Episode 488: Walter Freeman Pt 2

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. What's the answer, and what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?

Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery. Plus. Hey weirdos, I'm ash.

I'm Elena and this is morbid.

Whoop, whoop with slurpy frogs. You'll get that at the end of the episode, but there's a dub-dub in the room today.

There's a dub-dub, say hi, hi.

I missed you this week. I missed you this week. It felt weird without you. It was very strange, and actually, I have a funny story related to it.

Because we took the fam to Storyland in New Hampshire. Except for me, well, Ash wouldn't go. I'm just kidding, I wouldn't go. We invited....

I told the kids you can't go to Storyland unless you have children, and TT doesn't have children. And what's scary is, you can, you can. I saw it.

Not me. But a really adorable thing happened where we took the girls to go meet Cinderella. And she was the prettiest, sweetest Cinderella I ever did see. And she had the perfect Cinderella voice, which is that pretty sing-song voice. She just was so...

I was like, I am immediately soothed by you. She was a fairy tale and she was so sweet. And she held their hands in the picture and they were just starstruck. And as we're walking away after taking the picture, she was like, Do I know you from somewhere?

And I was like, maybe? And she was like, I listen to you on the radio, and she was in full Cinderella character. Like, kept the sing-song, said the radio, the radio. And then she was like, she goes. I can't believe I'm meeting you right now.

And I go, I can't believe I'm meeting you right now. Cinderella, The kids probably shit themselves, they lost it that mama knows Cinderella. What's even better was she did a mic drop at the end because she was like, Have a beautiful day, Elena.

And I hadn't said my name, so the girls were like, Cinderella knows, Mom, Holy shit. They were like, what the fuck, losing their mind.

That's iconic one. You were awesome Cinderella. Hopefully you're listening Poor Winnow for Cinderella at Storyland. You're awesome.

You were an amazing Cinderella, you were beautiful, your voice is beautiful, you made the girls day. I saw a pic.

You're gorg, you also made my day. So Cinderella at Storyland from this week. You were great and I'm sorry I thought of it later.

I was like, Ooh, I should have said, I should have asked if you wanted to, like, take a picture or something or do something cool. But like, I didn't think of that. So I apologize because I was very hot and we had been at Storyland twice and that's like.

That's a lot of storyland for Elena. That's two more days that I wanted to be there.

We all know Elena hates amusement parks, but she pours one out for the kids. And you made it, like, really cool, and the girls were so happy, and that's all that counts.

I love that you were awesome and keep being awesome, keep it weird, keep it weird, just like Cinderella.

I just missed you while you were gone. Yeah, it's always weird. I don't know. I didn't really do much this week, I got a lot of wedding stuff done this week.

Well, that's good. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we had a very nice family time and we went with Deb-deb and her fam-Bam.

I know you guys are all so cute, so it was a nice little family time together. We love family time. you know, who didn't love family time?

The Kennedys, definitely not the Kennedys, and I was going to say, Walter Freeman, but you are correct, these Kennedys did not.

That's a joke, yeah, kidding, kidding. When we last you, we last you.

When we last you talked to, it's been a few days. I also am getting over that illness that started in part one. Oh shit, you were sick in part one. Now I'm at the end of that illness.

Because I wouldn't have been able to talk through this if we had done it all at once. I'm kind of glad you went away because I didn't end up getting it. Oh, knocking on wood. But when we left you in part one, we were right at the part where, well, we had seen Walter Freeman and his partner there. Watts kind of fuck up a lot of lobotomies.

Yeah, kind of. They were following the original lobotomy procedure, which is not to be confused with the transorbital lobotomy that he creates later. Two different things. But when we last left you, I was talking about how he ended up performing a very failed lobotomy on one. RosEmary Kennedy This is going to make me so sad.

And this was definitely one of his greatest failures by far, one of his greatest failures, most public, greatest failure, for sure. Did he ever speak on it? He considered it just like, Oops, okay, moving on.

Oopsie, Yep, it wasn't really wow, just off we go, yeah.

It's also like they could have owned his life. You would think, right? I mean, there's a lot with this. And I think the outcome was just something that was kind of shoved to the side a little bit. That's really sad.

And I don't think anybody was really looking to make a big fuss out of it. Because the whole reason it was done, as we'll go into it, was political aspirations. And someone seeming to get in the way of that, according to certain people, that's fucked up. So let's talk about, finally, Rosemary Kennedy's lobotomy, how it came to be.

And to do that, we need to start with what happened to get there. Because I don't know, I know just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this. So Rose Kennedy, not Rosemary Rose Kennedy, her mother sure went into labor on September 13th, 1918..

And Rose Kennedy and Joe Senior? They placed a call to their obstetrician and they were thinking the doctor was going to arrive pretty quickly from Boston. It wasn't going to be crazy, but at that time there was a pneumonia outbreak in Boston, so the doctor was actually detained.

He wasn't able to leave right away. Oh shit, yeah, 1918 Am I right? Yeah, you're right.

So he wasn't going to make it to the Kennedy's house before the baby actually entered the birth canal, like it was happening quick. So now, in 1918, we knew people knew that, like, you don't hold a baby in the birth canal. I would imagine that, like, we probably knew that even before we knew that. I mean, you'd be surprised.

But in 1918, it was well documented that, like, what the outcome would be from that, what kind of complications would arise from it? Like, very much known, like, right? We can't blame this on, like, oh, we didn't have the research kind of thing because we did.

So at the time, believing she was doing the right thing. A young nurse that was present for the birth ended up trying to hold Rose's legs closed to stop the baby from being born. Oh, and when that? I know everybody's making the same face in the room right now. Yep, everybody.

Because you would think that, like that could, like, kill the baby, right? That's bad in every way, that something can be bad for both mother and baby. Yeah, and it didn't work, because, as we know, when a baby is being born, a baby is being born.

You can't just cross your legs and stop it from happening. Oh my god. So that didn't work. So she reached into the birth canal and held the baby's head there and kept the baby in the birth canal for two hours, two hours.

Until the doctor arrived, Yes, I don't know, like, why did the doctor have to be there if the baby was already coming out anyways? no idea.

Like, what is the fucking logic there? I don't, I don't know, there isn't any, I do not know what.

And again, it was 1918.

It was very well established that stopping a baby who is moving forward down the birth canal would definitely result in some issues, like deprivation of oxygen. It could result in birth defects, brain damage, death, probably all manner of things.

And this is what happened with Rosemary. Rosemary was the baby, and they actually named her Rosemary, but they nicknamed her Rosemary. Oh, okay, now. To anybody who was around Rosemary or just saw Rosemary, she was just like all the other children around her.

You know, nothing outwardly wrong. But by the time she entered primary school, that's when they started seeing that there was some developmental disabilities, some cognitive impairments. Yeah, gee, I wonder why? And as she got older, Joe and Rose Kennedy, they tried to work with, like, you know, to try to make life easier for her. Try to make learning easier. They hired private tutors to help with school.

