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Speaker 1: What's grease and m door knobs. I'm Robert Evans hosted

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Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards for part two of our episode on

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Speaker 1: the inventor of lobotomy, and the door to the recording

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Speaker 1: studio has been greased with olive oil, which I'm informing

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Speaker 1: listeners of so that they can truly get into the

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Speaker 1: behind the Bastard spirit by greasing their own doors with

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Speaker 1: olive oil. So everybody play look at home, Grease, grease

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Speaker 1: something near you up with olive oil. All wait, all right,

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Speaker 1: I'm here as with in part one with Daniel van Kirk. Daniel,

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Speaker 1: how are you? How are you? How are you? How

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Speaker 1: are you? How are you doing today? I am great.

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Speaker 1: I'm so glad to be back for the conclusion of

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Speaker 1: this story about a horrific man who justified his means. Yep,

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Speaker 1: he's a bad man. And speaking of bad men, were

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Speaker 1: about to talk about a president. Although a president most

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Speaker 1: people like, um, so I may be pissing some people off.

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Speaker 1: John and Robert Kennedy are probably the two most famous

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Speaker 1: brothers in American history. One was the president until he

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Speaker 1: got shot, another would have been the president if he

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Speaker 1: hadn't been shot. Both men have come to symbolize fairly

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Speaker 1: or unfairly, an era of just in decent governance in

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Speaker 1: the United States of America, one that will probably never

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Speaker 1: come again. But the Kennedy brothers had a sister as

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Speaker 1: well as another brother named Ted, who we don't talk

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Speaker 1: about much because of that lady he drunkenly killed. This

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Speaker 1: woman's name was Rosemary Kennedy, and her life was stolen

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Speaker 1: by Dr Watts, Dr Freeman, and wild unchecked misogyny. Now,

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Speaker 1: Rosemary's birth was, in the words of the Irish Times,

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Speaker 1: complicated by medical misadventure. Depending on which source you read,

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Speaker 1: you will hear different things about the exact extent of

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Speaker 1: her intellectual disabilities. Some articles I've read say she was

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Speaker 1: severely mentally handicapped and unable to lead a normal life.

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Speaker 1: Others argue she had learning disabilities but was otherwise bright

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Speaker 1: and capable. I'm not a doctor, but I did teach

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Speaker 1: special ed once, and it seems fair for me to say,

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Speaker 1: whatever the precise extent of her issues, Rosemary Kennedy would

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Speaker 1: have been capable of living a real, satively independent life

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Speaker 1: with some specific help. Now you get very different versions

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Speaker 1: of Rosemary story depending on which right up you read.

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Speaker 1: For example, here's people. As Rosemary entered her late teens,

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Speaker 1: her parents saw less of the affectionate, dutiful and eager

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Speaker 1: to please young woman they knew and loved, and more

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Speaker 1: of her violent outbursts. She began screaming and yelling and

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Speaker 1: throwing things. She was violent and throwing vases across the room.

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Speaker 1: She was out of control. One person says now that

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Speaker 1: article paints Rosemary is a deeply disturbed young woman, and

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Speaker 1: her lobotomy is tragic, but purely the result of her

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Speaker 1: parents not having better options to care for such a

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Speaker 1: disabled child in a more primitive era. Another Irish Times

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Speaker 1: article I found, which interviewed one of her biographers, a

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Speaker 1: man named Irvine, takes a different route. Irvine has a

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Speaker 1: more filled out picture in his head. He sees her

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Speaker 1: as stunningly beautiful. It was often said she was the

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Speaker 1: most beautiful of the Kennedy's, beautiful and poetic. She did

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Speaker 1: have learning disabilities, It's hard to say how much, but

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Speaker 1: she wrote letters, she kept a diary. She became a

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Speaker 1: Montessori teacher for a while, and she taught young children.

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Speaker 1: Her favorite book was Winnie the Pooh, and she could

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Speaker 1: read that to children. So yeah, yeah, great book. He

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Speaker 1: has the sense of a fairly normal, deeply loving young woman.

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Speaker 1: Every letter that she wrote a show drenched in this

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Speaker 1: want for her father to acknowledge her and love her.

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Speaker 1: Every one of those letters is heartbreaking. It's all about

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Speaker 1: I'm doing my best and I hope this pleases you.

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Speaker 1: She would send reports about her weight because wait was

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Speaker 1: a huge thing in the Kennedy family, monitoring the weight

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Speaker 1: of all the children. There's so much correspondence where Joe

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Speaker 1: and Rose are just talking about the weight of their children.

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Speaker 1: So yeah. Meanwhile, an Irish Central article I found on

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Speaker 1: her describes her this way. By kindergarten, Rosemary was called

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Speaker 1: retarded in the lingo of the times, and such children

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Speaker 1: were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image,

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Speaker 1: it was a disaster. Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third

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Speaker 1: or fourth grade intelligence, and she was packed off to

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Speaker 1: a boarding school for misfits. From there, she wrote her

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Speaker 1: father a heartbreaking letter, Darling, Daddy, I hate to disappoint

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Speaker 1: you in any way. Come to see me very soon.

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Speaker 1: I get very lonesome every day now. Rosemary finally caught

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Speaker 1: a break when her father became ambassador to Britain, and

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Speaker 1: she thrived in a London convent school. But back in

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Speaker 1: the States, Rosemary, who again was very attractive, began attracting

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Speaker 1: admirers at twenties. She was a picturesque young woman, a

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Speaker 1: snow princess with flushed cheeks, gleaming, smile, plump figure in

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Speaker 1: a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met. Uh.

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Speaker 1: And of course, as Larson writes, her parents found her

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Speaker 1: sexuality dangerous. And I think this gets to the core

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Speaker 1: of kennedy family issues with Rosemary more than anything, um.

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Speaker 1: And it seems to me, based on what I've read,

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Speaker 1: that the argument that she was mentally retarded is very oversold.

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Speaker 1: I think she had learning disabilities. I think she was

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Speaker 1: someone who had difficulty thriving in a normal school. But

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Speaker 1: I think she was basically it seems like she was

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Speaker 1: basically a functional, intelligent person UM who was a young,

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Speaker 1: attractive woman and people wanted to fuck her, and she

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Speaker 1: wanted to funk them, and this was not okay with

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Speaker 1: Joe Kennedy. So I think that's the core of the issue. Um.

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Speaker 1: The Kennedy's were a powerful, wealthy, high society family just

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Speaker 1: got to stay in line on that family got to

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Speaker 1: stay in line, in line. She has some learning disabilities,

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Speaker 1: and she's promiscuous and a woman. We can't we gotta

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Speaker 1: can't take out this part of it too. Yeah, she

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Speaker 1: maybe having some mood disorders. So maybe she like flies

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Speaker 1: off the handle and gets like yelly and stuff and

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Speaker 1: like that. They'd assume, like, well, she's not happy in

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Speaker 1: the family, so she must be broken. Yeah, that's and

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Speaker 1: she's a woman's here to disregard her exactly, Like that's

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Speaker 1: going to carry on the name, Yeah, exactly. I think

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Speaker 1: she was a strong willed young woman who wanted to

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Speaker 1: live a life that would have been inconvenient to the

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Speaker 1: family goals. And it's my opinion that this, more than

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Speaker 1: anything else, sealed her fate. And before we go any further,

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Speaker 1: I want you to take a look at this picture

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Speaker 1: of Rosemary. Will be on our website too, Sophie, can

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Speaker 1: you show that to Daniel. Oh she looks like fun. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: she looks fun. She looks like a normal, healthy young woman.

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Speaker 1: I would describe her as looking playful and lively and coy,

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Speaker 1: like a willful young woman with a spirit behind her. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: she falls into uh like fun girl. Winter, Yeah, fun

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Speaker 1: girl fall. Now, within mere months of this photograph, she

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Speaker 1: would be reduced to a shambling ruin of herself by

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Speaker 1: the treatments of doctor's Freeman and Watts. But the final

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Speaker 1: decision on whether or not to perform the lobotomy on

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Speaker 1: Rosemary was up to the family patriarch Joseph from People Quote,

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Speaker 1: Without his wife's knowledge, he took Rosemary to see Dr

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Speaker 1: Walter Freeman, a controversial neurologist, psychiatrist and professor at George

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Speaker 1: Washington University who had gained fame for popularizing lobotomies in America.

