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Right now, I am listening to The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix, and I just cannot get enough of it.
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Travis fell in love with the perfect woman Beautiful, understanding, available 24 -7 There was just one catch She wasn't human Binge all episodes of Flesh and Code early and ad -free right now on Wondery Plus Hey weirdos, I'm Ash And I'm Alayna And this is Morbid morbid in the morning it's morbid in the morning and i apologize i'm sick so you bitch i might sneeze all over you or cough all over you that's nasty but yeah that can be taken out in the post post -editing process.
It can. Just know that I sneezed and coughed all over you.
We took it out. But yeah, so I'm trying to muster up my strength and energy right now, because this is a pretty wild case that we're going to be talking about.
It's not one case. It's a man's career, is what I should say.
Okay. We're going to be covering Walter Jackson Freeman.
Oh, shit. The father of the transorbital lobotomy.
That little thing. That guy.
That little lobotomy.
Yeah. He's something.
A monster. He is something.
We're going to do this in two parts, because I do want to talk about the Rosemary Kennedy lobotomy.
That is so tragic. That is, I mean, reading about that rocked my world.
I remember I actually didn't know about that until maybe I would say like five or six years ago when there was like some Kennedy special on the History Channel.
I never knew that. And when they started going into it, I was like, oh, my God.
Oh, it's horrific what they did to that woman.
It's horrific. Exactly.
And then to think that that really wasn't that long ago.
No, it really wasn't in the grand scheme of things.
That's nuts. And that her own it was her own father who really, really fucked her over there.
Mm -hmm. But I mean, it was both her parents, but we'll get into that in part two.
I want to start part two with that and like give it its due.
Yeah. Because it's quite a story and it's quite a lengthy story and it needs its own kind of moment there.
Definitely. But we are going to begin by talking about Dr. Freeman himself.
Explain where he came from, how he even came into this, like what his intentions at first were.
Okay. all that fun because it seems like they got lost down the road they certainly did yeah i don't know a lot about his origin story so i'm excited to hear when you hear about him in the beginning it feels like and you're just kind of hopeful that it's true that he had these like grand and somewhat pure intentions at one point i think they were lost in this thing where he believed in a time where they believed like talk therapy was the only way to get through mental illness he believed that it was physical like medical intervention that was the only way to get both were were wrong and both were right
yeah because both of them were standing both sides were sitting there standing in the this is the only way right and it's not it's a mixture of both yeah as we know as we know now it we still haven't perfected it it's it's very much a mixture of both but each of them were saying no no no my way is the only way so his intentions in the the beginning where he he wanted to cure mental illness okay but my goodness did he go about it the wrong way yeah and he just kept going even through his failures which his failures weren't like failing at you know you know creating something entertaining or something
and you just keep working at it until you do it right you're failing at human beings like you're ruining Winning human beings' lives with your failures.
So it's like you can't keep doing this but he kept doing it at the expense of so many people.
That's the thing. He's just like on to the next one.
Okay, on to the next one.
And that's when he goes into evil villain territory.
It's like you start with these intentions but my goodness did they get lost along the way.
So when Portuguese neurologist Igas Moniz developed the lobotomy because a lot of people confused that Dr. Freeman was the one who created the lobotomy.
he didn't. Okay. He created the transorbital lobotomy, which is a totally different procedure.
Egas Moniz was the one who created the lobotomy.
They also called it a leucotomy, too, but we know it now as a lobotomy.
It was in 1935, and it was just a super crude surgery that was developed as a blanket treatment for mental illness.
It involved drilling into the skull and like literally just scrambling the neural connections to the frontal lobe.
yeah and they just thought like yeah that'll fix it just yeah just eggbeat that person's brain and that'll do and the thing is all of these ideas have a basis in like reality and you're like you if you just followed that in a logical and more like normal way you could have got somewhere i think but you followed it down this wild path of just let's scramble the connections it's like Like, you didn't think of anything more refined here?
Because that's the thing.
When you think about it, you're like, yeah, scrambling them will help?
Like, I don't know about that.
I don't think that's going to do much. So less than a decade later, after Igus Moniz created the lobotomy, American neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman refined, question mark, the procedure to develop a non -surgical procedure.
Because that was obviously a very surgical procedure.
This one could be performed in a doctor's office.
That's terrifying. And this is what he called the transorbital lobotomy.
And how is that not surgical?
Well, Freeman's procedure involved inserting a medical instrument very similar to an ice pick into the patient's orbital socket.
To eyeball? To sever, like right next to the eyeball, it would go in.
Okay. And it would be used to sever the neural connections.
interactions without requiring surgery hospital stays or long recovery times.
It was advertised as quick easy and a painless solution to everything.
Painless? Yeah. They advertised it as painless.
Let me just shove this thing into your eye?
They were like oh don't worry we'll numb you up it's fine.
What? And if you look at patients like afterwards they like their eyes are all black obviously.
Of course. It's intense.
That's awful. And he said he could cure it could could cure general lethargy, occasional depression, schizophrenia, violent aggressive behavior, everything on the spectrum.
And they basically made the procedure a go -to solution for very complex psychological issues that have affected countless people for countless centuries.
They were like, oh, we figured it out.
