between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain, he would be able to prevent the patient from experiencing distressing thoughts and exhibiting abnormal behaviours. Maybe because you'd be so bothered by the hole in your face all of a sudden. I'm less worried about all of my other crippling anxieties now that there's a hole in my face. Yeah, wouldn't catch me picking my nose now. Such abnormal behavior.

If you've read the book, you will already know this. But if you haven't, go and buy it. But also keep listening because I'm going to tell you anyway. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive functions like memory, emotions, impulse control, problem solving, social interaction, motor function, etc. The prefrontal cortex, which lives in the frontal lobe, is our emergency brake. It stops us from texting our ex or jumping off really high stuff. And if your prefrontal cortex is damaged, you are in big trouble. Psychopaths, for example, have a diminished connection between their emotional centre, the amygdala, that's a bit reductive, but get over it, and their prefrontal cortex. So they don't have the little voice telling them to take a deep breath and walk away.

Monis called the first iteration of his surgery a leucoptomy. And like trepanning, it involved drilling holes into the skull. And then, unlike trepanning, pumping ethanol into the frontal cortex to destroy the brain tissue. It's what Dharma was doing. Yeah, I was going to say, all right, Dharma. Yeah, yeah. I think someone wanted a sex zombie, I think. Overall, the procedure was deemed a success. Although, Moniz did note that using ethanol made it difficult to avoid unintended damage to other parts of the brain. Shucks. Well, fuck me. Well, fucking drill

a hole in my head and fill it full of ethanol. So he refined this procedure by using a leucotome, a sinister looking metal instrument, which I guess you could say was the bleeding edge of psychiatric science at the time. It was a kind of a long spike with retractable wires that allowed Moniz to remove chunks of white matter from the patient's brain. Guess who, despite her parents' wishes, is not a doctor. I never, ever, ever, ever will be. Sometimes I still see longing in my parents' eyes when you hear, because my dad was like, oh, this guy I've worked with, you know, he's in his 40s and he's just like, I'm going to quit. I'm not going to do the bank stuff anymore. And he's gone and trained

as a doctor. And I'm like, uh uh-huh I barely made it through an episode about lobotomies no oh my god I went to like this cocktail making thing a couple of months ago and the guy who was doing the cocktails the bartender I was telling him about the podcast blah blah blah and then the next day he'd obviously gone and listened to it and then I got like a flurry of dms from him being like oh my god I love your podcast and while I was there I was like can you make me a red-handed cocktail and I'll like put up the ingredients or whatever and I kind of feel like he half-assed it and he was just like I'll do it at the end and he was like whatever and then he messaged me he's like please don't post that I will make you so much better of a red-handed cocktail

now that I actually love the show and I wonder if we get him to do us one but we call it a leucoctomy maybe because it's like drill a hole in your head and fill it with ethanol i know it sounds like a fucking disingenuous little prick i don't know if i want anything to do with him i don't know i'm not allowed bartenders anymore keep them away from me no no no no don't worry he's not buying what you're selling the following year an american neurologist and psychiatrist dr walter freeman which like if we had the soundboard thunderclap oh i can't try to do it i don't know what that was i got confused maybe i have had a leucotomy and by which i mean a cocktail not a whole drill to my head i thought the cat noise i did was much better in the last it's the same noise you just i know it was like it came back into my head and then i started clapping it's your go-to noise it's your panic noise so dr walter freeman bad bad guy his partner dr james

watts bad guy not quite as bad but still pretty bad both of them became lobotomy evangelists and they popularized the surgery in the US. So basically, it's all their fault. At first, everyone bought into the idea. The New York Times even dubbed it the new surgery of the soul. And in an attempt to make it quicker, cleaner, cheaper, and more accessible, Freeman developed a new method that he called the prefrontal lobotomy. He started off by using an actual ice pick

to reach into the patient's prefrontal cortex through their eye socket instead of drilling holes in the skull. Right. Another method that they came up with was the transorbital lobotomy, which involved a more robust version of the leukotome, called an orbiter clast. Ooh. Freeman would insert the orbiter clast into the top of the eye socket, then tap the top with a hammer to break through the thick layer of bone.

She's going pretty green over here, guys. She's clutching her eyebrows. It just makes me feel so unwell. And the thick layer of bone that I'm talking about is, of course, the layer of bone that we need to protect our precious fucking thought organ that is your brain. This is horrific. I know, I know that all of this is a reality. I can watch it in horror films, but I'm feeling very queasy right now. Though I would definitely go to a museum which had all of these on the wall. Mate, Hunterian, I'm telling you.