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Speaker 1: He took her to the best at the time, and

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Speaker 1: at the time time readers, Digest, Newsweek, everybody was touting

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Speaker 1: the best thing for mental illness, the lobotomy. It was

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Speaker 1: the cure. All people were so eager for some help

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Speaker 1: that they just grabbed onto it. You see, that's Freedman

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Speaker 1: from the last episode being smart about just playing into

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Speaker 1: the press. He did. He'd gotten this ship into the press,

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Speaker 1: and fucking Joe Kennedy reads this in a Newsweek as

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Speaker 1: he's sipping fucking Manhattan's and his his his can of

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Speaker 1: Bunkport retreat or wherever the funk it is. And if

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Speaker 1: you need to wonder about how much you Kennedy cared

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Speaker 1: about the like agency or um agency. She's a girl, exactly,

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Speaker 1: writes of a woman. Not only is he taking his

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Speaker 1: daughter to get her brain carved out, he's not telling

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Speaker 1: his own wife that he's doing it. No, why would he? Exactly? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: this is all double it's a double smack. Yeah. Now,

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Speaker 1: Freeman diagnosed Rosemary with agitated depression and promised Joe that

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Speaker 1: a lobotomy would put an into her rages and render

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Speaker 1: her happy and content. What did he diagnose her with

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Speaker 1: agitated depression? This sounds like that ship where they're like, Oh,

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Speaker 1: what do you want me to call it? What do

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Speaker 1: you want here? Joe? Yeah, she's not she's not happy

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Speaker 1: and that's a problem. That means she's broken, right, But

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Speaker 1: the agitated is why we have to do something about it,

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Speaker 1: because it's just getting worse. The family's got money and

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Speaker 1: she's not happy. So the only thing to do was

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Speaker 1: to break a brain us, okay, sorry. In the file

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Speaker 1: of Dr Freeman assisted by Dr James Watts for him

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Speaker 1: to prefrontal lobotomy and Rosemary at George Washington University Hospital

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Speaker 1: rather than curing her. The lobotomy essentially erased Rosemary Kennedy.

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Speaker 1: The procedure itself literally involved Dr Watts scraping away at

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Speaker 1: her brain tissue while Dr Freeman asked her to repeat

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Speaker 1: stories from her childhood and lists the month of the year.

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Speaker 1: When she could no longer answer, the procedure was pronounced

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Speaker 1: a success. Whoa yeah, tell us when we've taken enough

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Speaker 1: you tell us, yeah, tell us when you don't remember

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Speaker 1: who you are, and then we'll be like, part we

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Speaker 1: got it perfect, We got her Because I wondered that too,

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Speaker 1: like if somebody got their lobotomy right. And then they

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Speaker 1: were still like the in the last episode, the doctor

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Speaker 1: who went out and got drunk. Still like what they

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Speaker 1: were like, well, we gotta go in and dig a

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Speaker 1: little deeper. I guess they often did that. Not always.

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Speaker 1: We'll talk about some other cases later, um, but yeah,

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Speaker 1: that was not uncommon. For the one. They were like,

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Speaker 1: let's get it all, just keep talking it all. Just

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Speaker 1: get the whole girl out of there. Yeah, just make

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Speaker 1: her a shell now. Rosemary spent the rest of her

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Speaker 1: life completely dependent on a small handful of caretakers until

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Speaker 1: her father's stroke. She lived isolated and hidden from the

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Speaker 1: rest of the family at St. Koleta's, a Catholic facility

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Speaker 1: in wisconsant for inconveniently disabled members of which families. When

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Speaker 1: Joe finally stroked out, her nieces and nephews attempted to

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Speaker 1: reintegrate her back into the family, but any hope she'd

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Speaker 1: ever had of an independent life of forging in existence

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Speaker 1: for herself was obliterated by doctors Freeman and Watts. Unice

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Speaker 1: Kennedy would eventually create the Special Olympics in honor of Rosemary,

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Speaker 1: and in nineteen eighties seven story in the Saturday Evening

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Speaker 1: Post brought the whole sordid tale to light, but that

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Speaker 1: was far too late to stop the career of Walter

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Speaker 1: Freeman from reaping an unspeakable toll in human lives. By

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Speaker 1: nineteen forty five, at the end of Freeman and Watts's collaboration,

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Speaker 1: around a hundred fifty lobotomies were being performed annually nationwide.

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Speaker 1: But in nineteen forty six, Walter Freeman introduced his revolutionary

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Speaker 1: transorbital lobotomy technique and started teaching it to surgeons and

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Speaker 1: non surgeons all around this glorious land. By nineteen forty nine,

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Speaker 1: some five of thousand lobotomies were being performed annually, so

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Speaker 1: that's great. Many of those were performed by Dr Freeman himself,

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Speaker 1: who started traveling the nation showing off his skills to

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Speaker 1: rooms full of doctors in the press. And I'm going

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Speaker 1: to quote now from the book The Lobotomist. Patricia Darien,

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Speaker 1: a student nurse at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville,

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Speaker 1: watched Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy at a nearby state hospital.

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Speaker 1: Freeman selected the patients for operations, she reported, by twisting

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Speaker 1: their joints to determine their flexibility, not by reading or

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Speaker 1: taking histories. After a special luncheon honor of the occasion

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Speaker 1: of his visit, he occupied a conference room and had

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Speaker 1: each patient shocked and photographed. When all was ready, he

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Speaker 1: would plunge the lucatom in. Darien noted he wore no gown, mask,

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Speaker 1: or gloves. Afterwards, he would sit the patients up and

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Speaker 1: have them walked out of the room. He was very

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Speaker 1: proud of the fact that the people walked in and

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Speaker 1: walked out, none had to be carried, although one or

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Speaker 1: two of them sagged badly on the way out. She remembered.

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Speaker 1: After several operations, Freeman enlivened the demonstration by cutting nerve

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Speaker 1: fibers on both sides of the brain simultaneously. Then he

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Speaker 1: looked up at us, smiling. I thought I was seeing

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Speaker 1: a circus act. He moved both hands back and forth

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Speaker 1: in unison, cutting the brain identically behind each eye. It

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Speaker 1: astonished me that he was so gay, so high, so up.

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Speaker 1: Darien recalled the sequence of events as a living nightmare,

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Speaker 1: a deeply disturbing performance. He's reached his final form. Yeah now.

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Speaker 1: Frank Freeman, Walter's son, was occasionally enlisted to help his

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Speaker 1: father in these lobotomy exhibitions. They would spend weeks at

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Speaker 1: a time on the road, crossing thousands of miles, visiting

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Speaker 1: numerous hospitals, and lobotomizing huge numbers of people. In nineteen

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Speaker 1: fifty two, Frank helped his father perform a lobotomy. The

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Speaker 1: process started when Walter immobilized the patient with a series

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Speaker 1: of powerful electro shocks, and then, as Frank recalled, I

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Speaker 1: was there to hold the person's legs down. We all

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Speaker 1: went for a ride when he threw the switch. When

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Speaker 1: the patient stopped seizing, Walter would lift the eyelid, jam

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Speaker 1: his ice pick inside and shattered the bone that separated

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Speaker 1: it from the brain. He would carefully hammer away at

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Speaker 1: gray matter until both sides of the frontal lobe had

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Speaker 1: been disconnected. Frank recalled, I was kind of impressed. He

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Speaker 1: made it look so easy. That's good, right, Well, I mean, yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's so easy because he loves it. He's so you know,

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Speaker 1: like you were saying, do what you love and you'll

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Speaker 1: never work a day in your life of hammering into

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Speaker 1: people's brains with a nice pet. But he also seems

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Speaker 1: obsessed with the celebrity of it, like he wants to

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Speaker 1: like be the guy and come to your town and

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Speaker 1: put on his brain show. He wants to put on

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Speaker 1: a show. He wants to do it with both hands.