They also would go out with her, hire people to go out with her whenever she went into, like the community. And the older she got, though, the more difficult it was getting, and not just for them to, like, help her. But it was now becoming a political thing where they were not keeping up appearances. Because now, as she's getting older, it's becoming evident that something's going on. And for them, the primary issue was that Rosemary would go into what they described as fits.

What kid doesn't throw a fucking temper tantrum every now and again? Yeah, I mean, this was happening too, as she was getting older. And the fits that they are describing are not temper tantrums, they're seizures. Oh, she was having seizures, and apparently so. The author, Kate Clifford Larson, described them as seizures or episodes of mental illness. Quote unquote.

These would happen in public and this would embarrass her parents. Oh wow, how embarrassing it is that you had a fucking seizure. Are you kidding me exactly now? This whole story is sad from start to finish.

It really is because it didn't become a thing of like, you know, let me just comfort my child and show everybody that, like, you know, this happens to families all over everywhere that, like, you know, kids have to go through this. They could have been an example. Yeah, absolutely.

To show people like, you know, this is how you show love and affection, and, you know, support. For a child who is cognitively impaired, like, No, we're not going to do that, that's, it's annoying.

So now, at this point, like throughout much of the 20th century, mental illness and cognitive or developmental impairments were a cause of shame. And a lot of families would hide or just institutionalize their disabled family members. Instead of dealing with any of the quote unquote embarrassment or any social stigma that came from it. How funny is that they didn't want to deal with it, so they would just kind of lock them away, that's it.

Like, let's pretend they just don't exist, that's that's so sad. Imagine having a child, and like, you think about, like, how badly you wanted to have kids, yeah, and like, how hard it is for some people.

And then some people are just going to throw their kids in institutions well, and it's like, you like they, you're not a parent. They didn't ask to come into this world like you brought them in, right?

So take care of them like, that's your whole job, Yeah, your whole job is supposed to be. I brought you into this world, it's my job to take care of you and make it safe and make you safe.

Like, I'm your one protector, yeah, it's. It's awful. And to not not fulfill that responsibility that you bestowed upon yourself, and not only not fulfill it, but actively. Like, throw them in a cage, and, you know, throw away the key.

Right, it's like, damn, and it's like, just because of something they have no control over. And did not ask for and did not participating in creating that is just beyond, yeah.

And the thing is, this was also very difficult for the very devoutly Catholic Kennedy family. Because their church was actually a certain kind of church. That deemed disability the result of sin, and they viewed it as a punishment from God. That is literally so fucked up, it makes me so angry.

Yeah, you think that that is a result of sinning? Yeah, oh, fuck yourself, yeah.

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I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like, at my locker and she came up to me and she was like, stuttering, super bad. I'm like, stop around, She's like, I can't.

A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast, like doubling and tripling. And it's all these girls with a diagnosis. The state tried to keep on the down low.

Everybody thought I was holding something back. well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah.

It's hysteria, it's all in your head, it's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the Witches of Salem?

Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here, something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. you can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery+.

That's ridiculous, it's really awful. So, while Joe and Rose Kennedy refused to have their daughter at this time committed to an asylum or an institution of any sort. They weren't going to do the thing of throwing her away and locking up, you know, throwing away the key. As Rosemary got a little older. Rose said that she was having a little bit of trouble managing her daughter's behavior because it was becoming a little unpredictable. And, you know, as she gets older, it's harder to lay down that parent card.

And she was also having trouble just meeting her needs without help. So they were a very wealthy, very well-connected family. So they first sent her to various boarding schools, where they were hoping she could find some kind of structure. Get help in school, like have more focused learning in school, I see that thought process. But she was struggling to fit in.

She was struggling to meet the demands, but apparently people really liked her. Like, Rosemary was an unbelievably charismatic and likable person. And even though she was struggling academically and struggling a little to fit in and kind of like, find her place. She worked really hard to win the affection and approval of those around her, that was like something she really worked at.

And very much. She really wanted to make her parents proud, like it was clear that she just really wanted to win them over. Essentially, yeah, like, win their love, it sounds like.

And again, people around her loved her, They thought she was. Everyone said. Her personality was so likable, so charming. She was so charismatic. She was like a hot ticket, you know? Look at pictures of her.

She looks like a hot shit, yeah, and she is beautiful, like she is just like one of. She's like of that era, yeah.

She's what you think of, totally like, it's just like she's so cool and so things probably would have continued this way for Rosemary.

I think they probably would have just kept trying what they were trying, doing what they were doing, you know, I think it would have probably went okay. But then her father had political aspirations, and by 1938, Joe Kennedy Sr. had been named the ambassador to the Court of St.

James in Britain, which was a position that required him to present himself and his entire family to monarchy at Buckingham Palace. See, I think that if you want to present yourself, that's all well and fine. That's a lot to put on your family, yeah, especially kids, for a decision that you want to make.

That's tough, it's tough, you know what I mean? It's a lot to to live up to, yeah.

And it's a lot to expect of your entire family, it is clearly. But in order to prepare Rosemary for what was now going to be very intense scrutiny of the public. The Kennedys enrolled their daughter at the Belmont House, which was a Catholic boarding school that was run by nuns and favored hands-on learning. Over rote memorization, okay?

And according to Liz Lenz, who's an author, she said Quote Rosemary flourished under the guidance of the nuns and was training to become a teacher's aide. Wow, so she was thriving seriously. But then the Germans invaded Paris in 1940, and Joe and Rose pulled their daughter out of Belmont House and returned to the United States.

So again, she was on this road of like, if things just kept going the way they were going, we probably would have been okay. We wouldn't even be sitting here telling the story now. World War II may have prevented Rosemary from being thrust into the spotlight. But it didn't change the fact that the family, especially Joe Kennedy Sr. was seeing having an intellectually disabled daughter a problem.

That's such a wild school of thought, yeah. And he was searching now, not just to manage what Rosemary was going through, he was searching for a cure. He wanted these fits to stop.

I would love to believe in my heart of hearts that he's a father and was hoping to cure this for his daughter's sake as well. But there was definitely political ambitions at the forefront of this. Yeah, I don't think you can argue that, and this is when he so.

In his search, he was searching high and low for something, something that would cure this. He came across the work of Walter Freeman and James Watts. No, thank you. And this is when they were doing prefrontal lobotomies. And it was definitely still controversial in the medical community. But it was also gaining some traction a little bit in the press. As quote, a cure for the physically disabled and mentally ill. Now, return to start, pass go.

Yeah, don't go here, land in jail, stop. And by this time, Rosemary's what they were calling them. Outbursts and fits were becoming more and more common. She was struggling, like more frequent, too.

And now her behavior was kind of teetering, like she'd started sneaking out at night. She was just having fun. And the nuns were getting worried that she was going out to pick up men and would end up like, pregnant. Well, fucking live your damn life, all right?

Go crazy. With that being brought to the Kennedys, they were like, Okay, so Joe Kennedy brought up the procedure of the prefrontal lobotomy to his wife, Rose Kennedy. Rose was skeptical and she was like, I don't know about this.