Let's go. So once Freeman broke through to the brain, he'd twirl the orbiter clast around like he was mixing a cocktail in order to cut through the fibres. The method took no more than 10 minutes because it didn't require drilling into the skull and it could be carried out by just knocking a patient unconscious with electroconvulsive shocks. Well done. You did it. That's the worst bit. Back in Portugal, Moniz, remember him, the guy who invented the whole thing,

was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for inventing the lobotomy, which even at the time was a pretty controversial move. A lot of people in the medical and psychiatric communities were adamantly opposed to the idea of sticking needles in people's brains, swirling them around and hoping for the best. These people became more and more vocal as the results of the surgery became more apparent. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either,

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He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Cone. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down.

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Until you're wearing an orange jumpsuit, it's not real. Now it's real. From his meteoric rise to his shocking fall from grace, from law and crime, this is the rise and fall of Diddy. Listen to the rise and fall of Diddy exclusively with Wondery Plus. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mom's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus.

In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on

Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Like we said earlier, lobotomies were initially used to treat mental disorders that up until then had been deemed untreatable. That included schizophrenia, severe OCD and even depression. And people just accepted that this treatment, quote unquote, would come at the cost of the patient's personality and intellect. Lobotomies were also used as a part of gay conversion therapy, as recently as the 60s. But that is a topic for another day. The effects of the divisive surgery were a mixed bag. Many patients were left with a drastically reduced ability to function

independently and displayed serious cognitive impairment. Many more patients died from the procedure or were left in a vegetative state. This is unbelievable. Walter Freeman, Thunderclap, coined the term surgically induced childhood to describe the results of a lobotomy. According to Freeman, the brain scraping and swirling worked by turning someone into an infant and then helping them mature again into a more amenable person. Yeah, that's not how that works. In one case, Freeman described a 29-year-old woman that he'd just lobotomised as being a, quote, satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster.

I hate you, Freeman. He's awful. He's awful. He then advised her parents to deal with her behaviour by employing a system of rewards and punishments, suggesting that they give her ice cream when she was good and a smack when she was bad. She was 29 years old. Yeah.

Freeman initially claimed that lobotomies had a success rate of 85%. Which is, this is just the olden times when you can be like yeah sure yeah and also like the snake oil yeah good because I poured it into the hole in your head because again it's just like how are you defining success success is now that this person is no longer functioning but I mean this is obviously a very trite point but basically what's happened here is they're just like I can't deal with this person who is you know my father son daughter grandma whatever because they've got some sort of condition like schizophrenia or depression so like that person's not important so let's just drill a hole in their head to like make my neutralize them neutralize them so that they're

not a problem anymore and i can just stick them in a room give them ice cream and smacks when i want to because it's just like we don't need to worry about like making this person better we'll just take them out of the equation without killing them exactly this is the next best step so he's claiming the 85 success rate and I'm guessing he's measuring his success rate by the lack of interference that these people are now causing in other people's lives or the fact that they didn't die yes yes, yes, yes. But it was later found that only around a third of lobotomized patients experienced any improvement.

And the fatality rate was around 15%. So yes, you are right. 85% didn't die. 15% did. So one former advocate for the surgery in America said, quote, lobotomies were really no more subtle than a gunshot to the head, which is a far cry from how Freeman described it as, quote, only a little more dangerous than an operation to remove an infected tooth.

Of 15% of people who are getting their teeth pulled dying, Freeman, are they? And then ending up with the personality of an oyster. Jesus Christ. Okay, by 1951, around 50,000 people had been lobotomized in the States. And Freeman had done about 3,500 of those all by himself. I think he might have just had a bit of a sadism problem. Mm-hmm. 19 of the people lobotomized by Freeman himself were children.

That is disgusting. The youngest was just four years old. Jesus. And we're not getting off scot-free the side of the pond either. 20,000-ish lobotomies were performed in the United Kingdom, which, proportionally speaking,

is way more per capita than in the US. So we're not off either. And neither are the Scandies, which I didn't expect. Denmark, Norway and Sweden lobotomized around 9,300 people, all between them. And in Japan, the majority of lobotomies were carried out on young children with, quote, behavioral problems. Wow.

So one notable case from the US was that of a 12-year-old boy named Howard Dully. Howard wasn't schizophrenic. He wasn't severely depressed. He didn't have OCD. He actually didn't have any form of psychosis whatsoever. So why was he lobotomised? Well, Howard's stepmother... Thunderclap.