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Speaker 1: That you're really impressed. And see they all walked out

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Speaker 1: of here. Did you see him all walk out like

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Speaker 1: well to be carried himself. But yeah, he was lazy

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Speaker 1: when he came in. Yeah. Now, over the course of

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Speaker 1: a very long career, Walter would perform more than three thousand,

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Speaker 1: four hundred and thirty nine lobotomies in fifty five hospitals

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Speaker 1: in twenty three states. The entire time he believed himself

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Speaker 1: to be something of a heroic medical radical, pulling his

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Speaker 1: discipline forward into the future. His motto was lobotomy gets

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Speaker 1: them home, which meant in effect that lobotomizing people allowed

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Speaker 1: them to exist comfortably and without complaint in Americans Itty.

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Speaker 1: It is impossible to know how many of Freeman's patients

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Speaker 1: truly benefited from his treatment. His summaries of his results

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Speaker 1: were always very biased, and it's never possible to analyze

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Speaker 1: them outside of the lens of his own opinions. Objective

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Speaker 1: scientific analysis of the results of lobotomies in this period

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Speaker 1: are essentially impossible to find. We know that at least

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Speaker 1: four hundred and ninety of his patients died as a

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Speaker 1: result of his services. We also know that lobotomizing human

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Speaker 1: beings was not simply a matter of medical necessity. The

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Speaker 1: longer Freeman worked as a solo lobotomist, the more he

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Speaker 1: leaned into the performance art side of the field. And

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post now, shocking his colleagues,

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Speaker 1: for instance, grew into a great source of pleasure. Once,

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Speaker 1: during a lobotomy demonstration at a nursing home in Baltimore

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Speaker 1: before a group of surgeons who replaced his surgical hammer

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Speaker 1: with a carpenter's mallet. He delighted in reporting how other

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Speaker 1: lobotomy demonstrations made a Columbia University professor emeritus of neurology

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Speaker 1: weakened with faintness, sickened students in England, and so outraged

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Speaker 1: a German neurologist that Freeman said, I almost had to

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Speaker 1: push him out of the way in order to perform

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Speaker 1: the operation. Several times he shut off his virtuosity with

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Speaker 1: the Luca toome by performing two handed lobotomies, working both

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Speaker 1: eye sockets simultaneously on people. That's forget that there's a

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Speaker 1: person on the other end of this hammer and pick yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 1: His cross country trips in pursuit of lobotomy patients and

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Speaker 1: his self appointment as the Transorbital Procedures International Ambassador only

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Speaker 1: heightened Freeman's sense of professional solitude and caused him to

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Speaker 1: commit serious erras of judgment. More than once, he worked

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Speaker 1: the luke toome forcefully enough to break it inside a

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Speaker 1: patient's brain at Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa. He accidentally

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Speaker 1: killed a patient when he stepped back to take a

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Speaker 1: photo during the surgery, and allowed the lucatome to sink

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Speaker 1: deep into the patient's mid brain. That's all from jack

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Speaker 1: al High. Yeah that's pretty fucked up. Huh yeah. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Also we don't know what his scale is. It still

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Speaker 1: might have been deemed a success by him. The guy's

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Speaker 1: not complaining anymore now. Many of Walter's patients were unable

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Speaker 1: to walk away or really think after his ministrations, but

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Speaker 1: this caused less of an issue than you might think.

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Speaker 1: The bulk of his clientele were inmates at asylums, and

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Speaker 1: the folks paying for surgeries didn't so much want those

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Speaker 1: folks healed as they wanted them quieter. People in charge

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Speaker 1: of hospitals often welcomed Freemen into their institutions because the

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Speaker 1: lobotomized patients. Some of them, you know, would go home

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Speaker 1: because they'd actually be helped by the procedure, and the

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Speaker 1: others were generally easier to manage. Freeman himself wrote, the

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Speaker 1: noise level of the ward went down, incidents were fewer,

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Speaker 1: cooperation improved, and the ward could be brightened when curtains

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Speaker 1: and flower pots were no longer in danger of being

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Speaker 1: used as weapons, so it mainem easier to deal with. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: no more biting no more biting, no more problems at all,

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Speaker 1: because they can't do anything anymore because he just erased

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Speaker 1: them basically in a lot of cases, and we don't

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Speaker 1: have to like technically say we killed them. Yeah yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean hundreds of people were improved by his work,

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Speaker 1: hundreds more it's less clear, and of course hundreds and

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Speaker 1: hundreds died. But this in part one, it's almost seems

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Speaker 1: like though they're using the exception to prove the rule. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so it's like it's there's some people that's benefited, so

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Speaker 1: we should do this for everyone. We think we needs it,

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Speaker 1: Like exactly, they don't. Those the numbers don't really match up.

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Speaker 1: If the people are benefited from you're like, well five

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Speaker 1: of these people five percent, it might not work out

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Speaker 1: for I'm still not favor for it, but I get

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Speaker 1: what your logic is. But being like, oh, a few

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Speaker 1: percentage of people, this really small group, this really helps, well,

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Speaker 1: then that doesn't mean we should be doing it for everyone. Also,

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Speaker 1: when I was I keep thinking, I was like, I'm

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Speaker 1: sure this happened to people who are autistic, right, oh god,

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Speaker 1: yeah yeah, because but that wasn't even like they didn't

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Speaker 1: even know. I didn't was autism even diagnosed in the seventies. No, no, no, no,

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Speaker 1: I don't think at this point. I I think it

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Speaker 1: was even after that that they really had a handle

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Speaker 1: on it. But like it's possible that's what was going

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Speaker 1: on with Rosemary. She may have had like aspergers or

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Speaker 1: something like that. I really don't know. I don't think

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Speaker 1: anybody does. I'm gonna guess a lot of his patients

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Speaker 1: were aught histic and they just got written down as

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Speaker 1: imbeciles or retarded, which is like the lingo they would

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Speaker 1: have used at the time. And you know, because they

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Speaker 1: required different means to like reach and teach and like

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Speaker 1: work with you know, because they had a different sort

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Speaker 1: of brain. Uh, they just sort of hammered into their

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Speaker 1: brain until they weren't a problem anymore. Right, How many

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Speaker 1: women wouldn't have gotten a lobotomy if they hadn't been married.

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Speaker 1: That's a scary question, because they was a man saying, well,

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Speaker 1: you're the problem, you aren't making the food, you fight

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Speaker 1: with me, you have your own thoughts, which I'm sick

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Speaker 1: of hearing. But if they had just never if they

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Speaker 1: had become a to use it, the lingo of the

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Speaker 1: of the era a Spinster, they would have never gotten

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Speaker 1: a lobotomy because they would have had an oppressive man

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Speaker 1: in their life to be like, I'm sick of you. Yep, yep.

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Speaker 1: Marriage doomed them. Yeah, that's fair to say, probably hundreds

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Speaker 1: of cases at at least. Yeah, Now, Freemen had plenty

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Speaker 1: of problems with Oh. Actually, before before we get into

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Speaker 1: Freeman's problems, you know what's not a problem our advertisers. Great,

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Speaker 1: you know, who won't lobotomize their wives? Who the products

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Speaker 1: and services that advertise on this show. Great? Then I

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Speaker 1: then I want to hear about him, because now I'm

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Speaker 1: interested products. We're back and we're talking about Walter Freeman,

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Speaker 1: and of course the issues that came as a result

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Speaker 1: of him hammering ice picks into the brains of thousands

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Speaker 1: of people. Uh. In ninety seven, Freeman operated on a

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Speaker 1: Washington cop after the brain ice picking, said cop hemorrhaged

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Speaker 1: on both sides of his brain, and, in Freeman's words,

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Speaker 1: was never able to do more than the simplest tasks

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Speaker 1: around the house. Even so, Freeman did a brisk business

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Speaker 1: in Washington State. In the late nineteen forties. He met

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Speaker 1: the actress Francis Farmer at Western State Hospital. She'd been

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Speaker 1: a patient there for five years, largely as a result

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Speaker 1: of behaved your her parents considered wild and unconventional, but

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Speaker 1: we today would probably just call being a human. We

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Speaker 1: don't know for sure if Freeman lobotomized her, but some

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Speaker 1: reports say he did, and Frank Freeman says his father did.

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Speaker 1: There's a picture that is almost certainly of miss Farmer's operation.