And she asked her daughter Kathleen to find out more. She was like, Will you go find out for me? Like, I don't know anything about this, please? just like, Go tell me if this is real, okay?

And, according to Clifford Larson, Kathleen spoke to a journalist whose name is John White. I know him, yeah. And this John White guy had done some reporting on mental illness and treatments for the Washington Times Herald, and he had done a real deep dive into this.

So he told Kathleen that the results of the lobotomies were quote no good, and he said, Don't, no. Like I can tell you, through my research, people are ending up sometimes worse than they began. Don't do it. It seems like more often than not worse than they began.

And, you know? According to reports, Kathleen went back to her mother and said, Oh, no, mother, no, it's nothing we want done for Rosie. So she was like, No, this is not good. The results are not promising at all.

Don't do this, like, don't do this. So Rose was like, Okay, like, thanks for letting me know. But Joe went ahead and made the decision to have the surgery performed on Rosemary.

What so, like, went behind their backs, just went behind their backs. In fact, biographer Lawrence Leamer wrote, Joe liked to cut away at a problem and then move on.

I don't know if I would, just I don't know if Rosemary would be a problem. Yeah, like, I don't know if I would word it like that, sir.

Because also, I'm like, that is the most to cut away at a problem. If you're considering Rosemary, the problem, that's exactly what you're doing, cutting away and then moving on. Yeah, seriously.

Now, after checking into George Washington University Hospital, Rosemary was evaluated by Walter Freeman and Watts, and they diagnosed her with agitated depression. What? And I was like, I don't know if that's it, my guys.

No, and they both said, Oh, what's great is that this is easily treatable. With a prefrontal lobotomy. It sounds like you could have a fucking case of the sniffles and be like, Oh my God, you know, we can fix this prefrontal lobotomy.

Now, based on that initial evaluation, Joe Kennedy Sr. approved the surgery. Without telling his wife or explaining to Rosemary what was happening. They didn't tell her what was happening. She was 23 years old, and they did not tell her what was happening. Oh my God.

And it was just after that initial evaluation. They took a peek at her, said she's got agitated depression. We can probably cut into her skull and scramble around her front lobes a little bit and I think it'll work. What even is that? And he was like, sign her up.

Oh my God. And knowing he knew nothing about it, it sounds like, and also it doesn't sound like Kathleen. he, like, listened to what Kathleen said.

Yeah, also, this was the same day they did the initial evaluation. Quote, unquote, he said. Go right ahead.

Later that day, Rosemary was given an anesthetic to numb her brain. She was strapped to a table. Oh my god, Watts drilled two holes into her skull. Oh my God.

And used the leucotome to sever the connections in her frontal lobes. While they were doing this, they had Rosemary recite poetry to indicate that she was, that everything was going on, which also she loves poetry, loved poetry and was very good at poetry. So she was reciting it while they're drilling into her skull. That is like a scene in a movie that would make you start bawling your eyes out.

Isn't that macabre? Yes, like that is macabre all of that, like thinking about that, Oh my god.

This young, beautiful, vivacious, but struggling young woman reciting poetry as they sever her brain connections and sever her prefrontal lobe connections. Oh my God, that her father consented to.

And was he in the room, like, just there? I have no idea. Oh my God, now, how do you do that to your child? Yeah, I don't know.

And it's like, how did he even have the right to do that? When she's 23 years old, I'm assuming there was something, I mean, this is way back, yeah, there's no rights back then. Something to do with what she was struggling with that they just assumed that it was his decision to make.

It's like giving me anxiety. And I don't know if this was in the time where. Like, you know, he's the father, yeah, like he makes all the decisions, he's the man of the house, right?

But again, he had approved this whole thing based on the fact that Freeman and Watts had assured him. This was going to solve all of Rosemary's problems. Or at the very least, they claimed it'll make her docile and more manageable.

That's the other thing that's also such a that's so haunting, that's haunting, like, Yeah, Docile, that's one way to put it.

And you know what the surgery did do that, I would say, but don't you think, or wouldn't you think that you would want to see cases of like their patients that it's worked on? I would want to see for my own eyes those people before I ever. I mean, I can't imagine putting my loved one in that position.

No, but before you ever did that, I would want like concrete physical proof in front of me, and he didn't even have that. And remember, they were kind of like over-inflating their results there. Like they would follow these people for like a minute and a half. And then be like, Well, it looks good to me.

And then all these issues would crop up and they wouldn't even report it. Wow, so it did put to an end her explosive outbursts, and, you know, the seemingly difficult behavior that they were dealing with. It also rendered her unable to speak and unable to move. She became paralyzed.

After months of therapy, she regained the partial ability to walk. Oh my God, but one leg was turned in significantly and never was the same. Oh my God, did he ever like, speak publicly about this?

This was one of those things that was just like, Man, that's that, that's a fucking stain on your life, my dude. And so it took also months for her to regain the ability to speak. And when it was, it was, quote, a mix of garbled sounds and words, Oh my God.

So she could barely even, and like, right up until the point that they did this to her. She's just reciting poetry, poetry, and then and now she can't even speak.

It's like she's locked in her own body, like, I'm sure those outbursts were still happening in her mind. Oh yeah, she just had no way of, she just couldn't outwardly do it.

Oh my God. So they put her in a prison of her own mind. Yeah, absolutely, how fucking dark now. Once she was deemed stable, Joe sent her to Craig House, which is a psychiatric facility.

And then she was transferred to St. Coletta's, which was a residential facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, and she lived at that facility until her death in 2005..

For six decades, she lived at that facility, in a facility in her. She's a Kennedy. Joe never visited her.

He died never visiting her. Fuck that guy, yeah, fuck that guy. And following the whole the surgery, Joe was very cagey about where his daughter had gone.

He was very fuck him. But Rose and Rosemary lived at. In fact, it was 20 years before she saw any family member. no one went to see her for 20 years, 20 years.

20 years She lived at St Coletta's for 20 years before any of her family members found out where she was or went to see her. So most of her family didn't even know where she was. He wouldn't even tell them.

He just wouldn't even tell all to be a fucking political leader. And it was only after Joe's death in 1961 that Rose Kennedy learned where her daughter was. She never knew where she was. He never told her he wouldn't tell her that man is a monster.

And he went to, yep, and she went to see him, her after 20 years of not seeing her. And when Rosemary saw her mother for the first time in 20 years, she ran towards her. And I guess, like, Rose held out her arms, because she's thinking she's running into my arms. And all. The nuns there immediately went to stop her because they knew she ran at her mom and started pounding on her chest and screaming. They said she was shrieking at her.

And they said, after 20 years and a fucking lobotomy, she remembered that her mother was not there to take care of her when she needed it. Oh my, this is. This is a gut-wrenching story. There's a I'm just trying to find, there's a People Magazine article which I'll link in. The show notes. That tells you the story of when Rose saw her for the first time. And that's where it came out. Like, you know that after 20 years and a lobotomy, she still remembered that she wasn't there when she needed her.

