Today lobotomy is a horror story. Less than a century ago it was a revolutionary “fix” for misunderstood mental health problems.
The first lobotomies were performed in the late 1880s by Swiss physician Gottlieb Burkhardt, a supervisor of an asylum looking for ways to subdue overactive patients. Burkhardt removed parts of the brain cortex of a few patients suffering from auditory hallucinations and other symptoms of what would later be identified as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Following the surgeries, one patient died and another committed suicide, but others were pacified. To Burkhardt and the doctors who would later follow in his footsteps, this ratio—and this result—counted as success.
Still, Burkhardt’s work didn’t immediately inspire imitation. Lobotomy truly gained traction starting in 1935, when two American scientists removed the frontal lobes of chimpanzees and, in the same year, Portuguese neurophysician António Egas Moniz performed the operation on a human. Egas Moniz and his assistant completed nearly 40 lobotomies by 1937, and the procedure—which still achieved only mixed success—became standard practice.
By the 1940s most American neurosurgeons loudly resisted lobotomy, criticizing its lack of research and low success rate. But the procedure’s negative feedback did nothing to stop Walter J. Freeman II, a neurologist who was, according to an NPR account, “equal parts physician and showman.” Freeman and his partner, James W. Watts, developed the Freeman-Watts standard lobotomy, which laid out a procedure for how exactly a spatula was to be inserted and manipulated in the brain. “He didn’t have any qualms,” remembered Wolfhard Baumgartel, a physician who had witnessed Freeman perform a series of lobotomies in the early 1950s, and, as Baumgartel told StoryCorps, “He wanted to prove that he was right, he was convinced that he was right. I thought, ‘How can a man be relaxed just going blindly into a brain?!’”
A fierce advocate for lobotomies, especially when they were performed by him, Freeman became a traveling lobotomist. He was in a state of perpetual road trip, visiting psychiatric hospitals across the United States to perform and teach lobotomies. By 1945 he had streamlined the procedure so that it would take only 10 minutes: a pick was forced through the back of the eye sockets and into the frontal lobe of the brain. After an operation, Freeman would stay in the operating room while one patient would be sent out and another ushered in. By the end of his career, Freeman had performed or supervised over 3,500 lobotomies, but that was only a fraction of the total. In all, more than 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States, most between 1949 and 1952.
The popularity of lobotomy was only encouraged by Egas Moniz’s most notable accomplishment: in 1949 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for, as the citation put it, “his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses.” But that did not mean the procedure, particularly as Freeman practiced it, was safe or even successful. Though many of Freeman’s patients showed reduced tension or agitation, others became entirely passive, apathetic, or disinterested in their own life, resulting in the trope of lobotomized people as “zombies.” Some were reduced to the mental capacity of children. Others died. Some of Freeman’s patients were children themselves, like then 12-year-old Howard Dully, who was lobotomized on the order of his stepmother. He wasn’t aware of his surgery until decades later. “I'll never know what I lost in those 10 minutes with Dr. Freeman and his ice pick,” Dully told NPR in 2005, when he was 56. “By some miracle it didn't turn me into a zombie, crush my spirit, or kill me. But it did affect me. Deeply. Walter Freeman's operation was supposed to relieve suffering. In my case it did just the opposite. Ever since my lobotomy I've felt like a freak, ashamed.”
Children, women, and the severely mentally ill were especially vulnerable to being lobotomized without their knowledge. In Sweden, where over 4,500 lobotomies were performed between 1944 and 1966, most of the patients were women. Parents, husbands, and doctors were able to order lobotomies without asking the person whose brain would be dismantled.
It is, however, ultimately impossible to know exactly how many people around the world were subjected to lobotomy. It’s also impossible to know how many people died as a result of the procedure. Of Freeman’s 3,500 patients, for example, perhaps 490 died. Like Howard Dully, many who received lobotomies didn’t know what had changed until years later. Some never discovered the secret of their lobotomy at all.