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Speaker 1: It shows a man Walter in a sleeveless shirt with

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Speaker 1: hairy arms and ungloved hams, hammering a lucatom, the surgical

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Speaker 1: device he invented to replace his ice pick into a

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Speaker 1: woman's eye. As a crowd watches and there goes what

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Speaker 1: would have been my Halloween costume. Yep, yep, tragic sleeveless

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Speaker 1: Harry ice pick m hmm. By ten fifty four, tranquilizers

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Speaker 1: like chlorpromazine replaced lobotomies as the preferred treatment for agitated

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Speaker 1: people in asylums. Freeman left Washington for Los Altos, California,

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Speaker 1: and for the next eighteen years he split his time

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Speaker 1: between lobotomizing people and hiking. Actual medical science gradually left

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Speaker 1: him behind, but Freeman continued his research on transorbital lobotomies

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Speaker 1: because he loves it. He loves he loves it. In

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Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, he conducted an experiment meant on fourteen

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Speaker 1: disturbed mental defectives, mostly young schizophrenics. In a letter to

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Speaker 1: a colleague, he explained that this experiment tested the efficacy

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Speaker 1: of injecting hot water into the brain after stabbing it

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Speaker 1: with an ice pick. I was prepared to accept two fatalities,

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Speaker 1: but fortunately all the patients survived, and he invited to

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Speaker 1: return next May. What is he new, tiede. He's just

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Speaker 1: trying to come. He's like, well, but now we do

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Speaker 1: this thing like that would just shoot some water in there.

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Speaker 1: Oh my god. I don't see how any of these

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Speaker 1: patients could improve, but at least one can now be

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Speaker 1: cared for at home again. His his concern is that

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Speaker 1: they be easy to care for now that they get better. Really,

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Speaker 1: if we you know what else, you remove the whole head.

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Speaker 1: You can do whatever you want with that. But real

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Speaker 1: fucking easy, to be real easy. They don't complain. There's

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Speaker 1: you don't even have to feed him. M hmm. Now,

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Speaker 1: since Walter worked at a variety of different hospitals during

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Speaker 1: this period, he enlisted a number of different nurses to

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Speaker 1: help him in his thousands of procedures. One of these

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Speaker 1: people was Helen Comer, a nurse in West Virginia for

402
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Speaker 1: thirty four years. I found her account in an article

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Speaker 1: written by Story Corps in nineteen fifty four. I assisted

404
00:21:03,880 --> 00:21:06,359
Speaker 1: Dr Freeman and doing a transorbital lobotomy. I was a

405
00:21:06,359 --> 00:21:07,960
Speaker 1: new nurse at the time and I was drafted to

406
00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:10,080
Speaker 1: work in there with him. Had no idea about what

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Speaker 1: I was getting into, but I was curious and I

408
00:21:11,840 --> 00:21:14,040
Speaker 1: wanted to see it. And I saw it. Oh my,

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Speaker 1: The room was full of people. Everyone wanted to see

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Speaker 1: what was going on. People from town and everywhere else

411
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Speaker 1: came up to witness the occasion. He came and I

412
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Speaker 1: held the patient's head and he did the lobotomy. He

413
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Speaker 1: had an instrument. To me, it looked like a nail,

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Speaker 1: a great big nail. It had a sharp point, and

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00:21:26,880 --> 00:21:28,960
Speaker 1: he inserted this in the corner of the individual's eye

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Speaker 1: and banged it with a mallet I guess it was.

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Speaker 1: And then he pulled from one side and pulled to

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Speaker 1: the other. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to watch.

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Speaker 1: I know that day we lost one patient because they

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Speaker 1: couldn't stop the bleeding, and I can't remember if any

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Speaker 1: others died. It wasn't what I thought it might be.

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Speaker 1: To me, it was cruel, but that was just my opinion.

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Speaker 1: I was just doing the job I was employed to do. Remember,

424
00:21:47,440 --> 00:21:49,280
Speaker 1: I've seen all kinds of things in my line of work,

425
00:21:49,320 --> 00:21:51,160
Speaker 1: so if I stopped and dwelled on each little thing,

426
00:21:51,200 --> 00:21:53,879
Speaker 1: I'd be hurting. I remember he was relaxed. He was

427
00:21:54,000 --> 00:21:56,200
Speaker 1: very calm while he was operating. He made it look

428
00:21:56,240 --> 00:21:58,960
Speaker 1: easy to do. I think he just had an extremely high,

429
00:21:59,040 --> 00:22:01,879
Speaker 1: self confident person anality. He didn't have any qualms. He

430
00:22:01,920 --> 00:22:03,800
Speaker 1: wanted to prove that he was right. He was convinced

431
00:22:03,800 --> 00:22:05,680
Speaker 1: that he was right. I thought, how can a man

432
00:22:05,760 --> 00:22:08,359
Speaker 1: be relaxed just going blindly into a brain. But of

433
00:22:08,400 --> 00:22:10,960
Speaker 1: course I didn't have the authority to say stop. That.

434
00:22:11,760 --> 00:22:13,760
Speaker 1: These patients were not young ones. I think they were

435
00:22:13,800 --> 00:22:16,200
Speaker 1: all about thirty or forty years old. I knew two

436
00:22:16,200 --> 00:22:18,080
Speaker 1: of them. After the operation, I found that they had

437
00:22:18,160 --> 00:22:21,280
Speaker 1: changed in their personality. My impression, which I remember still,

438
00:22:21,440 --> 00:22:23,920
Speaker 1: was that they didn't ask any questions. Expression of deep

439
00:22:23,920 --> 00:22:26,000
Speaker 1: turmoil in their heart or in their soul was subdued.

440
00:22:26,080 --> 00:22:28,919
Speaker 1: There was something missing emotions. I would say, you know,

441
00:22:29,000 --> 00:22:31,159
Speaker 1: if you were to converse with somebody, there's always emotion

442
00:22:31,200 --> 00:22:32,960
Speaker 1: with it. Just take all of your emotion out of

443
00:22:32,960 --> 00:22:38,080
Speaker 1: a conversation with somebody and what's left. Uh yeah, when

444
00:22:38,119 --> 00:22:40,280
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, I can't believe he just kept doing it?

445
00:22:40,359 --> 00:22:43,840
Speaker 1: And how I mean, and I know you've probably covered this,

446
00:22:43,920 --> 00:22:46,120
Speaker 1: just the amount of people who had some sort of

447
00:22:46,160 --> 00:22:51,199
Speaker 1: like like they were a sociopath and the medical field

448
00:22:51,480 --> 00:22:54,520
Speaker 1: gave them that outlet. I mean, it happens in the military.

449
00:22:53,880 --> 00:22:57,160
Speaker 1: I I feel like Freeman might have been a sociopath,

450
00:22:57,480 --> 00:22:59,679
Speaker 1: like he's he's described as having a lot of difficulty

451
00:22:59,760 --> 00:23:04,159
Speaker 1: like necting to people, a shallow affect, like yeah, he

452
00:23:04,240 --> 00:23:07,679
Speaker 1: kept trophies like I do think he thought he was

453
00:23:07,720 --> 00:23:11,000
Speaker 1: helping people, But I think his understanding of what helping

454
00:23:11,040 --> 00:23:13,880
Speaker 1: people was was helping the people who had to care

455
00:23:13,920 --> 00:23:16,000
Speaker 1: for these folks. I don't think he actually cared about

456
00:23:16,000 --> 00:23:19,280
Speaker 1: the patients because he's broken anyway. You just don't care.

457
00:23:20,160 --> 00:23:24,000
Speaker 1: You just don't give a You lack empathy, and if anything,

458
00:23:24,200 --> 00:23:27,600
Speaker 1: you do these things to people to like sponge off

459
00:23:27,680 --> 00:23:33,560
Speaker 1: of their emotion and their feelings and their reaction. Yeah. Yeah, Now,

460
00:23:33,880 --> 00:23:37,560
Speaker 1: the most common diagnosis for which Freeman prescribed brain scraping

461
00:23:37,680 --> 00:23:40,800
Speaker 1: with schizophrenia. This does not mean that most of his

462
00:23:40,840 --> 00:23:44,560
Speaker 1: patients were actually schizophrenic, just that he hastily declared them

463
00:23:44,600 --> 00:23:47,320
Speaker 1: to be schizophrenic before jamming in ice pick through based

464
00:23:47,359 --> 00:23:51,160
Speaker 1: on how well they could bend their joints. Yeah. Yeah.