How could you ever do that to your child? Yeah, and I guess there were after that, it was she. Still, she still knew what it like, you know, there was still anger there. Of course, they ruined her fucking life. She would bring her to, like, you know, to the cape and stuff.

Rose would bring her to the cape, Rose would bring her into the to the house and everything and try to, like, you know, be a part of her life at that point. But it's like, Oof, too, a little too late. And in that same article, I think there's a story about, I think. The Rose going swimming and wanting her to come in, and Rosemary, just like, wouldn't even look at her.

And like, the nuns were like, She, Yeah, it's like, you know, she was abandoned. Yeah, she like, I don't know what you expect here, I mean. And I guess Rose was quoted as saying, like, Rosie, what did we do to you?

Oh God, and it's like, Oof. So you have to look at it from the perspective of a man made the decisions for his family back then. And who knows, like you said, he probably never told her where Rosemary was.

The whole thing is awful, so then you have to feel like Rose was robbed of her child. Yeah, oh my god, it's a horrific story.

Nobody won here, no one won, and it's like, neither did you, Jo. Yeah, because now you're going down in history as somebody that lobotomized and threw away your fucking child.

Yeah, and years later, I guess somebody Lawrence Leamer, who I mentioned earlier, was doing research for his biography on the Kennedy family. And he ended up meeting a server at a Nashville pancake restaurant who said that she was actually there. And an attending nurse during Rosemary's surgery, what? And it said quote The nurse was so horrified by what she saw happening that she left nursing and never returned to the profession.

Wow, she was a waitress at a pancake house. I believe that, yeah, now. In 1941, when Walter Freeman and James Watts just cavalierly recommended, Rosemary undergo a fucking lobotomy by just looking at her.

Just later that day, Oh yeah, we have room in our schedule. They had no research or evidence to say that that was going to solve her problem, but they claimed it because they wanted that name.

Yeah, they wanted to say we did the lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy, and they figured, let's roll the dice. If it turns out in our favor, then we win. If it doesn't, they'll lock her away.

So who gives a shit? Oh my god, just to experiment on human life like this is beyond sickening. Yeah, I probably said, beyond. A total of like 52 times at this point, but.

It's crazy. And they were medical professionals, obviously, which is insane, but they had spent all their time in labs and lecture halls. Neither one of them had a lot of surgical experience to begin with.

Right?

And now they have a growing body of evidence that's really showing that this is not a good surgery. But they still went ahead with it, and when it went terribly fucking wrong, they just brushed it off and went ahead totally undeterred. And they just kept doing them, yeah.

Oh no, well, now they were like, Hmm, this is when they went transorbital. Because if there was any trait that Walter definitely demonstrated throughout his entire life from very young, it was impatience. This man had no fucking patience for anything.

Yeah, you seem to say that in part one, and we know that doing things quick and doing them right are not always the same thing. No, those are actually two very different things. He was always looking for the quickest way out, and, in fact, one of his biggest issues. With psychoanalysis as a treatment for chronic illness, like, you know, talk therapy and cognitive therapy, it was that the process could take years or even decades to show progress.

He didn't like how slow it was. I want it done now. Which, in one sense, you're like, Okay, I understand, wanting to find something to add to, you know, psychoanalysis, you know, quote unquote. That can maybe speed it up in a healthy way, right? Like something that can lead it along hand in hand with that.

You know, that's always a good thing is to make people's suffering lessen. Quicker, of course, like, definitely, but you shouldn't just be looking for the quickest thing.

You should be looking for something that in, you know, in tandem with what's going on. And so that's what bothered him the most. And while he believed the prefrontal lobotomy was definitely the solution to many of society's like issues, he was growing kind of frustrated with the fact that this procedure was being limited a bit because they needed trained neurosurgeons to do it. And there was long recovery times due to, you know, the fucking head trauma that he would sustain during the surgery. Drilling a hole in your skull might take a second to heal.

So, in the years after Rosemary Kennedy's absolute disaster of a lobotomy, he shifted a lot of his attention to adjusting the procedure. So it could be done quickly and by trained medical practitioners, without the need of a hospital or long recovery times. Have your lobotomy not in a hospital? Yeah, have your lobotomy on your lunch break. Can I ask you a quick question? Yes.

So when you drill a hole into the skull, I know like, sometimes bone can kind of like regrow itself, right? Mm-hmm. But does that happen on your skull? Do you know it can fuse back together?

So with the regular lobotomy, as well as the transorbital lobotomy. They're kind of like drilling holes in the skull, right? So they're not taking like a big chunk out of the skull. It's like drilling a hole so that you just leave like, it's that will.

I'm not sure what happens to that. I'm sure a lot of the issues that happened after that probably did stem from that. But yeah, I don't think the entire thing was very well thought out from start to finish, to be honest. You're just walking around with a hole drilled in your skull, yeah.

That seems like it could be an issue. Like, wouldn't you think that it would bleed? Or like, you know what I mean, like? And then you would get like, blood on the brain? Or, yeah, like, there's a whole host of issues that come from this, for sure.

You just try to picture it in your head and you're like, what? and you're like, I don't understand this at all. Last time it gave me a headache. I went home with a headache because I thought way too much about, like my brain being injured. Drilling holes in your brain.

Yeah, yeah, well, to find a solution to this like slowness, that Walter Freeman was not digging, he turned to the work of Amaro. And I think it's Fiamberti, it's very Italian, sounds very pretty with an Italian accent.

He was an Italian psychiatrist who also shared Freeman's enthusiasm for quick fix solutions to the problem of mental illness. I don't understand how in a medical profession, you're like, Yeah, quick fix solution, yeah, totally, that'll work.

Now, a few years earlier than this, Fiamberti had successfully found a way around. The need to drill into the top or side of the skull by accessing the frontal lobes through the orbital socket. Oh, no, no, no. It basically would be inserting a guide needle into the space between the eyeball and the wall of the eye socket. No, and it's the one that's like, next to the bridge of your nose.

Nope, so the inside. And Fiamberti was able to quickly and easily penetrate the. It's a very thin sheet of bone that separates the eye socket from the brain cavity. You gotta go. And once the frontal lobe was now accessible, the guide needle was removed and the leucotome was inserted where that was to sever the connections.

The procedure was very quick and the side effects were minimal. I guess. Question mark, question mark, question mark. Typically, they included like headaches, yeah, a black eye.

Eye aches, maybe a fever, every now and then. But best of all, at least from Walter Freeman's perspective, was it was quick, it was simple, could be performed in a doctor's office.

Patient could leave a short time after they got discharged that same day. At least for the most part. What the actual fuck, yeah?

Oh yeah, I'm just going to be a little late to work today because I have a lobotomy scheduled for this morning. But I'm still going to make it in. But I'll make it. Yeah, don't worry about it.

What the fuck, dude? And honestly, in 2023, with the way that work is. If you were like, I have a lobotomy scheduled at noon, they'd be like, you better be here for the end of the fucking day, or you're fired. Like, you know, at least here where we are, America, America.