Evil stepmother. ...brought him along to Dr Freeman's office and said that Howard was, quote, unbelievably defiant. She said that he refused to go to bed on time, daydreamed too much, and would do weird things like turning the lights on in a room, even if the sun was out. She would have hated me.

And that was enough for Freeman to recommend that 12-year-old Howard undergo a transorbital lobotomy in order to change his personality. Howard is still alive to this day. He's 73 now, and it took decades for him to recover from the surgery. He spent many years institutionalized, incarcerated or homeless and he struggled throughout with alcoholism. Remember your frontal lobe is also responsible for impulse control. It's home to your emergency brakes. But Howard Dully against all odds did manage to turn his life around. He graduated from

college and became a certified instructor at a school bus company in California. He's also written two books on what Freeman and his stepmother did to him. One was a New York Times bestseller. One of the most well-known lobotomy cases is that of Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Throughout her childhood, Rosemary struggled academically and was labelled as having serious learning disabilities. As she grew older, her family later said that she began to have seizures and violent temper tantrums. It has since been speculated, however, that Rosemary Kennedy was just a kid with a short temper and her learning disabilities were grossly over-exaggerated. And that story is corroborated by the fact that as

a teenager, Rosemary kept a number of diaries that were eventuallyexaggerated. And that story is corroborated by the fact that as a teenager, Rosemary kept a number of diaries that were eventually published in 1980. And these diaries depicted a young woman with an active social life who loved to dance and the opera and had a secret longing to be on the stage. So it is possible that her high society, overachieving family, made up of US senators, socialites and of course a future president felt like her behaviour would make them look bad. In 1938 Rosemary went to Buckingham Palace

as a debutante to King George VI and the future Queen Elizabeth II. Apparently Rosemary spent hours practising the complicated royal curtsy but when the time came she tripped over and almost fell on her face nobody acknowledged it and her mother rose never spoke of the incident quick note on the royals i said probably on a normal red-handed i was talking about the queen's cousins that were locked up in an institution blah blah blah what i forgot to mention so someone came for me on twitter about this and they were like the queen could have nothing to do with it she couldn't have done anything about it she's the the queen. And the person was quite...

And also, when we're talking about the queen, we're talking about the institution of the royal family. We're not talking about one person. Like, calm the fuck down. So I got told off for spreading misinformation. But this is not a misinformation. It's not even the other one. Disinformation.

They weren't just locked up. They were pronounced dead and then just kept in a home. Yes. Fewer questions that way they're dead yeah nothing to see here i'm surprised they weren't lobotomized they fucking might have been wow so yeah coming back to rosemary her mom never spoke about the incident of her falling over in front of the queen but over the next three years rosemary was expelled from a summer camp and sent to a convent in dc where she'd sneak out at night regularly.

Again, we're talking here about the Kennedys. Yeah. Right. The notorious womanising men of the Kennedy clan. And here you've got Rosemary and they're actually making us look bad. And I'm sorry, if I grew up a Kennedy with more wealth than King Midas could shake his golden stick at and suddenly you send me to a convent in DC. Damn right I'm climbing out the window.

Oh yeah. But the nuns told her parents and they were worried that Rosemary was having sex. Unless she could get an STD. Or worse, pregnant. Her father began to worry that her behaviour could mess up the family's political ambitions. And so, in 1941, when Rosemary was 23 years old, her father went to Freeman to have her lobotomised.

That is fucking unbelievable. I know this is true. I knew about this before. That's fucking unbelievable. And the next bit's even worse, because Rosemary's dad didn't tell his wife that he had lobotomised their daughter at 23 years old until it was already too late he just did it fucking hell how is this not a movie is it a movie i don't know probably because the kennedys are quite influential in the media and they don't want it out there do you know what no one can touch us should we make a movie about this because sure sure let's do it it's fucking i've got a free afternoon. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. So he sneaks her off, lobotomises her,

and initially the lobotomy was deemed a success because Rosemary no longer had severe mood swings. But it also left her unable to walk, talk intelligibly, or control her bowels. Oh, what a success. So it essentially turned her into a two-year-old child. Wow. Freeman's partner, Dr. Watts, and this is the only reason I think he's not quite as bad as dr freeman later revealed that he never

believed that rosemary ever had any serious mental disorder at all for decades rosemary was hidden away and kept a secret from the world in an institution in wisconsin none of her siblings knew of her whereabouts and her mother rose didn't visit her for 20 years following the lobotomy this is the saddest thing it's fucking horrible i can i'm not defending mrs kennedy at all because it's cowardly is what it is but i can't imagine the feeling of having to look your daughter in the face knowing that you let this happen no absolutely not but you're right it's cowardly it's like i can't deal with this. Exactly. But you're child.