465
00:23:51,280 --> 00:23:54,400
Speaker 1: Other common ailments treated via ice picking were chronic pain

466
00:23:54,560 --> 00:23:58,600
Speaker 1: and suicidal depression. In seven New York Times article listed

467
00:23:58,600 --> 00:24:04,679
Speaker 1: the various symptoms for which lobotomies were often prescribed. Tension, apprehension, anxiety, depression, insomnia,

468
00:24:04,720 --> 00:24:12,600
Speaker 1: suicidal ideas, delusions, hallucinations, crying spells, melancholia, obsessions, panic states, disorientation, psycholesia,

469
00:24:12,720 --> 00:24:20,160
Speaker 1: pains of psychic origin, nervous indigestion, and hysterical paralysis. Nervous indigestion. Yeah. Now,

470
00:24:20,600 --> 00:24:22,920
Speaker 1: if you know anything about the fifties and sixties c

471
00:24:23,080 --> 00:24:25,480
Speaker 1: i A, you know that nobody fucked around with human

472
00:24:25,520 --> 00:24:28,360
Speaker 1: brains in new and exciting ways without drawing their attention.

473
00:24:28,680 --> 00:24:32,280
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty two, the agency hired Henley Laughlin, a psychiatrist,

474
00:24:32,359 --> 00:24:34,480
Speaker 1: to report on the potential of lobotomies to help the

475
00:24:34,520 --> 00:24:38,720
Speaker 1: god fearing American government disabled communists. I'm going to quote

476
00:24:38,720 --> 00:24:41,920
Speaker 1: from the book Lobotomist. Again in his classified report titled

477
00:24:42,000 --> 00:24:45,200
Speaker 1: some Areas of Psychiatric Interest, Laughlin commented that the procedure

478
00:24:45,200 --> 00:24:47,639
Speaker 1: would be adaptable to intelligence work, and noted that he

479
00:24:47,680 --> 00:24:51,080
Speaker 1: watched Dr Freeman performed twenty two transorbital lobotomies with an

480
00:24:51,119 --> 00:24:54,280
Speaker 1: average of about six minutes per operation. This included time

481
00:24:54,359 --> 00:24:56,639
Speaker 1: for before and after photographs, as well as the keeping

482
00:24:56,680 --> 00:24:59,600
Speaker 1: of notes and records. From an empiric standpoint, the operative

483
00:24:59,600 --> 00:25:01,720
Speaker 1: procedure is relatively simple and could be learned in a

484
00:25:01,720 --> 00:25:04,959
Speaker 1: brief period of time by almost any intelligent person. In addition,

485
00:25:05,000 --> 00:25:07,439
Speaker 1: he wrote, there is not great outward evidence of injury

486
00:25:07,480 --> 00:25:09,800
Speaker 1: or damage to the patient. Besides the behavior changes in

487
00:25:09,800 --> 00:25:12,840
Speaker 1: the black eyes, the average pathologist performing an autopsy would

488
00:25:12,960 --> 00:25:14,840
Speaker 1: have to be a keen and careful observer to detect

489
00:25:14,920 --> 00:25:17,600
Speaker 1: changes in the brain substance made by the operator. Because

490
00:25:17,640 --> 00:25:19,840
Speaker 1: I felt unable to disclose to Dr Freeman the real

491
00:25:19,880 --> 00:25:22,240
Speaker 1: basis of my interest, Laughlin notes he could not solicit

492
00:25:22,280 --> 00:25:24,760
Speaker 1: the lobotomy expert's opinions as to how the procedure might

493
00:25:24,800 --> 00:25:27,720
Speaker 1: be modified for use by the CIA. Laughlin, who also

494
00:25:27,720 --> 00:25:29,960
Speaker 1: professed an interest in the possibilities of taking him not

495
00:25:30,040 --> 00:25:32,959
Speaker 1: at control of patients during the period of unconsciousness following

496
00:25:32,960 --> 00:25:36,520
Speaker 1: electroshock therapy. Formed his own opinions on the potential lobotomy

497
00:25:36,560 --> 00:25:39,239
Speaker 1: presented as an intelligence tool. To date, there has been

498
00:25:39,240 --> 00:25:42,200
Speaker 1: considerable discussion relative to the possible use of the lobotomy

499
00:25:42,240 --> 00:25:45,720
Speaker 1: type operation by this agency as a neutralizing weapon, Laughlin

500
00:25:45,760 --> 00:25:48,439
Speaker 1: wrote in prefacing his conclusions, he described the role of

501
00:25:48,440 --> 00:25:50,720
Speaker 1: the frontal lobes as one that allowed a person to

502
00:25:50,760 --> 00:25:53,560
Speaker 1: pursue a cause and feel devotion to it. Certainly, any

503
00:25:53,600 --> 00:25:56,960
Speaker 1: crusading spirit is apt to be quenched. He reported, community

504
00:25:57,040 --> 00:25:59,920
Speaker 1: enterprise and activities in the way of social uplift, leadership,

505
00:25:59,920 --> 00:26:02,479
Speaker 1: and executive abilities and activities are apt to be lessened

506
00:26:02,520 --> 00:26:05,920
Speaker 1: after operation. On this basis, a zealous and fanatic communist,

507
00:26:05,960 --> 00:26:09,359
Speaker 1: if lobotomized, might retain his interest in communism, but his drive,

508
00:26:09,520 --> 00:26:12,920
Speaker 1: zeal and ability to organize or direct would be substantially reduced.

509
00:26:13,119 --> 00:26:16,200
Speaker 1: So that's good. You take out the fight baby. Also,

510
00:26:16,240 --> 00:26:18,880
Speaker 1: I wondered if for interrogation used like the CIA would

511
00:26:18,920 --> 00:26:21,040
Speaker 1: be like, well, there's so much more agreeable. They'll tell

512
00:26:21,080 --> 00:26:25,280
Speaker 1: you anything. We should lobotomize them then interview them. I

513
00:26:25,320 --> 00:26:28,040
Speaker 1: will say, the good news is that even the CIA

514
00:26:28,320 --> 00:26:31,320
Speaker 1: in this period had too many scruples to lobotomized people

515
00:26:31,359 --> 00:26:33,679
Speaker 1: as a method of social control. What what what what

516
00:26:33,720 --> 00:26:36,240
Speaker 1: are we in the sixties by now? Yeah? Yeah, yeah yeah,

517
00:26:36,240 --> 00:26:40,080
Speaker 1: the sixties the LSD, right is they're they're ghosting strangers

518
00:26:40,080 --> 00:26:45,159
Speaker 1: with acid like like Gangbusters. Yeah. But Laughlin wound up

519
00:26:45,200 --> 00:26:49,119
Speaker 1: recommending against lobotomies as a way to disabled communists h

520
00:26:49,240 --> 00:26:51,200
Speaker 1: and his His main reason for doing so is that

521
00:26:51,240 --> 00:26:53,560
Speaker 1: it would look really bad to scramble the opinions of

522
00:26:53,600 --> 00:26:56,880
Speaker 1: people whose opinions differed from the US government, Like, if

523
00:26:56,880 --> 00:27:00,679
Speaker 1: that got out, it would be bad. Um. So it

524
00:27:00,840 --> 00:27:03,480
Speaker 1: is here that I should note that on at least

525
00:27:03,560 --> 00:27:07,040
Speaker 1: one point, Walter Freeman was on the somewhat defensible side

526
00:27:07,040 --> 00:27:09,600
Speaker 1: of medical history. As I previously stated, there was a

527
00:27:09,640 --> 00:27:12,400
Speaker 1: time when mental health professionals believe that all mental issues

528
00:27:13,000 --> 00:27:16,199
Speaker 1: stemmed essentially from repressed memories and traumas and other things

529
00:27:16,280 --> 00:27:18,720
Speaker 1: that a therapist could work out. Freeman was on the

530
00:27:18,760 --> 00:27:21,280
Speaker 1: vanguard of doctors who argued that many brain problems were

531
00:27:21,280 --> 00:27:24,119
Speaker 1: physical or chemical in nature, um and based more on

532
00:27:24,200 --> 00:27:27,000
Speaker 1: circumstances of biology than things that had happened to the patient.