Yeah.

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But the thing is, here's the thing, so that sounds like, whoa, Fiamberti, like, What are you doing? like, Holy shit, dude, but Fiamberti, he'd only done it a handful of times.

And he got bad results, you don't say. He concluded that the risks of this procedure vastly outweighed the benefits. Okay, good. So he was like, No, we tried, it didn't work.

Moving on. But Walter was like, I don't know. I think the one thing that it's missing is me. Oh yeah, that's what everything in life is missing.

I think Fiamberti didn't do it right, but I think me. With my skilled hand and my genius and my confidence, I think it could be a revolutionary process. I don't understand how this motherfucker looked in the mirror and was like, Yeah, I'm a good guy. Yeah, I think he was like, I got this.

Sounds like a narcissist to me. He was like, you know what, the problem with Fiamberti's technique is Fiamberti and not Walter Freeman. So he was like, I think this will forever change mental on this procedures, like, I think I can do this.

I think it did, but not in the way he hoped. So he reasoned that Fiamberti's bad results were because, quote, probably because Fiamberti's patients needed more. That's all. How do you even know that you don't ask questions?

Don't worry about it. How do you know that? He just knows that? Why are you asking Walter Freeman questions? He's telling you things?

That's so nuts. Why do you need to know? But he also believed that one of the problems with the procedure as it had been performed. And this is where people probably know the transorbital lobotomy by another name. And we'll get to it right in a minute. But he thought that was the issue that, you know, Fiamberti was doing it, and not him. And the second issue was that the procedure, as it had been performed, was it needed instruments, that it was using, instruments that weren't sturdy enough.

In his opinion, is this where the ice pack comes in? And that they had a tendency to bend or break and he took the lead. So he was like, you know what, we need something that is, you know, slender, sharp, tough, something that's not going to bend, not going to break.

And he found that instrument at home, in a kitchen drawer, in the form of the Uline Ice Company's ice pick. Why the fuck he had that in his kitchen drawer? Yeah, what the hell is Walter doing with an ice pick? Just, you know, ice picks, you know, you pick an ice, I guess.

Deeply upsetting, yeah.

So Freeman wasted. So again, that's as Ash said. Before. You probably know the transorbital lobotomy, you've probably heard it called an ice pick lobotomy. Oh my God, that is why it's called an ice pick lobotomy, because he literally started it with an ice pick. Oh my God.

So he wasted no time perfecting his new technique over the course of several weeks. And on January 17th, 1946, he tested out the procedure on a real-life person on 29-year-old housewife Sally Ellen. LANESCO Oh, no. Like many of his other patients, she had a very long history of struggles with depression, anxiety. She was also dealing with a lot of manic behavior and violent behavior.

She was having bouts of violence, and in these bouts of violence, she would strike her daughter. Oh, no, so, having run out of any other options. Sally's husband brought her to see Freeman, who quickly suggested this new technique, and the couple, together, did agree to do it.

And he had told this couple that it had been done in Italy a few times and it was very quick, easy, low risk. Now, remember? Meanwhile, Fiamberti stopped doing it because of how awful the outcomes were, because it wasn't working now. After agreeing to the surgery, he brought Sally into a private room.

She was rendered unconscious, and the way they did that was using an electroconvulsive machine to render you unconscious. I'm sorry, what exactly what it sounds like while this happened, and Ash is, like, speechless.

I have no words at this point. While this happened, a nurse would hold towels under the patient's nose and mouth to collect any mucus or other fluids that would flow out of your orifices. While this happens, Walter then peeled back Sally's eyelid, inserted the ice pick into the orbital socket, gave it a few tap, tap. Gentle taps with a hammer to break through the bone plate. And once he had broken through, he quote unquote wiggled the ice pick about to sever the frontal lobes.

He has no idea what he's doing, just wiggling it about. You think about how they can use cameras now to go in your body. There are surgeons now that can operate on fetuses in Utero on a screen, they are doing brain surgery and heart surgery on fetuses in Utero.

I mean, that is remarkable. We're a magic species at that point. But he didn't have a camera, he didn't even have a fucking camera. How do you know what you're doing?

You're just going in there and wiggling it about quote unquote like that is not a medical procedure. You are, you are like a Frankenstein doctor. He's fucking around and finding out that's all he's doing.

No, the problem is, he's not finding out that's the thing. he's just fucking around. oh no, he's finding out he's just not sharing.

That's all he's finding out, though. Oh my God, he knew all these, these results, he just wasn't sharing them.

That's all, he's such a douchebag now. As Sally was regaining consciousness, it appeared that the operation had been a failure because she could not speak immediately after the procedure and she needed assistance walking. How do you do this to people? But then, in the days and weeks that followed, Sally was showing what they referred to as slow progress.

She regained the ability to walk and talk, and she never experienced any of the symptoms that had led them to coming into Freeman's office. Okay, yeah, her daughter Angeline said. QuoTe It felt like he had given me a tremendous gift to give my mother back to me. Aw.

And after monitoring Sally's progress for several weeks, Walter happily reported that his patient was now enjoying good health. And in 2008, her daughter said she changed that quote from her the. It felt like he had given me a tremendous gift to give my mother back to me. That was in 2008. Wow, okay.

So it did work. So he looked at this as irrefutable evidence that this is successful across the board. It's going to help everyone. That's just a one-off, my guy now. After conducting just a few procedures, he concluded that his technique was safe enough to operate on both sides of the brain in the same day. And decided to do so with his fourth patient.

Can I ask you? I don't know if you'll have an answer. Do you have any idea why it would have worked? Maybe he just didn't shever a connection. Do you think that could have been it? I think it's literally just luck, yeah.

I truly do, and I don't know, I mean, I'm going to listen to Angeline here and say her mother was a functioning person and was cured. But, like other results that they looked at as desirable, I guess could have been that that person just became docile and manageable, right?

That's the thing, but I'm going to listen to Angeline here. If she says her mother was back, her mother was back. I think the problem with the lobotomy is it's just a fucking crapshoot. It's literally like, there's no way that you can sit there and tell me you're doing it right every time.

No, and as we'll see, he became a lot more unhinged as he went. It sounds like it is there any possible way that he could have put the ice pick in a part of the brain where there were not connections, and maybe that's why it worked, because no connections were severed.

I mean, who knows? I mean, your brain is such an intricate and complex organ, right? It would be hard not to hit something of importance with that thing. But who knows? I mean, stranger things have happened, you know?

But he decided now that he was going to operate on both sides of the brain in the same day, and he used his fourth patient. So he's done three that he's considered successful, so like three, and you decide to make that big of a move. Yeah, it's like, that is not a case study, my guy.

This is not tic-tac-toe, my sir. So the fourth one, his name was David Berman. And unfortunately, Walter never got to operate on the second side of the brain to test his theory. Because Berman began hemorrhaging because Freeman accidentally punctured a blood vessel in his brain. Oh my God, did he die?

