The Lobotomist

American neurologist Walter Freeman was a textbook example of good intentions gone tragically wrong. As a young man, Dr. Freeman visited several sanitariums warehousing the mentally ill, becoming deeply troubled by the sight of people living in filth and squalor. A man of boundless ambition, Freeman read tirelessly on the subject of mental illness, ultimately discovering an obscure Europe text that offered hope for a dramatic, permanent change in a patient's behavior after nerve pathways to the brain's frontal lobe(s) were severed. As a neurologist without surgical training, Freeman began conducting transorbital lobotomies—in which a device resembling an ice pick is inserted directly between the patient's eyelid and eyeball—in 1936. Before long, a production line mentality developed as Freeman quickly moved from one facility to the next, performing lobotomies at each stop. The press, courted by Freeman, latched onto the procedure as a cost-effective psychiatric quick fix, barely noticing the failures (including a botched operation on Rosemary Kennedy, and some deaths on the operating table). While Freeman had vocal critics throughout his career (and the parallels to medical experiments during the Holocaust were troubling), he continued on, ultimately performing thousands of lobotomies in over 20 states. However, eventually doctors began noticing that many patients were reduced to permanent childlike behavior or else reverted back to mental illness, and the death of a patient in 1967 finally ended Freeman's career. Barak Goodman and John Maggio's The Lobotomist, based in part on Jack El-Hai's book of the same name and aired on PBS's American Experience series, presents testimony from doctors, former patients, and Freeman family members (as well as graphic and disturbing images) to offer a tragic portrait of a man undone by vanity. Freeman spent his last years revisiting sanitariums where he had performed lobotomies, looking for a vindication he would never find. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (S. Rees)