And unfortunately, while the procedure was slightly effective for a very small number of those who received a lobotomy, it was used indiscriminately, often without consideration for the increasingly disastrous outcomes that were happening.
They were just like, oh, this one will be fine.
You know what? Forget that one.
We're going to move on to the next and this will be better.
Sometimes patients were as young as four or five years old.
Are you kidding? Yes.
Oh my God. Whose parents I'm like.
Yeah. So the question becomes, was Dr. Freeman an indiscriminate egomaniac or was he just blind blinded to what he had really done and was looking to be the person to fix it all i don't know i think it's a good a good mix of both i think he is evil villain territory for sure and i think it began as something different and it turned into something fucking awful i feel like i mean that kind of happens with a lot of villains it's true he and it it's it's unforgivable the way he just kept going that's the problem here when he realized like this is not working where he just kept going he kept hiding
results he was just moving forward like it wasn't this awful thing so let's talk about who walter freeman is who is he walter freeman walter jackson freeman jr was born on november 14th 1895 in philadelphia i think that makes him a scorpio so there you go so he was the first of seven children born to walter freeman senior and corinne keen freeman walter's maternal internal grandfather was William Keene, who was a veteran of the Union Army who served in the American Civil War and was the country's first brain surgeon.
Oh, shit. So, he came from medical background.
Walter's earliest years, he was sick a lot, like practically from the moment he was born.
Oh, wow. When the boy was only 14 months old, William Keene, his grandfather, was called on by his parents to quote excise 30 enlarged lymph nodes from one side of the baby's neck yeah which this procedure ended up causing permanent paralysis of the trapezius and sternomastoid muscles oh yeah so they just took his lymph nodes out on that side yeah okay yeah enlarged lymph nodes yeah yeah now in the years after that Walter was was dealing with a wide array of common and also uncommon illnesses at the time.
He got diphtheria, measles, scarlet fever, mumps.
He had repeated bouts of tonsillitis and eventually needed a tonsillectomy.
So he was sick a lot.
It sounds like he had some kind of autoimmune disease.
It sounded like there was definitely something more wrong.
But in the late 19th century, Philadelphia was a hub for progressive ideas in science and medicine.
And a lot of influential people in those fields lived there.
So Walter grew up surrounded by doctors and surgeons who encouraged him, like very much encouraged his inquisitive nature because he immediately was like, he was around it all the time.
His grandfather, who he really liked, was a brain surgeon.
So he was like, what's this all about?
And he ended up earning the nickname Little Walter Wai Wai.
Little Walter Wai Wai, that's adorable.
Because he was always asking like, why?
Why? Why does this work?
How does that work?
He was the original why.
Yeah, he really was.
He was the one who started it.
But, I mean, it was all basically just ensuring that he was going to go right into medicine like his father and his grandfather.
Now, as a student, Walter was stellar.
He was super into academics.
He was great at it.
But he was less interested in and less in tune with was things that little boys his age were, quote unquote, supposed to be interested in.
Okay. Like sports and girls.
and all that stuff which i find like just i'm like that they it's always presented as like oh that's his weirdness and it's like they're supposed to be interested in part it should be really italicized here because it's like a kid doesn't need to be into sports and girls to be a normal kid no it's not like let's not do that but of course this made him a little bit of an outsider at school especially where the time period the time period for sure and at home it was kind of a mixed platter for him because according to writer jack elhi walter contentedly assumed the victorian role of the distant
but dominant oldest brother so he was distant with his siblings he acted like the boss and he was also pretty distant with his own father his father was not like a lovey -dovey type okay walter remembered him as quote shy socially awkward and a humorless father whose example taught his son to regard emotional expression as something strange and frightening.
I feel like that was pretty typical of the time, unfortunately.
While Walter's father seemed very uncomfortable in his role as like caregiver, like he just didn't seem to be able to function in that.
Not a warm fuzzy. Corinne Keene Freeman, the mom, took the complete opposite approach and made a very consistent effort to involve herself in her children's lives, be there emotionally.
She was pretty much shut out of her husband's life because he was working all the time.
And so she was kind of also on the receiving end of just being neglected.
So she knew what it felt like.
But she reveled in motherhood, like reveled in it.
She went to all her children's events and activities around the city.
She was there. She would bring them places.
She was always with them.
She would arrange little vacations with with them she would bring them to like nearby resorts and places like jamestown gloucester cape may all kinds of places just them she sounds rad and yeah and it's like so unlike their relationship which was pretty tense and strained with their father their mother was kind of their like their refuge yeah she became their like oasis where they could talk about their emotions very freely with her that's good she didn't make them sound strange like she would listen um at least they had that yeah exactly and but of all her children walter was still the hardest
to reach according to her like he was very aloof distant very much took after the father okay um and actually corinne described her uh walter as the cat that walks by himself oh that's what she that was one of his nicknames what a sweet way to describe it though she's like he's just a little kitty that likes his alone time uh and if there was any figure that loomed very large over young young walter's life it was his grandfather william keen the first brain surgeon uh unlike his father who again very much like struggled to relate to others which i'm like i think he probably had some stuff going
on of himself by the sounds of it yeah because it sounds like he has some like issues like socially and also just like emotionally like i don't even because i don't find i didn't find anything um about him being like aggressive and violent or anything like that He was just like awkward and didn't know how to deal with that.