I want you to picture him. Hemorrhaging was probably the most horrifying thing ever. Now he was sent home after this partial lobotomy, and he ended up writing in his notes that this man recovered fairly well.

Now he wrote that in his notes. He recovered fairly well. Doubt it. Berman suffered from seizures and partial paralysis as a result of this fuck-up for the rest of his life, he struggled for the rest of his life.

This man is the OG Dr. Death truly like, Wow, it's crazy that you don't really hear more about him.

That's why I wanted to do this. Because if you say the name Walter Freeman a lot of times, it's like, I don't know who that is. Yeah, and it's like, he did a load of shit. Clearly he was a bad guy.

Like, this is a bad, bad situation, you literally hit someone's blood vessel in their brain and say they recovered fairly well. Oh, it's going to get worse, my friend. after they hemorrhage on your table, it's going to get worse, my friend.

Oh wow. So of course he's not going to be deterred by this failure. He had to have killed someone. Freeman and Watts just charged ahead, they just went right ahead with it.

And this was supposed to be something that was a last resort. Initially. When Fiamberti made it, created it, he was touting it as it was conceived as a last resort for the most impaired. Like, this is your end of the road Hail Mary thing. Last ditch effort. And he saw it wasn't working, so he was like, this can't even be your last resort.

Right, they're doing it now, not as that, but as a quick fix for everything. They even did it for nervous indigestion, oh my God, and suicidal thoughts, hysterical paralysis, they called it.

Anything on the spectrum of illness, especially mental illness, they would recommend a prefrontal or transorbital lobotomy, but even indigestion. Yeah, wow. And it's crazy because some people in the medical field at this point were starting to kind of come around to their theories because they were having some successes.

So they're looking at it, some of them as like, you know, we judge this a little bit, and I think it can be something we're looking at. They were thinking like, there's something here, there's something here that maybe we can jump off. I don't know, yeah.

A lot remained skeptical, and they were warning that there was risks that were just inherent to this procedure that you really couldn't work around. And in December of 1947, for example, Swedish psychiatrist psychiatrist Dr. Gusta Rylander addressed a conference of over 700 doctors. And said, Although he had used the technique to some effect, he thought it was a very risky approach to any kind of illness. And he said, quote Because of the personality deterioration that might occur. So he's saying, Yeah, sure, you might fix some of the issues that this person came in with, but they're going to become a docile zombie.

Yeah, potentially a hundred percent. And like, this just isn't worth it to, like, destroy someone's personality and ability to do basic motor functions. Just to get them away from whatever they're struggling with, like, we can do better here.

A hundred percent now, despite Dr. Rylander's insistence that this lobotomy should really only be relied on in extreme cases, the most extreme. Walter Freeman forged ahead and he said, You know what? I'm going to keep doing it to literally anyone that shows up in my office, regardless of age. By the end of the 1940s, Freeman and Watts were performing dozens of lobotomies each week, sometimes on kids as young as four or five years old. No.

No, yep, yep. And to Walter, this growing popularity and people flocking to him was just a sign that he was doing something right and he was a success. You feel so bad for these people because they don't know any better.

They're thinking this is going to cure everything I've ever gone through because you're budging results. And there's no like Yelp back then, no, or any kind of peer review.

But, interestingly, by 1950, James Watts, his partner there, was becoming a little disturbed by the frequency with which people were turning to lobotomy. And he was like, Wait a second, like, I think this is too much, we're overdoing it like this should be only in extreme cases, like we shouldn't be doing this to fucking four-year-olds.

How do you put a four-year-old on that table and shove a fucking ice pick in their eye into their brain? Oh my God. And then, I mean, you think about ruining the rest of somebody's life in general, That's horrific. You think of doing it at four and like, 80 years at least ahead of them.

That are just fucking horrible, a trauma that they're going to have to deal with, oh my god. So only one of them had real surgical training, and that was James Watts, okay?

And he took his role as the surgeon in the two very seriously, and they often clashed over what he considered to be. Walter Freeman's very cavalier attitude about cutting into a person's fucking brain, Yeah, I think that you could be cavalier about certain things in life, but cutting into a person's brain not so much. No, and Watts was getting a little frustrated by that, and he was like, This is a little weird, man. Gee, I wonder why?

And Watts frustrations dated back to 1946, when he entered their shared office one day and found Walter standing before a patient with two ice picks sticking out of their eye sockets.

Casually, he looked at Watts and said, Jim, can you come here and hold the picks while I take a photo? What? That's when Watts turned and left the room. And they never shared an office again, but they continued to work together. But that was in their shared office that he walked into the shared office, and that was what was happening.

He was like, I would like my own office now, I would like my own country now. Bye, so I can move to it and never see your ass again. Yeah, that's how I would feel. But by 1950, he was even more disgusted by Walter's obsession with what he deemed quote a brain damaging operation, and they ended up parting ways in 1950..

He turned into a madman. Yep, so, but it was 1946 that he walked in and saw that, like him, standing in front of a patient with two fucking ice picks sticking out of their eyes and wanting him to hold them to take a photo, how disgusting. And by 1950, he was like, Fuck you.

And he ended up, Watts described it. But in 1950, he was like, I see it as a brain damaging operation. I'm surprised it took four more years after that, me too, but at least it happened, you know? But this didn't slow down Walter's enthusiasm about the surgery.

I had a feeling you were going to say that, yeah. His most productive period, in fact, was between 1949 and 1952 because he got bald. A span where thousands of transorbital lobotomies were performed across the country. Oh my God.

In fact, during a two week period in 1952, he visited a hospital in West Virginia, and he performed in two weeks 228 lobotomies. There's no way in a two week period, there's no way you could. Even if it was a procedure, that was like a helpful procedure, yeah.

Performing that, many No. You would have to be exhausted by the end of that, of course, and like losing your skill set as you're going through it, I would think.

Well, what's worse, exactly, and what's worse is he's kind of becoming like a celebrity at this point and that's going to his head. And now he had taken to performing lobotomies for audiences. No, that's that is just beyond fucked. And he would then. Now he's going into, like, shock jock territory, where he would like to quote, shock his audience of doctors and nurses by performing two handed lobotomies. Hammering ice picks into both eyes at once.

I'm sorry, is this the fucking circus? my guy? Yup, sure is. I mean, yeah, the circus is fucked up in and of itself. So, and that's from NPR in 2005, that quote. But yeah, he would literally two ice picks, one in each eye socket, at once.

Now, why would you even want to go see that? I don't know. But despite his enthusiasm, by the mid to late 1950s. A growing awareness of the major risks associated with lobotomies and the wide release of medications like chlorpromazine, I think, or thorazine.

Sure led to a pretty dramatic decline in the public's interest and reliance on this procedure. And, aware of this, that it was declining in popularity and also gaining a reputation for being a little barbaric, a little.

Now, Walter began promoting the transorbital lobotomy as a cure for problems other than those related to mental health. Of course, so, a lot of so. Among those was the growing number of men who were publicly identifying as or being outed and or arrested for being homosexual. Many of whom were committed by their own families or the courts for their quote unquote behavior.