So I'm just going to lock you up and not look at you for 20 years. Yeah. Until I won't be able to recognise you, then I'll come. During his presidential campaign, JFK explained Rosemary's absence from the public eye by saying that she was just a bit reclusive. It was only after he was elected that he revealed that Rosemary was institutionalised.

But he didn't mention the failed lobotomy. He just said that his sister was, quote, mentally retarded. Nice. And it was only in 1987 that Rosemary's fate became public knowledge. 18 years after the world learned her story, at the age of 86, Rosemary Kennedy died of natural causes in 2005. It's believed by some that Rosemary was the inspiration for the Special Olympics, which was created by her sister Eunice and started in 1968. When I first read that, I was going to take issue with it because the birthplace of the Paralympics is Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. And when you drive into Buckinghamshire, it says birthplace of the Paralympics.

So I was like, I will eat my muse. The Special Olympics and the Paralympics. So I was like, I will eat my muse. The Special Olympics and the Paralympics are different things. The Special Olympics are for people with sort of mental disabilities and the Paralympics are more physical. And I did not know that. Yes, no, absolutely. Rosemary Kennedy's story is a tragic one, but it's not an isolated one. When you look at the numbers, there was an enormous gender disparity in lobotomy patients. By 1942, 75% of the lobotomies Freeman had carried out were on women. Across France, Switzerland and Belgium, between 1935 and 1985, that number rose to 84%.

Was it because more women had severe mental health issues than men at the time? No, not even close. Far more men were institutionalized than women, still are. Although women were more likely to be diagnosed with depression and mania, wandering womb, etc. much more than men. I saw an amazing tweet the other day. It was like the greatest trick ever pulled is that convincing the world that women are the more emotional sex. We've just decided that anger isn't an emotion so it's likely that the gender disparity when we're talking about lobotomies comes from men wanting to sedate their outspoken and opinionated wives who are tired of the

pressures of playing an npc in their husbands lives another famous and tragic case of women being lobotomized is that of maria eva du Perón, or Evita, as she's affectionately known, by her people and musical lovers all over the world. Don't cry for me, Argentina. Aha. Born in 1919, Evita was an Argentine actress, politician, activist and philanthropist who served as the First Lady of Argentina

from 1946 until her untimely death six years later, at the age of just 33. If Evita ever comes back, we're going to go and see it. Do not watch the Madonna film. Do not watch it. I won't. I won't. That is what I was thinking. I forbid it.

That's what I was thinking of when we were saying Evita, but I won't. So Evita was married to the Argentine president, Juan Domingo Perón. During her time as First Lady, Evita was as outspoken and opinionated as they came. She ran the ministries of labour and health. She was a huge supporter of trade unionists and spoke out for workers' rights. She also found the time to run her own charity, the Eva Perón Foundation, which aimed to help gifted children from poor backgrounds and build schools, hospitals and orphanages in underprivileged areas. Evita also championed women's suffrage in Argentina and founded the first large-scale

female political party, the Female Peronist Party. She was a fucking radical, like she was incredible. But on the 9th of January 1950, and this sort of happens at the end of Evita, the musical, she collapsed in public and underwent surgery a few days later. The public were told that she'd had an appendectomy, but the truth was that she'd been diagnosed with cervical cancer. Her husband, Juan, ensured that the diagnosis was kept secret from the public and even from Evita herself. Although she didn't know she had cancer, Evita knew, of course, that something was seriously wrong. She continued fainting throughout 1951 and experienced severe weakness and vaginal bleeding. Her health began deteriorating incredibly quickly and she eventually underwent a radical hysterectomy. A few months before her

death in 1952, Evita was given the title of spiritual leader of the nation by her husband. And that really was how she was seen, like she was an icon. In one of her last public appearances, Evita rode with Juan in a parade through Buenos Aires to celebrate his re-election as president. But she was so ill and weak she couldn't even stand up on her own. But the public couldn't know that. So underneath her oversized fur coat, Evita was propped up by a hidden frame made of plaster and wires. She died the following month in July 1952, after her cervical cancer metastasised and returned. Evita weighed just 36 kilos at the time of her death.