533
00:27:27,480 --> 00:27:29,879
Speaker 1: And Freeman and his fellows wound up being right. We

534
00:27:29,920 --> 00:27:32,360
Speaker 1: know today that many mental health issues do stem from

535
00:27:32,359 --> 00:27:35,280
Speaker 1: hormonal or chemical imbalances, things that can be corrected with

536
00:27:35,320 --> 00:27:39,320
Speaker 1: medication or, in rare cases, surgery. Walter identified the problem

537
00:27:39,320 --> 00:27:42,320
Speaker 1: in mainstream medicine rather correctly. He was just very wrong

538
00:27:42,359 --> 00:27:45,200
Speaker 1: about its solution, and because he was such an advocate

539
00:27:45,240 --> 00:27:48,960
Speaker 1: for his solitary practice of lobotomizing people, he failed miserably

540
00:27:49,000 --> 00:27:51,480
Speaker 1: to advance his theory of mental illness with the Times.

541
00:27:52,080 --> 00:27:55,280
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty he treated one Howard dully, On, eleven

542
00:27:55,359 --> 00:27:57,600
Speaker 1: year old boy with what I would describe as mild

543
00:27:57,640 --> 00:28:01,080
Speaker 1: to moderate behavioral issues. Howard fought with his brother, lied

544
00:28:01,160 --> 00:28:04,440
Speaker 1: to his parents, and occasionally stole candy. He was rather

545
00:28:04,480 --> 00:28:07,600
Speaker 1: withdrawn and anti social, but certainly not someone a reasonable

546
00:28:07,640 --> 00:28:10,440
Speaker 1: person would diagnose as in need of major brain surgery.

547
00:28:10,840 --> 00:28:14,640
Speaker 1: His behavioral issues, such as they were, stemmed from understandable causes.

548
00:28:14,920 --> 00:28:17,119
Speaker 1: His mother had died of cancer when he was five.

549
00:28:17,480 --> 00:28:20,680
Speaker 1: His father had remarried a cold and demanding stepmother who

550
00:28:20,680 --> 00:28:24,000
Speaker 1: hated him. Howard was emotionally abused by her and ignored

551
00:28:24,040 --> 00:28:27,399
Speaker 1: in favor of his stepmother's biological children, so he acted

552
00:28:27,400 --> 00:28:29,800
Speaker 1: out more and more as he grew he's acting out.

553
00:28:30,000 --> 00:28:34,960
Speaker 1: He wants attention someone exactly caring parenting. Yeah, And as

554
00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:37,719
Speaker 1: he acted out, his stepmother responded by beating him and

555
00:28:37,760 --> 00:28:41,160
Speaker 1: forcing him to eat alone. This made his behavioral problems worse,

556
00:28:41,240 --> 00:28:43,800
Speaker 1: and his stepmother decided that meant there was something wrong

557
00:28:43,840 --> 00:28:47,000
Speaker 1: with him. She started talking to psychiatrists and eventually wound

558
00:28:47,040 --> 00:28:51,080
Speaker 1: up preferred to doctor Walter Freeman. Now by this point,

559
00:28:51,120 --> 00:28:54,600
Speaker 1: Walter was a thoroughly fringed figure. Lobotomy was still practiced

560
00:28:54,640 --> 00:28:57,760
Speaker 1: far too widely, but most medical professionals no longer believed

561
00:28:57,760 --> 00:29:00,479
Speaker 1: it was anything but a deeply flawed last resort measure.

562
00:29:00,800 --> 00:29:04,040
Speaker 1: But Howard's stepmother didn't care about that. When Walter interviewed

563
00:29:04,040 --> 00:29:07,200
Speaker 1: here steps on, he saw evidence of profound disturbance. Quote.

564
00:29:07,360 --> 00:29:09,640
Speaker 1: He is clever at stealing, but always leaves something behind

565
00:29:09,680 --> 00:29:14,800
Speaker 1: to show what he's done. Freeman records from Yeah He's

566
00:29:14,840 --> 00:29:17,400
Speaker 1: he's a yeah yeah. If it's a banana, he throws

567
00:29:17,440 --> 00:29:19,040
Speaker 1: the peel at the window. If it's a candy bar,

568
00:29:19,120 --> 00:29:21,080
Speaker 1: he leaves the rapper around someplace. He does a good

569
00:29:21,080 --> 00:29:23,120
Speaker 1: deal of daydreaming, and when asked about it, he says,

570
00:29:23,200 --> 00:29:25,240
Speaker 1: I don't know. He has defy at at times. You

571
00:29:25,360 --> 00:29:26,960
Speaker 1: tell me to do this, and I'll do that. He

572
00:29:27,000 --> 00:29:29,760
Speaker 1: has a vicious expression on his face some of the time. Now,

573
00:29:29,760 --> 00:29:32,240
Speaker 1: based on a brief interview, Dr Freeman declared Howard to

574
00:29:32,240 --> 00:29:35,160
Speaker 1: be schizophrenic and prescribed one dose of scrambled brain for

575
00:29:35,200 --> 00:29:37,840
Speaker 1: the young boy. When he met the famous doctor, Howard

576
00:29:37,920 --> 00:29:40,040
Speaker 1: was struck by his round glasses, his suit and his

577
00:29:40,080 --> 00:29:43,280
Speaker 1: stylish goatee and made him look a little like a beatnick.

578
00:29:43,320 --> 00:29:45,400
Speaker 1: He was warm, personable and easy to get along with.

579
00:29:45,520 --> 00:29:48,040
Speaker 1: Was I fearful? No? I had no idea what he

580
00:29:48,080 --> 00:29:50,640
Speaker 1: was going to do with me. I'm gonna quote next

581
00:29:50,640 --> 00:29:53,040
Speaker 1: from a right up in the Guardian. When Dully awoke

582
00:29:53,080 --> 00:29:54,960
Speaker 1: the next day, his eyes were swollen and bruised and

583
00:29:54,960 --> 00:29:56,960
Speaker 1: he was running a high fever. He recalls a severe

584
00:29:57,000 --> 00:29:59,480
Speaker 1: pain in his head and the discomfort of his hospital gown,

585
00:29:59,520 --> 00:30:01,720
Speaker 1: which gave open at the back. He had no idea

586
00:30:01,800 --> 00:30:03,680
Speaker 1: of what had happened. I was in a mental flog,

587
00:30:03,800 --> 00:30:05,760
Speaker 1: Dully says. I was like a zombie. I had no

588
00:30:05,800 --> 00:30:08,600
Speaker 1: awareness of what Freeman had done. Eight weeks after the

589
00:30:08,640 --> 00:30:11,120
Speaker 1: doctor first saw him, Dully came around from his operation

590
00:30:11,160 --> 00:30:13,920
Speaker 1: in a state of numbed confusion. The hospital reports stated

591
00:30:13,960 --> 00:30:16,200
Speaker 1: that he had been given a transorbital lobotomy. A sharp

592
00:30:16,240 --> 00:30:18,920
Speaker 1: instrument was thrust through the orbital roof on both sides

593
00:30:18,960 --> 00:30:21,520
Speaker 1: and moved so as to sever the brain pathways in

594
00:30:21,560 --> 00:30:25,160
Speaker 1: the frontal lobes. Dr Freeman's bill came to two hundred dollars.

595
00:30:25,440 --> 00:30:30,120
Speaker 1: Dully was his youngest ever patient. Extraordinarily, he survived. Now

596
00:30:30,160 --> 00:30:32,640
Speaker 1: Howard would go on to live a full life eventually,

597
00:30:32,760 --> 00:30:35,400
Speaker 1: but first he suffered three years of homelessness, mental illness,

598
00:30:35,400 --> 00:30:37,280
Speaker 1: and a deep confusion as a result of the damage

599
00:30:37,320 --> 00:30:39,640
Speaker 1: done to him. He would grow into a school bus

600
00:30:39,720 --> 00:30:42,000
Speaker 1: driving trainer and a living monument to the resilience of

601
00:30:42,040 --> 00:30:44,200
Speaker 1: the human brain. But one cannot help it read his

602
00:30:44,240 --> 00:30:46,600
Speaker 1: story and wonder how much less painful his life might

603
00:30:46,640 --> 00:30:48,800
Speaker 1: have been if a ship heeled doctor hadn't driven an

604
00:30:48,800 --> 00:30:54,200
Speaker 1: ice pick into his fucking brain gleefully, yeah with with

605
00:30:54,280 --> 00:30:59,520
Speaker 1: panash and also the like, uh seems like schizophrenia to me.