I have to go. This shit makes me so fucking angry and this is really going to get you right now, because this was like, so angering to hear. Oh, no. By some estimates, and this is from 2023, up to 40 of Freeman's patients were gay men operated on to change their sexual orientation.

Yeah, fun fact, you're not going to do that up to 40, wow, now. As understandings of mental illness and emotional health started to change in the 1960s, becoming a little more compassionate, a little more nuanced, at least slightly, especially from the 1950s.

Walter was growing increasingly desperate to remain relevant and didn't want to turn away any patient, regardless of any symptoms or claims. He just wanted to keep doing them. And it's like, it shouldn't be about you, it should be about your patients, which clearly it never was. And this is when Lou Dully brought her 12-year-old stepson, Howard Dully, to see Walter Freeman in the fall of 1960..

She described his issues as being a major source of trouble for the family. And honestly, when you hear what they were, you're like, So he's just like a 12-year-old, what were they? She said. He objects to going to bed, but then sleeps well. Are you kidding me?

Is that not every child in the fucking world? He does a good deal of daydreaming, and when asked about it, he says, I don't know, yeah, me too. Still, he turns the room's lights on when there's broad sunlight outside. This woman is a cunt.

Those are the reasons that she wanted a transorbital lobotomy for her 12-year-old stepson. So what you're telling me is that she didn't like her stepson? So she was like, he's annoying me. Worst stepmom in history. Okay, okay.

We can drill an ice pick into his brain if you want. Like, Okay, Meredith Blake. And she was like, That sounds great, Christ. And four days later, Howard was delivered to Freeman's office without being told what was going to happen.

Oh my God, where was his dad? Where was his mom? Yeah, now, looking back on it, Howard believes his stepmother because he didn't live through it, luckily.

Oh God. He believes his stepmother had never wanted children and resented him for reasons he'll never understand. Yeah, it sounds that way, he said. Quote in 2005 He told NPR My stepmother hated me. I never understood why, but it was clear she'd do anything to get rid of me.

Here's an idea that woman should be in prison for the rest of her fucking life. Like, if you don't want children, don't have them, or don't marry somebody that has them, that seems simple. This is what's even wilder.

She Lou Dully had taken Howard to several other doctors before Walter Freeman, and they all told her nothing is wrong with Howard. And many of them told her it might be more of quote a stepmother problem. Yeah, sounds like it. Yeah, wow.

Now I hate her.

Looking into Freeman's archives at the George Washington University Library reveals a lot about Howard's surgery. I mean, it's reckless, to say the least. It said Mrs Dully came in for a talk about Howard.

He wrote in his clinical notes Things have gotten much worse and she can barely endure it. I explained to Mrs Dully that the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard's personality by means of transorbital lobotomy. Changing his personality, not curing him of anything, just changing him. Let's change this kid.

Now the procedure was done and it failed at changing Howard's personality. So Lou Dully turned to more extreme measures and convinced her husband to give up his parental rights. What? and made Howard a ward of the state? What?

Yeah, I'm sorry, what the fuck is wrong with the dad there? So oh, there's, yeah, fuck both of them. Because now, like this woman just hates her stepson. Didn't want kids married a man with kids which like, What the fuck is your problem? Like, you knew what you were getting into, bitch?

Right, decided to get him a transorbital lobotomy, just to see if it would fucking ruin his personality and make him a zombie. Because she wanted to throw him away, when it didn't, she convinced his father to just abandon him.

Yep, I don't even know what to say to that. And this left him obviously deeply traumatized, I mean, abandonment and the lobotomy. They shoved ice picks into his eyeballs, yeah.

He told NPR It took me years to get my life together. Oh, howard. Through it all, I've been haunted by questions, Did I do something to deserve this? No.

Can I ever be normal? Yes, and most of all, why did my dad let this happen? Why did your dad let this happen? Some people should.

I have chills, my whole body hurts for this child. I don't understand why people don't realize you don't have to have kids exactly if you don't want kids. If you are thinking that you could possibly give up your fucking child like rights to your child when they're 12..

At 12 year olds, Jesus, I don't mean give them up for adoption. no, just to be clear, at 12 years old.

Oh my God, to just abandon your child because he's a nuisance to the new lady you married. I mean, you're a fucked up individual. Get a fucking grip, my guy and this woman.

What the fuck is wrong with you? You fucking monster? Yeah, lou. what? lou dully, Lou dully. you're a fucking dull bitch.

Like, I spit on you, yeah, you shouldn't even deserve our spit. So, luckily, Walter Freeman performed his last transorbital lobotomy in February of 1967 on a long-term patient of his, Helen Mortensen. What do you mean, long-term patient?

She had just been a patient of his several times. He had been multiple lobotomies. Oh wow. The procedure was the third lobotomy that he had actually performed on Mortensen.

What? And unluckily, this is very sad. It resulted in her death from a brain hemorrhage when Freeman nicked an artery. Is that the only person he killed? So when I said, luckily he performed his last one, I mean, like, thankfully, he was never allowed to do one again, right?

But it is horrific how this ended.

So sorry, I'm like, Are you all right? No, my brain is like on another level. So he never killed anybody before that, no.

That's at least on the books. Yeah, like this was the. That's shocking, yeah, he only killed one person now....

I mean, tragic, like the fact that she had to die, that's horrible. oh, it's horrific, yeah.

And that she was a long-time patient, she was obviously struggling to go through more than one. And it's like, that's how you end hemorrhaging from a nicked artery in your brain. Oh my God now. The accident resulted in Freeman being banned from operating on anyone in the state of California.

Bye, bitch. And honestly, that's like, it's kind of wild that that was the only consequence.

And only in California. Yeah, like, obviously, I know there's, and he really didn't have a lot of, like, formal surgical training, that's the other thing.

Like the fact that this was the first one. Wow, like just shoving ice picks into people's brains, willy-nilly, like, that's really wild, those odds right there, truly.

But he?

So he lost his ability to perform the procedure that he had invented and advocated on for decades. And he officially retired. And spent the next several years traveling around the country conducting follow-up studies on his former patients. Until he died from cancer on May 31st, 1972. Now, over the course of his decades-long career, he conducted approximately 3,500 lobotomies. Holy shit.

Three-quarters of those were transorbital or ice-pick lobotomies, so most of them, nearly 500 of those, resulted eventually in the death of the patient. And that's according to Hugh Kay, and that's from 2023. The Dark History of Gay Men, Lobotomies and Walter Jackson Freeman.

Wow.

So 500 people eventually died of whatever injuries they sustained from it. I think with his last one with Helen, it was more of an immediate thing that caused him to lose his license, right? Well. Some of Freeman's patients, likely those that were operated on the more surgically inclined James Watts, I would think, did feel their lives were improved by the procedure. Wow.

The reality was that the results varied so widely. I mean, it hit all spectra. It was literally like playing roulette. Yeah, it was just, you see what happens.

Right, like there was no rhyme or reason to it. So that's not a good procedure, that's not a good procedure when you're literally just rolling a dice and it can land any way. Who would sign up for that, knowing those odds?