So I'm like, I think you needed a little bit of like, you know, help dealing with that as well.
Right. But yeah, he did not.
And also his father didn't like attention.
So he did his work.
He was also a doctor.
But he did not like attention from the public about it.
He didn't want accolades.
He wanted to just do his work and he wanted to get through it.
And he was very uncomfortable with being showered with any kind of attention.
And that's funny because it seems like his son didn't end up the same way.
Well, because Walter's grandfather, William Keene, reveled in accolades and attention because he had a pristine, very stellar reputation in science.
Like you said, the first brain surgeon.
And he was great. So it's like he loved it.
So it was totally opposite.
And Walter definitely was drawn more to that side.
And by the time Walter was, like, early in his teens, Keen's work in neurology had actually earned him a level of fame that many scientists never see.
He was a role model to Walter, like, his intellectual prowess or his social, like, his ability to be, like, socially aware and socially comfortable.
Because Walter was still very socially awkward at this point.
He was taking after his father.
But he was looking up to his grandfather.
father. And in time, Walter became his grandfather's favorite grandchild.
Really? Because I think he saw that he was going to follow after him, but he also saw him as somebody as like, I need to kind of show him the ropes kind of thing.
And they spent a lot of time together during Walter's formative years as an adolescent.
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Now in 1912, Walter enrolled in his freshman year at Yale University.
Oh shit. Yeah. Rory Gilmore.
There you go. And unfortunately he found that he was like a little ill -prepared for the amount of work and the rigor that was expected of students.
Rory felt the same.
exactly he was Rory Gilmore exactly and he actually recalled later in prep school a daily stint of 30 lines of greek translation was standard in college it was 30 pages I'm ill prepared for the prep school part of that for real I'm ill prepared for like the prep for the prep school yeah no he said the jump from geometry and algebra to calculus was equally otually baffling.
And I also agree with that.
Fuck calculus. Yeah.
I never had to do calculus, but my friends did.
And I was like, yeah, no, that's not for me.
It's a lot. But Walter struggled considerably during his first year and he barely passed his classes.
But he also was matriculating at 16 years old, which was an achievement in and of itself.
So. Yeah. So we have to give him that.
But at 16, the rigor was a little too hard. It's like, Like, yeah, we can understand that.
That checks. Yeah, and also he's immature at this point.
Yeah. A 16 -year -old boy is not ready for college.
Yeah, but Walter's immaturity and social awkwardness ultimately led to a college experience that he later described as very lonely, intimidating, and not a good time at all.
That's sad. Pretty miserable.
During his sophomore and junior years at Yale, Walter continued to struggle in all aspects, Beck socially, academically.
He tried and repeatedly failed to settle on a major that he could at least enjoy doing.
Like he just wasn't finding his place.
Because again, he's 16.
That's hard. And it was right at the beginning of his senior year that Walter actually contracted typhoid and was hospitalized for a long period.
And that's when he began to talk about going into the medical field.
Despite his father's insistence that he avoid medicine.
Really? Because his his father was like, it is a very demanding, intense career.
Walter kept coming back to the idea of being a doctor.
And he saw it as, he was like, I think this is a good career.
You get a good life out of it.
It sets you up if you're good at it.
And he did have a big interest in poetry as well.
But he was looking at it as, this is much more of a viable career than poetry.
Especially for the time.
Yeah, exactly. Now, as Jack L.
High notes, typhoid had stolen half of Freeman's senior year, but in return, it had given him an opportunity to ponder his future.
Following his graduation from Yale in 1916, he enrolled at the University of Chicago and began to study medicine.
So unlike his time at Yale during, you know, where he was really struggling to find his place and his passions.
It's almost like when you have to do like your prerequisites.
Yeah. It's like that Yale was his prerequisite.
Walter acclimated very quickly to medical school.
He found that he loved it.
He had a real big aptitude for formulas.
He loved laboratory work.
He just - He found his place.
This was his place.
Yeah. Now, after two semesters at the University of Chicago, he transferred to the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
and many of his fellow students struggled in their first year but he was like impressing all his instructors he was super committed to the hard work it's in his blood yeah he was very interested in it very good at it they were very impressed by him in the summer after his first year at the University of Pennsylvania he returned to Chicago for summer studies and that's when he started his fascination with the human brain particularly he became very interested in the the intersection between medicine and psychiatry.
He was very interested in that part.
And it was by his third year in medical school, his studies had come to occupy literally all his time.
He was becoming his father.
He was just fully committed.
And he said, medicine held my interest to the point where I excluded many other things, he later said.
That's not healthy.
In fact, I was barely aware of my family, do not recall what they were doing or where they were during this period.
That's really sad when you break that down.
and so he was very engrossed in his studies but he also just really wanted to start his career he was like I loved studying but I was just ready to take the step out of the nest he really didn't like doing internships like he kind of resented it and thought he was above it a little bit I could see that especially where his grandfather is who he is he's like do you know who I am he's like I don't need an internship he referred to it as scut work and he's the unglamorous day -to -day work of collecting samples and filling out paperwork was just not something he wanted to do.
Listen, we all got to start as an apprentice.
We all do. We all do.
Even in a hair salon, you got to do it.