606
00:30:59,640 --> 00:31:01,720
Speaker 1: That work, So schizophrenia, I can definitely do this. And

607
00:31:01,760 --> 00:31:04,840
Speaker 1: he's still in the candy bar. And that bitch, that

608
00:31:04,960 --> 00:31:07,000
Speaker 1: bitch of a step mom was like whatever, I don't care.

609
00:31:07,040 --> 00:31:08,880
Speaker 1: I just brought him here to get his brain taken out.

610
00:31:09,120 --> 00:31:13,520
Speaker 1: So yeah, and she's probably mad or long fucking dead hopefully,

611
00:31:13,720 --> 00:31:17,560
Speaker 1: but she's mad that it seems to have been on

612
00:31:17,600 --> 00:31:20,000
Speaker 1: the air, like the side of things, where somebody didn't

613
00:31:20,040 --> 00:31:23,000
Speaker 1: lose all capacity for life. Yeah, he was still a person,

614
00:31:23,080 --> 00:31:29,000
Speaker 1: unfortunately for much of her I'm sure dismay. Now you

615
00:31:29,040 --> 00:31:31,960
Speaker 1: know what won't declare you a schizophrenic for stealing a

616
00:31:32,000 --> 00:31:34,160
Speaker 1: candy bar and scramble your brains with an ice pick?

617
00:31:35,920 --> 00:31:38,880
Speaker 1: The products and services that support this show. Oh then

618
00:31:38,880 --> 00:31:42,120
Speaker 1: I want to know about him? Oh yeah, absolutely, Here

619
00:31:42,160 --> 00:31:51,200
Speaker 1: we go and we're back. We're talking about Walter Freeman

620
00:31:51,240 --> 00:31:53,760
Speaker 1: in the twilight of his career, you know, the sixties

621
00:31:53,800 --> 00:31:57,320
Speaker 1: and ship as medical science starts to pull away from

622
00:31:57,360 --> 00:32:00,479
Speaker 1: Freeman's practices and towards more humane methods of treating them

623
00:32:00,480 --> 00:32:04,040
Speaker 1: mentally ill um and I I guess more humane methods

624
00:32:04,080 --> 00:32:07,760
Speaker 1: includes literally everything that doesn't involve an ice pick. Um.

625
00:32:07,800 --> 00:32:10,080
Speaker 1: So while this was all going on in his field,

626
00:32:10,160 --> 00:32:12,680
Speaker 1: Walter doubled and tripled down on his claim to fame.

627
00:32:12,760 --> 00:32:15,120
Speaker 1: He spent increasing amounts of time doing what he called

628
00:32:15,240 --> 00:32:19,280
Speaker 1: shrink baiting, essentially trying to trigger more respectable physicians and

629
00:32:19,280 --> 00:32:22,360
Speaker 1: writing limericks about his professional enemies. He was known to

630
00:32:22,360 --> 00:32:26,760
Speaker 1: declare that he would rather be wrong than boring. That's

631
00:32:26,800 --> 00:32:31,960
Speaker 1: so true. That's on his tombstone. That's on his tombstone. Now.

632
00:32:32,080 --> 00:32:35,040
Speaker 1: This desire to buck tradition led him to issue other

633
00:32:35,080 --> 00:32:39,160
Speaker 1: basic aspects of professional medical niceties from The Guardian. He

634
00:32:39,200 --> 00:32:42,200
Speaker 1: had a buccaneering disregard for the usual medical formalities. He

635
00:32:42,280 --> 00:32:45,040
Speaker 1: chewed gum while he operated, and displayed impatience with what

636
00:32:45,080 --> 00:32:48,680
Speaker 1: he called all that germ crap, routinely failing to sterilize

637
00:32:48,680 --> 00:32:51,880
Speaker 1: his hands or wear rubber gloves. Despite a fourteen percent

638
00:32:51,960 --> 00:32:54,840
Speaker 1: fatality rate, Freeman performed three thousand and four hundred thirty

639
00:32:54,920 --> 00:32:57,360
Speaker 1: nine lobotomies in his lifetime, and we haven't talked about

640
00:32:57,360 --> 00:33:03,440
Speaker 1: any mail practice suits at all. No on the sixties man. Now,

641
00:33:03,640 --> 00:33:06,520
Speaker 1: in case you aren't aware, a fourteen percent fatality rate

642
00:33:06,600 --> 00:33:10,880
Speaker 1: is essentially criminal. Any modern surgeon who killed that many

643
00:33:10,960 --> 00:33:13,560
Speaker 1: patients with what they considered to be a routine operation

644
00:33:13,800 --> 00:33:16,120
Speaker 1: would be investigated on the suspicion that they were some

645
00:33:16,200 --> 00:33:19,120
Speaker 1: sort of serial killer. But of course Walter Freeman was

646
00:33:19,160 --> 00:33:21,280
Speaker 1: not really a surgeon. He was just a doctor who

647
00:33:21,320 --> 00:33:23,920
Speaker 1: found a lazier way to perform brain surgery using a

648
00:33:23,960 --> 00:33:27,960
Speaker 1: tool from his kitchen God Damnit. Walter's personal life was

649
00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:30,840
Speaker 1: no prettier than his career. In six he watched his

650
00:33:30,920 --> 00:33:33,640
Speaker 1: eleven year old son, the namesake of his grandfather, die

651
00:33:33,680 --> 00:33:37,040
Speaker 1: horribly in Yosemite National Park. The boy was filling up

652
00:33:37,040 --> 00:33:39,200
Speaker 1: a canteen in a stream when he fell over and

653
00:33:39,240 --> 00:33:42,840
Speaker 1: was dashed to death upon the rocks. Walter's wife, Marjorie,

654
00:33:42,880 --> 00:33:45,640
Speaker 1: was a chronic alcoholic, which is not surprising, and the

655
00:33:45,680 --> 00:33:49,640
Speaker 1: doctor cheated on her constantly. Still, his remaining children considered

656
00:33:49,680 --> 00:33:51,440
Speaker 1: him to have been a good father and defend his

657
00:33:51,520 --> 00:33:54,640
Speaker 1: legacy today as a medical trailblazer. I found this quote

658
00:33:54,640 --> 00:33:57,520
Speaker 1: from his son, Frank, now a retired security guard, and

659
00:33:57,560 --> 00:33:59,520
Speaker 1: I think it was meant to sound positive, but it's

660
00:33:59,560 --> 00:34:02,720
Speaker 1: just an intentionally horrifying to me. He is a friendly

661
00:34:02,760 --> 00:34:04,800
Speaker 1: giant of a man. This is talking about Frank. He's

662
00:34:04,800 --> 00:34:06,440
Speaker 1: a friendly giant of a man. Dress smartly in a

663
00:34:06,440 --> 00:34:08,719
Speaker 1: double breasted dark blue suit and a burgundy tie kept

664
00:34:08,760 --> 00:34:10,719
Speaker 1: in place by a thin gold clip. He was a

665
00:34:10,760 --> 00:34:13,160
Speaker 1: marvelous father, Frank said, sitting in a room filled with

666
00:34:13,160 --> 00:34:16,120
Speaker 1: crossword dictionaries and Dick France's novels. He loved a children

667
00:34:16,160 --> 00:34:18,200
Speaker 1: and always made time for us out of his busy schedule,

668
00:34:18,280 --> 00:34:21,239
Speaker 1: taking us camping every summer all across the country. Frank

669
00:34:21,280 --> 00:34:23,360
Speaker 1: recalls being invited to observe a love botomy when he

670
00:34:23,440 --> 00:34:25,799
Speaker 1: was twenty one, and vividly remembers having a little crack

671
00:34:25,880 --> 00:34:28,160
Speaker 1: as the orbital plate fractured. It only took about six

672
00:34:28,239 --> 00:34:31,600
Speaker 1: or seven minutes, and Dad kept up a running commentary. Indeed,

673
00:34:31,640 --> 00:34:34,320
Speaker 1: the original ice pick used for the first transorbital lobotomy

674
00:34:34,360 --> 00:34:37,000
Speaker 1: came from the Freeman family kitchen drawer. We had several

675
00:34:37,040 --> 00:34:39,600
Speaker 1: of them, says Frank, cheerfully. We're using the punch holes

676
00:34:39,600 --> 00:34:41,719
Speaker 1: in our belts when we got bigger. I'm enormously proud

677
00:34:41,719 --> 00:34:43,760
Speaker 1: of my father. I do think he's been unfairly treated.