Exactly, and he was also reckless. absolutely, he was reckless with it, and he was egotistical.

Yeah, and he just wanted it done quick, that's the thing. He never put forth the real effort that should have gone into creating a procedure like this, because maybe had he actually put effort in, he could have figured something out.

And something in there in the beginning wanted to make a good difference. He just lost it along the way he was suffering from. People wanted to cure mental illness, wanted to take this away.

It just got lost in ego, I was going to say in himself, yeah, and just in impatience. The need for celebrity.

Fame, Yeah, exactly, fame. And just there was a lot that really just it tampered down any of that good that was in there. To begin with, I do believe there was some good in the beginning, that good intentions.

Absolutely, that just were completely washed away throughout this, and it's really sad to see that somebody could turn into that. This is one of the most tragic cases, yeah.

Ever, and luckily, the transorbital lobotomy definitely faded out over the course of the 60s and the 70s, and was considered pretty obsolete by the 1980s. But still, neurosurgeon and author Dr. Henry Marsh cautions against judging men like Walter Freeman.

Too harshly, he says. Quote. Their theory was based on this terribly crude, simplistic view of the brain, that the brain was a simple mechanism. And you could just sort of stick things into it, he wrote. And reflecting on the history of the now unthinkable practice of lobotomy, Marsh said This business of dividing doctors into heroes and villains is wrong. The generation of surgeons who trained me had, I wouldn't say, godlike powers, but they had enormous authority.

Nobody questioned them or queried them. And I can think of some of the people who trained me who were essentially decent people who had been corrupted by this power. And became a little bit monstrous as a result, a little bit monstrous. That's kind of what we were just saying about Walter Freeman, though, how he lost it along the way.

Is that, like these essentially decent people get corrupted by this Godlike power bestowed on them, right, and it turns them monstrous, which is synonymous with evil? That's the thing.

But it's like, they don't begin that way, right? They don't all begin that way. You know what? I mean, this isn't a black and white thing.

He did not begin as an evil villain who was out to fuck people over and kill people, he didn't want to kill people. That's the thing his ego took over, and his need for fame and his need to do things quickly. And to have his name on this procedure and be revolutionary and all this. And it took over any kind of forethought into. Well, maybe we do need to take some time to perfect this.

We do need to do some more research, we do need to figure out how we can make sure that we're not just wiggling about an ice pick. And instead figuring out how to target specific things that we do lots of research on, that we find out when we target this thing. This is what happens. Instead of just being like, Yeah, we'll just sever a few things and see what happens. The other part that I think is interesting that Marsh pointed out was how back then there was such a simplistic view of the brain.

It wasn't looked at as this complex, as complex as it really is. So I think that also kind of informed a lot of these reckless things that people would do. But again, he just turned into a monster, he really did. There's really no getting away from the end of that.

He did turn into a villain, and he waited until he was retired to go check up on all his former patients. It's like, I don't know, maybe you should have done that while you were doing the procedures. A hundred percent, that's just humanity.

And to make sure you got to check up on them and see that they're still living functional lives. To be able to say that that was a successful procedure, and that's the thing exactly. You can't say your procedure is successful when you're not doing any follow-up visit. I was talking to Moniz there, who made the original lobotomy, what we know now as the Lobotomy.

And he made the device too right, the Leucotome, he didn't make the device. But he was the one who would literally not check up on the patients and just mark them off as a success because they didn't die in his office. That's cheating. And they looked a little docile when they left.

It's like he would not check up on them after a couple of weeks. And then he's just like, success. And it's like, No, no, no, no. Some of these things are going to show up down the line. You got to make sure that you didn't fuck something up. That's going to show up a month or two later, a year later, right? Like you can't measure.

You can't mark that as a success, and that's why I feel like you can't really like, measure your own success necessarily. In this case, it should be like a board should have been overseeing all of this. Like, there's so many things that should have happened here. That unfortunately just didn't because it was such a different time. Implemented now, luckily, to kind of safeguard some of this stuff.

Somewhat because of this, I'm sure. Honestly, this probably had a little bit to do with it. Because it's like, this is just reckless, it's just reckless behavior, It's reckless, monstrous behavior, completely.

I mean, I'm glad that James Watts kind of realized the situation at some point. And like I said earlier, I'm pretty sure the ones that were success at all were probably done by him. Because he was the only one because of his surgical skill, yeah, he was the only real surgeon on the team. Just the fact that Walter Freeman had no.

No surgical training, or barely any surgical training like no like formal surgery. Like. He had obviously done it for medical school and such. When you think about what doctors have to go through now, like pre-med.

Like, you have to go through all the different rounds and all the different, like various types of. I don't even know like the correct way to say it. Oh yeah, like, you have to go through, you have to hit all the different levels, you have to go through all these different rounds of.

It doesn't sound like it was like that when Walter became a doctor. Yeah, it was a different situation, for sure. That's so crazy. And now they make you hit like every department.

Right, so you have a vast understanding of everything, right? I remember because all the fucking the trainees, like, hated coming down to the morgue for their rotation through the morgue. And when you had one of your C-sections, wasn't there, like?

Yeah, there was like a trainees that came in, yeah, and they asked me if I wouldn't mind, and I was like, Yeah, yeah, whatever.

They're going to be doctors someday. They should see one. Yeah, like, I'm not going to tell them, no, that's wild.

At that point, you don't give a shit, you're like, sure, everyone come in, you're like, just take this thing out of me, but yeah, wow.

That is Dr. Walter Freeman and the transorbital lobotomy slash ice pick lobotomy. I don't even have words left. Yeah, that is something that's a story that will always stick with me.

It's a rough one. And just all the people's lives that were affected so negatively. Yeah, even the people that, like, it was a success, you know, yeah.

Like, they still had some kind of after effects, and it's a traumatic thing to go through, no matter what. The two that stuck out to me the most in this part are obviously Rosemary Kennedy and Howard. There I know Howard broke my heart.

He daydreams, he daydreams, and he leaves lights on when the sunlight's coming in and doesn't want to go to sleep, but then sleeps great. It's like you're just a kid.

You have a child. yeah, you have yourself, a bonafide human child. Wow, like, I'm an adult and I leave lights on sometimes.

I don't even believe in hell, but that woman's in hell, she's somewhere, I'll tell you that much. Well, thank you for listening. we hope you keep listening.

And we hope you keep it weird, but not so weird that any of this. Because, oh my God, ice picks in your eyes. No thanks. Oh my God, ice, not for me dog.

You just, you sorry, I was trying to get up. Are you showing up? Yeah, I'm showing up. That was a gross one, cause I tried to force it out.

Cause I was like, that's not how I wanted it to be. He sounded like a slurpy frog.

A slurpy frog Are there other types of frogs? Many kinds of frogs, but this girl tastes. I feel like they're all pretty slurpy, though.

I'm gonna put it at the end of it, she did sound like a slurpy frog. If you like Morbid, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com Slash survey.