There you go. Now, during this period, Freeman was developing certain characteristic traits that were kind of undesirable, but would end up being pretty relevant or prominent, I should say, during his entire professional life.
Yeah. Your face told me they weren't going to be great traits.
Yeah. So Elhi wrote, Freeman eventually realized that as an intern, he was supposed to be a member of a hospital team.
And the role of team player was never one that Freeman filled well.
So despite studying under some of the literally most highly regarded surgeons in the field, he would rather work by himself in the lab or just standing at an operating table for hours just focusing on something.
thing which I can't it's an undesirable trait for sure to not be a team player but I understand that some people just it's hard for some people yeah it just is I'm not a great team player like I'm just not and I it is an undesirable treat and one but it's one that you should work on well that's the thing because I was gonna say like I know that about you that like it's not your favorite thing to do but when it comes down to it I've seen you be able to do it exactly so So, and you have to be able to because life is a collaborative effort.
That's the thing. And a lot of times, like, you don't need to change yourself.
No. Like, I never believe in, like, changing those kind of parts about yourself.
Like, you don't need to just become a different person.
No. Because, like, I won't.
So that's just the way it is.
You know, like, if you're not very excited about team building things, like, that's not going to change.
But like you said, you just have to, like, you have to just go with it sometimes.
You got to grin and bear it.
And you're going to see, I think sometimes it helps to see when something pans out from a team effort.
Definitely. You look at it and you go, okay, you know what, I couldn't have done that by myself.
That needed everybody's hands in it.
That's the thing. Like different viewpoints make the world go round.
Yeah. It's like sometimes it is better to do things by yourself.
And sometimes people are allowed to do that.
Yeah, of course. Like sometimes you're going to be like really focused and you'll be able to get the job done.
But then other times, like you said, someone will see something you maybe didn't see and they can show you that.
And especially in science and medicine right multiple points of view and multiple people looking at a thing is what makes you discover things that you never would have so following his graduation from medical school in 1923 walter went to paris and he began postgraduate studies in clinical neurology funded by an american field service scholarship that he had won with the help of his grandfather father.
One. One. Quote unquote.
So over a long period of time studying at, I'm going to play this pronunciation because I will butcher it and I don't want to.
At La Salpetrière. Salpetrière.
Salpetrière. Yeah. You did it.
That place. You done did it.
Walter dove much deeper into his Studies of Psychiatry and Neurology, and he was working with patients that he described as, quote, old women worn out in the struggle of life and not ready to take the leap into eternity.
Oh, shit. Never felt more seen in my life.
Damn. I was going to say, damn.
We're all just like, well, shit.
That's robot. Pour it out for us.
So Walter spent months in France working with patients that struggled to pay for medical medical treatment, and he was working as an intern and was also studying the brains of animals and honing his skills in the lab.
Okay. His time in Europe was cut short, though, in the late spring of 1924.
What did he contract?
Well, I know you would think, but no, he received a telegram from his grandfather letting him know that he'd secured a job for Walter as a senior medical officer in charge of laboratories at St. Elizabeth's Hospital.
I'm feeling like Grandpa's pulling a little too too many strings here is walter walter's a nepo baby he's a nepo baby wow i will say though it looks like walter did do the job like he he put in some work and he was good at it like he was good at his the studies portion of it yeah it's not like he was like this shitty guy that his grandpa was just like shoving through these but he was definitely getting escorted through all the doors that were opening for him some nepo babies are talented exactly uh but this was a A psychiatric hospital in Washington, D .C.
Okay. And he was going to be a senior medical officer in charge of that laboratory.
Got it. So by the time that Walter joined the staff at St. Elizabeth's, Americans were well into a psychiatric crisis that would eventually transform the mental health field and treatment for psychiatric disorders.
Between 1903 and 1933, American psychiatric hospitals more than doubled in size.
Some had thousands of patients.
Which is far too many.
A lot of this was due to the large number of American men returning home from fighting in World War II.
It had deep psychological trauma.
But it also corresponded with a pretty significant rise in the number of physical and psychological diseases like syphilis, alcoholism.
These were becoming more and more prevalent.
The problem was, though, that diagnosing an illness and housing a patient were not the same as treating the illness.
Right. You know, just diagnosing it and sticking them in a room is not treating the illness.
Not fixing anything.
So a lot of patients received inpatient treatment that would be very barbaric by today's standards.
Truly, it should be by any standards, but it wasn't.
And these patients were what inspired Walter to have a feeling he described as, quote, a weird mixture of fear, disgust, and shame.
Yeah. So this is why I say like I think he looked at it and said this is gross And we need to do something about it But then he was gross with what he did about it So it's like you know it just didn't go You watch it and you're like that could have been a good story Yeah But it's not It's like you just went the wrong You took the wrong path my friend Oh and it sounds like he was just like over confident in certain abilities Yeah he really thought he had it He really did Now Walter was not a wholly unsympathetic man Like, like I've been trying to say in the beginning, at least. Sure.
The lack of treatment and the horrid state of squalor in which parents, patients were forced to live, quote, aroused rejection rather than sympathy or interest. In fact, the thing that basically drove him professionally was a desire to advance the field of neurology and psychology in a way that chronically mentally ill patients could eventually be treated and go on to live productive, fulfilling lives.