But Evita's story doesn't end there. In 2011, Daniel Nijensen, a neurosurgeon at Yale University Medical School, got his hands on the scans of Evita's skeleton and made a startling discovery. The x-rays of Evita's skull showed signs that it had been drilled into, the same way it would have been if she had received a prefrontal lobotomy. Initially, Nijensen thought maybe Juan had Evita secretly lobotomized in order to relieve the pain and anxiety she was feeling from her cervical cancer. And while that may have been partially true, the lobotomy may have also served a different purpose.

In the year leading up to Evita's death, she had become increasingly radical in her political speeches. Juan's government was already showing signs of fracture when Evita made a speech in 1952 calling out her enemies. She also had a 79-page document written up, titled My Message. In it she described the bourgeoisie, who she believed to be the enemies of the people, as cold as toads and snakes, and called for the people of Argentina to fight the oligarchy. And she wasn't just saying it. From her sickbed, without Juan's knowledge, Evita ordered thousands of pistols and machine guns with plans to arm the trade unionists in order to form workers' militias.

If this news had gotten out, it would have torn apart factions of her husband's political allies and likely have thrown the country into a civil war. With this context, it's not wild to think that Juan found out about Evita's plans and decided that maybe lobotomising his wife was the only option. Neil Jensen contacted some acquaintances of Evita's surgeon and found out that Evita's hysterectomy was conducted without her consent and so it's quite possible that they also lobotomised her at the same time. After the surgery, Evita stopped eating,

which explains why she was so thin at the end of her life. So, after all we've learned together about lobotomies, we have to ask the question, how and why did the procedure manage to grow in popularity at all? Lots of reasons. One reason is that psychiatric institutions were hugely overcrowded at the time and they were horrendous places to be. Patients were often subjected to all kinds of abuse. In 1937, there were almost half a million patients in just 477 mental institutions in the US. So for many, it could be that being lobotomised

seemed like a more desirable option than being institutionalised. Another reason was that there just weren't any antipsychotic or antidepressant medications around until about the mid-50s, which is also around the time that lobotomies began to fall in popularity. If you listened to our episode on the Sackler family, you'll know the rest. In 1954, the drug chloropromazine became widely available as the first major tranquilizer, and its success launched the modern psychopharmacologic era that we know today.

And the same way that lobotomies were often used to sedate quote-unquote female hysteria, the prescribing patterns of these new psychotherapeutic drugs followed the same suit. By 1968, not only was Valium disproportionately prescribed to women, it was marketed as an antidote for socially dysfunctional women. I actually read an article earlier this week that said, in terms of diagnosis, it seems equal men and women in terms of depression, but women are prescribed antidepressants, but many more women are on antidepressants than men are, even though the data seems to show that depression is an equal opportunities offender.

Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, depression does not care what's between your legs. Like we said earlier, the USSR banned lobotomies in 1950, and Japan and Germany followed suit a few years later. But the same can't be said for the US. Although Freeman himself was banned from carrying out lobotomies in 1967 after one of his patients died from a brain hemorrhage, I'm amazed it took that long. But amazingly, the US and quite a lot of Western Europe have never outlawed the practice. Lobotomies continued to be performed as late as the 1980s. And today, it's still kind of kicking around. But for different reasons, a lobotomy-like procedure

called a lobectomy is used to treat extreme cases of epilepsy and other seizure disorders. And as for Antonio Igazmonis' Nobel Prize, many have actually campaigned for the Nobel Foundation to rescind his award, calling it a monumental error of judgment. But the foundation has a rule against ever taking back one of their prizes. So he still carries that honour. I didn't know that, that they refused to take them back. Nor did I, but it makes sense, I guess.

I suppose in like a scientific field, like it's getting disproven all the time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true. And they're probably like, we were dealing with the information we had at that time. So look, don't make us open that can of worms, basically. But yeah. I wonder what having that attitude's like. There you go.

Lobotomies. Fucking horrible. I didn't know about Ev's like. There you go. Lobotomies. Fucking horrible. I didn't know about Evita. I didn't know. I knew about Evita actually more than I knew about Rosemary Kennedy. But that was purely because, I mean, it will surprise nobody that I once sat and read a bunch of stuff about lobotomies for no reason. And now we finally have shorthand. We can live our dreams.

Yes, exactly. It's our show and we can do what we like. So thank you ever so much. That was your Patreon bonus for July. And we hope you enjoyed it. Hope you learned some stuff. Please, dear God, don't watch the Madonna version of Evita. Do something else with your time instead.

Like, I don't know, read a book about lobotomies. Exactly. And we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant.

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