That was his idea. Right.
He was like, I don't want to stick them in a place and let them rot.
That's not my idea.
Because that's not care.
That's just like prison.
His whole idea here was I want them to go on to live a fulfilling life.
That was the idea, but my goodness, it got lost. So Freeman's son, Walter Freeman III, told PBS later, He was repelled by what he saw.
He saw the nature of illness not as something that required sympathy, but as something that required action.
Do something. He wanted to solve the problems of psychiatry, and he wanted to do it fast. And that's a problem.
That's where the problem lies, I think.
There are certain things that can't go on a fast track.
I think it was his need to get it done, his need to be the one who did it, his need to be the one that did it now.
And it's like, if that wasn't there, I think there would have been a lot more nuance to what he was doing, and it wouldn't have turned out the way it did.
But he just wanted to crash through and be the one who fixed it all.
And it's like you could have if you just took the time and the patience and the care.
But while his motives may have been to advance his career like in some way, and there were parts of it that were to reinforce his ego essentially.
Yeah, self -centered.
There was part of him, like we're saying, that didn't want to see people suffer unnecessarily.
Of course. So it was a lot of things.
It was amalgamation of reasons.
reasons um and especially if he could be the one to do something about it but as far as walter could see it mental illness had a negative effect on society as well because he said it removed otherwise very capable individuals from the workforce and made them a burden to themselves and according to him a burden to others uh he wrote i looked around me at the hundreds of patients and thought what a waste of manpower and women power which is kind of a dark way of looking at it it's a pretty dark way of looking at it i could like for the time period i suppose that's a very like just black and white
way of looking at it like we you could be working and you're not it's very sterile i don't like the idea of calling these people a burden to others no it's like you know what i mean like that that takes away any of the care that you put into your previous statements of like you don't want to see people suffer unnecessarily like that all that that stuff like i want them to live fulfilling lives i want them to be happy like stop there i want them to be able to work if they want to work like sure but to call them a burden on others and say like you know like they're a waste of man but it's like like
you went too far that's putting a lot and now you've taken kind of the any of the care out of it but by the early 1930s he had spent years studying schizophrenia and other chronic mental mental illnesses and concluded that such Such afflictions were organic and not societal or environmental.
So he figured they could only be solved through medical procedures.
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Despite those feelings, he had to entertain the nation's growing interest in psychoanalysis in order to succeed in the hospital in university settings that he was really drawn to work in.
Right. Because this was around the time when it was really booming that, you know, like psychoanalysis, like Freud, all that stuff was like, that was what everybody was looking at, not looking at the medical portion of it at all.
Right. And he's only wanting to look at the medical portion.
If they could only join forces and talk to each other.
While most scientists and psychologists focus their attention on the pathology of behaviors, years, Walter was really one of the few voices that were advocating for medical explanation and solution for the symptoms. By the mid -1930s, his routine had him waking up at 4 a .m. He began the day with writing.
Then he would split his time between private practice, his work at the hospital labs, and a teaching position at George Washington University, and working as a member of the Mental Health Commission of the District of Columbia.
Wow. That was every day.
It's an an overloaded plate right there.
Yeah, it was. And during this period, his work was focused on charting activity in the brain by injecting patients with thorotrast, which was a colloidal thorium dioxide that would show up in x -rays and allow the neurologist to identify certain problem areas.
Now, that is really fucking cool.
Very interesting, but Thoroclast was actually banned in the 1950s.
So, at the time, they did not know.
But in the 1950s in the United States, it was banned because studies found exposure intravascularly to this cause to this um to this solution causes liver tumors and inhaling thorium dust can create pancreatic and lung cancer as well oh shit unfortunately even though it was banned the effects can be super long lasting and can kind of be like time release they sometimes don't show up for decades like 30 to 40 years after you've been exposed scary that there's a lot of compounds and chemicals like that So scary.
Pretty gnarly, the things that we used and thought we understood in medicine and then only find out it's more dangerous than the ailment it's being used to detect.
Yeah. Like, so scary.
And I feel like that happened kind of more often than not.
Oh, it happened a lot because it was all exploration.
Right. So it was like, they didn't know.
Now, although he had been steadily increasing his reputation in medical circles around the country, he knew that his ambitions were greater than one person could manage alone.
Okay. So he was suddenly sitting there saying, okay.
I need to work with a team.
I have to be a little bit of a team player here.
Fortunately, Freeman's ideal partner arrived at George Washington University in 1935.
He was a young neurosurgeon named James Winston Watts.
And like Walter, James Watts came from a pretty prestigious medical family.
He had quickly risen to the top of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.
And then he had transferred to Washington, D .C.
as well. but also like freeman watts believed in psychosurgery which is what is now known as neurosurgery it was known before as psychosurgery um and that he believed that was the key to treating and eradicating mental illness so they were on the same wavelength right together now the meeting of these two what would be pioneers in neuroscience coincided with a growing scientific interest in the function of the frontal lobes of the brain so they were all on the right path.
They certainly were, because in fact, in the 1930s and 40s, the frontal lobe was considered to be the most important part of the brain throughout your lifespan, not just in childhood development.
People believed any injury to the front lobe in adulthood even could be a problem for ethical behavior, like, you know, control, like willpower.
But research, particularly D .O.
Heb's paper from 1945, which was called Man's Front Lobes, a Critical Review.
They later began to see through research that the front lobes are very important to development, and they are vital for building a framework of intelligence, skill building, but once you're developed, that's kind of it.
Right. They don't play as huge a role anymore, not to say they don't play any role, that's just not as big as once thought so he said large frontal lobe lesions in children were very much something to worry about or keep an eye on but in adults they didn't super affect iq or ability to make like ethical moral decisions to the extent that could be considered the sole issue do you know part of the brain does um no okay i did not look into that that's okay uh but remember we're They're in the era where they believe this is the most important thing about the brain, the frontal lobes.
We know different now that there's many different things that come together to do that.
But back then, frontal lobe was it, regardless of your age.
Frontal lobe or bust. So in their earliest work together, Freeman and Watts conducted experiments that not only confirmed their belief about the function of the frontal lobes, but also what could happen when that section of the brain became impaired.
paired they wrote with an intact brain an individual is able to foresee to forecast that the certain the results of certain activities but when the frontal lobes were damaged or moved surgically they said the person affected the person affected shows a lack of initiative and a tendency to procrastinate under such conditions the patient suffers a loss of self -consciousness and becomes indifferent to the opinions of others okay interesting that is interesting while they may have been at the forefront of their field freeman and watts weren't alone in exploring the ways in which the brain could be
surgically altered to correct undesirable behavior because in 1935 egus moniz who we talked about at the top a portuguese neurosurgeon had been experimenting with a procedure he called the leucotomy no a neurosurgical procedure he believed could definitely cure certain mental illnesses and other maladies by basically severing the pathways to the frontal lobes of the brain.
In a procedure that would eventually become known as the prefrontal lobotomy, he drilled holes into the sides or top of the skull to allow access to the frontal lobes, and then he used a scalpel to cut nerve fibers.
This is giving me a headache.
And he believed, sometimes if I think too much about having a brain, it freaks my brain out.
Yeah, I can understand that.
You know what I mean?
Because you're really not supposed to think about it.
It's supposed to be there.
But he believed that the surgery would force the brain to develop new neural pathways and more beneficial emotional responses.
So if you sever those ties, it's like forcing a river another way, you know?
Which I can see where that thought does come from.
If you build a dam, it's going to have to go a different way.
Yeah. Now, although Walter was skeptical of Moniz's theory that simply severing the connection would cause the brain to regrow healthier connections, he couldn't argue with the Portuguese neurosurgeon's published results claiming five in six patients were cured of their affliction through lobotomies.
Some years later, though, Moniz would clarify that only about 35 % of his patients were cured, while another 35 % showed some improvement.
Also, he rarely followed up with patients beyond a few weeks after their surgeries, so if there were any negative effects from the surgeries, he wouldn't have heard about them and he definitely wouldn't have included them in his research. Fantastic.
So we're going to go with that's a way less number than even 35%.
Yeah, sounds ethical.
So frustrated by American medical industry's increasing interest interest, and reliance in psychoanalysis over medical treatment for mental illnesses.
Freeman and Watts began considering how the leucotomy could be used in the United States so they finally got their chance to experiment with the technique in the fall of 1936.
They did this on a patient who was a 63 year old housewife named Alice Hammett.
She had come to them seeking help with with her anxiety.
Oh, no. Now, by her own report, Alice had suffered from anxiety, insomnia, and depression for as long as she could remember.
That's really sad. She had been hospitalized for nervous breakdowns in the past, but she said nothing alleviated her symptoms. She had tried everything.
So steadfast in his belief that all mental illness was organic and medical rather than social and behavioral, Walter deemed Alice to be a perfect candidate for the first ever lobotomy performed in the United States.
In reality, though, Alice's afflictions were likely definitely mostly behavioral as well as medical.
And society. Yeah. She had apparently grown up very well off, very spoiled.
Like she herself said, I was a very spoiled child.
Okay. She would throw tantrums to get her way, was given everything she wanted when she did that.
So when she entered adulthood, she didn't have coping skills or an ability to express her wants and needs in a healthy way.
She would just get mad, upset, and anxious about it.
So that was for sure behavioral and societal. I just said society earlier.
I don't know if you got that.
I was just like society.
Just society. Honestly, that is just the answer for everything, society.
So in the years after that, she was experiencing also a lot of unfortunate events in her life on top of this, like, ability to have no coping skills whatsoever.
Her two -year -old child had died.
Oh, wow. Her sister had been murdered at the hands of her brother -in -law, so her husband.
Yep. And again, at this time, society was not super comfortable with negative emotions.
Uh -huh. So Alice learned to keep those anxieties all inside, which led to a long history of having a lot of acting out publicly issues.
It got worse and worse, her mental illness, where she was exposing herself to the neighbors.
Oh, no. Verbally abusing her husband.
And she started relying on tranquilizers just to make it through the day.
Oh, man. Because that's the thing.
You push those anxieties down and you don't talk about them.
You keep pushing them.
Exactly. They explode.
they do damage inside so by the time Alice came to the Freeman and the Freeman and Watts she was anxiety walking at the end of her rope yeah she they said she wrung her hands she thrashed around during the examination like she was just she was an anxious ball of anxiety oh that's awful so really with few if any other options Alice and her husband consented to a test be the test case for this procedure.
Wow. On September 14th, 1936.
And again, she became the first person in the United States to receive a lobotomy.
So at first, the procedure seemed to be a success.
Alice was recovering pretty well from surgery.
Six days later, though, Freeman received word from Alice's husband that she was still calm and she didn't seem anxious, but she was having having trouble speaking and writing.
Oof. And that she was, quote, almost too placid.
So fortunately, once the swelling in the brain subsided, which took several weeks, of course, very intense procedure, she did return more or less to normal.
And I guess throughout the remainder of her life, though, even though her anxieties were less, like it did lessen a lot of that, she did experience a lot of symptoms that were very much probably related to the surgery, like convulsions.
Oh. that very much negatively affected her quality of life.
But even through all this, they considered this experiment with Alice a resounding success.
And they wasted no time reporting this to their colleagues.
It's so interesting that it did sort of help in a way.
Yeah, but it created more issues.
Yeah. Because I think it kind of, to me, it almost feels like it dulls the senses a bit, so her anxieties just weren't being felt.
as intensely. It's just dulling a feeling, you know?
Which is scary. That's very scary.
But he became determined at this point to refine the procedure because he wanted to reduce those side effects to make better success rates.
So he didn't want to lose momentum, so Freeman and Watts began looking for a second candidate for surgery just weeks after Alice Hammett.
And it feels like too soon when you don't know the...
Exactly. And you don't even know yet at what she's going to go through down the road.
Exactly. So they found a willing participant, 59 -year -old bookkeeper Emma Ager.
So like Hammett, she had struggled with anxiety and depression for most of her life.
Her symptoms were so extreme at times that she suffered hallucinations.
She had a profound and irrational fear of being poisoned.
That was something she was dealing with.
And apparently during the procedure, like doing her lobotomy, The leukotome broke down and the leukotome was the surgical tool used to perform the lobotomy.
It was invented in the 1940s by a Canadian neurosurgeon by the name of Dr. Kenneth McKenzie.
And it almost looks like a syringe type shape with a long protrusion at the end that gets inserted into the hole in the skull and then into the brain itself.
Like a syringe, there's a plunger on the back and this is used to kind of like send the wire thing into the brain to do the work.
Okay. Then the doctor uses it to rotate it and that cores out some brain tissue.
Oof. It broke down during the procedure.
That's not good. But they got it to work and the surgery was considered a success with Walter later noting that the patient was responsive and cheerful after surgery.
But he said, although entirely lacking in spontaneity.
so the success of emma agar's surgery very much encouraged freeman and watts and they wanted to continue employing moniz's leukotomy which freeman had rechristened the lobotomy i wonder what made him want to change it yeah i think he just wanted to make it his own yeah i mean wilson he wanted he wanted to change it to be the transorbital lobotomy so he could do it quicker that's why he changed that he didn't want the like recovery times he didn't want hospital stays he wanted to be able to do this inpatient do a lot of them and there's just certain things that you can't do like that and after this success
patients were lined up to receive what freeman and watts were touting as a groundbreaking treatment it shows you how bad mental illness can be that people were so desperate to get their skull and brain dug into just to get relief yeah it's it's horrible show you how bad it can be and because people were they were desperately asking to have their skull opened up and their brain scrambled to get relief when people say crippling anxiety I don't think they necessarily understand crippling like willing to have your brain yeah scrambled with a random tool that's like a relief that's like an electric
toothbrush just to get any kind of relief i can't imagine because that's the thing i mean like i struggle with anxiety like now today but i can't imagine what it felt like back then when they didn't have an understanding of it oh yeah because nobody's understanding you're taking the time to know if you have a panic attack afterwards you're like oh my god like i i feel like i was just just completely out of control of my own body.
And to feel like that every single day, I can't imagine.
And to have people probably look at you like, oh, what's she going through?
Like, that's a burden.
Yeah, like, that's annoying.
I mean, you feel like a burden, you know?
Like, that's awful.
Of course. It's like a cycle.
So you can see why people were.
But at the same time, like you said, like, holy shit, people were, like, just lining up for this.
Oh, yeah, lining up for it.
And they were getting successes out of it, what they were deeming as successes And it didn't take long, though, until these perfect outcomes turned into bad outcomes.
For instance, one early patient who received the surgery to treat chronic depression was transformed into a chronic talker.
Oh, wow. Wow. Who would literally not stop speaking.
Like, could not control it.
Could not stop. Like, it was uncontrollable speaking and also became, like, obsessively compelled to spend hours every day rowing on the Potomac River, like, just rowing, rowing, rowing.
Another patient seen for treatment of her anxiety and obsessive -compulsive disorder came out of surgery, cured of her symptoms. But just a few weeks later, both her depression and compulsive behaviors returned, stronger and more disabling.
than they were before really so there was a mix of outcomes it's interesting how they're doing the same procedure on people but it's affecting them differently I think because it's so interesting it's not refined and it's not it's not the same procedure I'm sure you're not severing the same connections every time so you're getting different results this is a wildly erratic procedure right in and of itself because that's the thing so they're like you said they're going through the eyeball and they're they're not doing that yet he hasn't even made the transorbital lobotomy yet he's just drilling
Angus Moniz's lobotomy yeah so he can see where he's severing I mean he to an extent okay yeah okay but this is just the lobotomy okay the lobotomy in and of itself is absurd like it's just in wild but because he he hasn't even created the transorbital okay okay by the winter of 1937 Freeman and Watts had begun making the rounds on the lecture circuit at talking about their successes, the potential of the technique to eradicate mental illness.
But, and while some in the field were pretty receptive to the experiments and results, a lot of people in the fields of neurology and psychiatry were very skeptical and suggested that the positive results could just be as easily be as a result of surgical shock and the result of the procedure than would be of the procedure itself.
Which sounds like it was the case because at first they're like, oh wow, I'm cured.
And then a couple of weeks later, they start having all these other issues.
Freeman and Watts continued right on though in their work of psychosurgery, quote unquote.
And they were very confident that they were on the verge of a major advancement in this field.
So in the late 1930s, the medical and psychiatric fields were very split among the majority who believed that the mind, a nebulous concept referring just to like thought and cognition, That's what the mind is.
Could and should be treated as separate from the body.
And then there were those like Freeman and Watts who were convinced that medical science, not talk therapy, was the only way to address mental illness.
Now, the problem wasn't that one was right and one was wrong.
They were both right to some extent.
And both wrong to some extent.
Each side believed that they were right and the other one was wrong.
The only way. And that it was this, like, you know, issue, intersection here and impasse that created a lot of tension between skeptics and advocates of the prefrontal lobotomy and drove Freeman and Watts' work in the field.
Now, determined to prove their skeptics wrong, Freeman and Watts revisited some of the earlier cases in which the patient showed no signs of improvement.
And this wasn't really helping their argument that, like, it was working.
And in one case, there was a woman who was plagued with fears of germs and contamination, and the second surgery on her frontal lobes led to a very difficult recovery for her, and her thinking was confused and inattentive following the surgery.
In another case, it was a woman who had been struggling for years with suicidal ideation.
Her depression only got way worse after the second surgery, and she tried to end her life by setting herself on fire.
Oh, my God. After the second surgery.
So it's bad now. And it's like, now this should have been, I mean - Done.
Done. Move on. Something else has got to be done here.
Go back to your papers.
But no, by the end of the 1930s, the setbacks experienced by Freeman and Watts were compounded when their friend and colleague, Igas Moniz, was attacked in his office.
Now, remember, Igas Moniz created the lobotomy.
In 1939, he was attacked by a former patient who shot him four times.
It caused him to be paralyzed and he ended up having to use a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Wow. So like this is showing you you're ruining people's lives here.
Like you're not helping.
This is not helping.
You have a former patient coming to like express his not in a correct way, but this should tell you something.
Now Freeman and Watts experienced another major major setback in the summer of 1941 when a very infamous lobotomy was performed on a very well known family member, Rosemary Kennedy.
And it very much failed to produce the desired outcome and would eventually be remembered publicly as one of their, if not their greatest failures.
Oh man. And we will be getting into the lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy in part two because I really want to get into that one because it's pretty horrific I only know I would say like the baseline of that entire story and for what I do know is horrible so I can't imagine what we're gonna talk about did to her it really isn't what these people did to her it's because she was very young when she got her she's 23 yeah so we'll get into that look up I encourage you before you get to part two look up photos of Rosemary Kennedy what a fucking fucking cool chick she looks like.
There's a picture of her, like, smoking a cigar and she's wearing this, like, fedora and she's just, like, she's also a knockout.
She's stunning. Yeah.
Stunning beauty. And it's like, and she and everyone, obviously we'll get to it in part two, everyone who knew her in her personal life said she had one of the most likable personalities.
I remember hearing that.
And we'll talk about why she struggled.
And she had some issues.
Of course. Of course.
That should have been addressed and they did try to address.
I don't know if they did a great job.
Sounds like talk therapy would have been a better version.
I think she needed a mix of many things and they just didn't give her the proper thing.
But everyone who knew her in her personal life said like, yeah, she struggled.
She had some issues, you know.
Of course. She could be a little unpredictable because of her issues, but they said her personality was fucking top notch. Like teachers loved her.
People who knew her loved her.
like she was just a very likable human being and she was funny she had like a good sense of humor right and she was just like a badass like she was gonna be a cool chick they killed her without killing her oh 100 and as we'll see she knew what happened later and she yeah that's heartbreaking so we will get into that in part two because it's a pretty heavy part yeah but this is the beginning of walter freeman i've always been interested in lobotomies and like that whole i've been interested in his career.
It's interesting. It's horrifying.
It's like a nightmare to me.
So yeah, hopefully you guys are finding this as fascinating and horrifying as I did.
I find it super fascinating, especially just even what we've covered in part one.
So excited is not the word. I'm anxious to get to part two.
Part two is going to be rough.
So yeah. All right.
Well, with that being said, we do hope that you keep listening and we hope you keep it weird. But don't say that you perform lobotomies on people because guess what?
It It didn't work. Yikes.
No. Should have been stopped right in the beginning.
Yeah. Stop it right in its tracks.
Just go to therapy.
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