678
00:34:43,800 --> 00:34:46,479
Speaker 1: He was an interventionalist surgeon, a pioneer, and that took

679
00:34:46,520 --> 00:34:52,799
Speaker 1: guts apple tree fall, yeah for him to like, Oh

680
00:34:52,840 --> 00:34:54,560
Speaker 1: you know, he did a good a good thing, and

681
00:34:54,640 --> 00:34:56,879
Speaker 1: isn't that great? Look here, look I got a nice

682
00:34:56,880 --> 00:34:58,480
Speaker 1: pick of my kids right now. We could go poke

683
00:34:58,520 --> 00:35:01,440
Speaker 1: anybody's eye. We to poke holes in our belts, and

684
00:35:01,480 --> 00:35:04,399
Speaker 1: my dad used to poke holes and brains. This is fine. Yeah,

685
00:35:04,440 --> 00:35:10,440
Speaker 1: this is fine, This is fine. Yeah. Now, thankfully he

686
00:35:10,480 --> 00:35:12,880
Speaker 1: wound up a security guard rather than a brain surgeon,

687
00:35:12,920 --> 00:35:14,440
Speaker 1: which I think would have been a better career for

688
00:35:14,480 --> 00:35:20,120
Speaker 1: his dad too, in retrospect, when his dad was sick

689
00:35:20,120 --> 00:35:23,000
Speaker 1: all the time. Yeah, yeah, he really should have stayed

690
00:35:23,000 --> 00:35:26,120
Speaker 1: that way. Now. In nineteen sixty seven, Freeman was visited

691
00:35:26,160 --> 00:35:28,839
Speaker 1: by Helen Mortenson, one of his earliest patients. She had

692
00:35:28,880 --> 00:35:31,840
Speaker 1: received two lobotomies from Freeman, one in ninety six and

693
00:35:31,840 --> 00:35:34,840
Speaker 1: one in nineteen fifty six after a relapse. In nineteen

694
00:35:34,880 --> 00:35:37,799
Speaker 1: sixty seven, she relapsed again, likely as a result of

695
00:35:37,800 --> 00:35:40,360
Speaker 1: her brain repairing itself, and she went into Walter for

696
00:35:40,400 --> 00:35:43,720
Speaker 1: a third lobotomy. This was conducted at Herrick Memorial Hospital

697
00:35:43,719 --> 00:35:47,400
Speaker 1: in Berkeley, California, and, unfortunately for Helen, Walter severed a

698
00:35:47,440 --> 00:35:50,040
Speaker 1: blood vessel in her brain. She died three days later

699
00:35:50,040 --> 00:35:53,839
Speaker 1: from the operation, and Freeman's surgical privileges were revoked. He

700
00:35:53,920 --> 00:35:56,400
Speaker 1: lived for five more years, during which he performed no

701
00:35:56,480 --> 00:35:59,920
Speaker 1: additional lobotomies. He died from cancer on May thirty one, night,

702
00:36:00,000 --> 00:36:02,720
Speaker 1: teen seventy two, at the right old age of seventy six.

703
00:36:03,120 --> 00:36:05,560
Speaker 1: Between nineteen thirty six and the late nineteen fifties, the

704
00:36:05,600 --> 00:36:08,200
Speaker 1: wave of lobotomies Walter ignited led to more than forty

705
00:36:08,239 --> 00:36:12,040
Speaker 1: tho lobotomies and perhaps more than fifty. Some aspects of

706
00:36:12,040 --> 00:36:14,759
Speaker 1: the techniques Dr Freeman pioneered are still in use, but

707
00:36:14,840 --> 00:36:18,239
Speaker 1: only on a profoundly limited scale. Less than twenty brain

708
00:36:18,280 --> 00:36:21,239
Speaker 1: operations per year on average are performed in the US

709
00:36:21,280 --> 00:36:24,560
Speaker 1: to treat psychiatric disorders. Most of these use lasers or

710
00:36:24,640 --> 00:36:27,799
Speaker 1: radiation to lesion off small sections of a particular chunk

711
00:36:27,840 --> 00:36:32,280
Speaker 1: of the brain, primarily to treat obsessive compulsitive disorder or Parkinson's.

712
00:36:32,280 --> 00:36:35,640
Speaker 1: Transorbital lobotomies are no longer practiced, and most of the

713
00:36:35,680 --> 00:36:38,200
Speaker 1: young men and women Dr Walter Freeman I spect have

714
00:36:38,320 --> 00:36:43,600
Speaker 1: long since followed him to the grave. And that's the episode. Wow,

715
00:36:45,000 --> 00:36:47,720
Speaker 1: so there's still done. But I'm sure nowadays somebody washed

716
00:36:47,760 --> 00:36:52,680
Speaker 1: into hands beforehand any sort of brain surgery to deal

717
00:36:52,719 --> 00:36:55,440
Speaker 1: with any sort of psychosis. Some of the things he

718
00:36:55,600 --> 00:36:59,399
Speaker 1: like pioneered are performed on a very limited basis um

719
00:36:59,520 --> 00:37:01,920
Speaker 1: or are part of more humane treatments. But again, like

720
00:37:01,960 --> 00:37:06,279
Speaker 1: twenty people a year received something vaguely similar, and they're

721
00:37:06,280 --> 00:37:09,200
Speaker 1: not even that similar. It's just that they removed similar

722
00:37:09,239 --> 00:37:11,360
Speaker 1: parts of the brain because it does help certain people.

723
00:37:11,440 --> 00:37:14,000
Speaker 1: But again, you look at how many thousands of operations

724
00:37:14,000 --> 00:37:17,000
Speaker 1: he performed, and the actual needs seems to be somewhere

725
00:37:17,080 --> 00:37:20,200
Speaker 1: like maybe a couple dozen people a year benefit really

726
00:37:20,840 --> 00:37:23,600
Speaker 1: form of what he did, he liked it right. It's

727
00:37:23,600 --> 00:37:25,680
Speaker 1: like when he was good to get an oil change

728
00:37:25,680 --> 00:37:27,960
Speaker 1: and you can tell they just want to change breaks.

729
00:37:28,719 --> 00:37:32,040
Speaker 1: They're like, new breaks, do you really, Well, that's what

730
00:37:32,080 --> 00:37:35,279
Speaker 1: we do here as breaks, So that's what we're gonna say,

731
00:37:35,320 --> 00:37:37,919
Speaker 1: you need. I think a lot of it was that

732
00:37:38,239 --> 00:37:43,160
Speaker 1: he um he was He was good at performing a lobotomy,

733
00:37:43,239 --> 00:37:45,879
Speaker 1: and most people weren't. Most people couldn't do that sort

734
00:37:45,920 --> 00:37:48,880
Speaker 1: of work without like breaking down because it was just

735
00:37:48,920 --> 00:37:51,480
Speaker 1: horrifying to a normal human being to shove an ice

736
00:37:51,480 --> 00:37:54,799
Speaker 1: pick into a skull um. And Freeman didn't give a ship,

737
00:37:55,040 --> 00:37:57,879
Speaker 1: and he didn't like working with other people, so he's

738
00:37:57,880 --> 00:38:00,000
Speaker 1: able to do this alone and he was the best

739
00:38:00,040 --> 00:38:02,000
Speaker 1: stat it and that's all he wanted from his career.

740
00:38:02,080 --> 00:38:04,120
Speaker 1: So that's the only thing he really did right. And

741
00:38:04,160 --> 00:38:07,240
Speaker 1: he didn't grow up with much of an affinity for

742
00:38:07,640 --> 00:38:10,880
Speaker 1: the female gender, so he was more than happy to

743
00:38:10,920 --> 00:38:14,520
Speaker 1: shut up a wife. Oh yeah, your wife's talking sounds

744
00:38:14,560 --> 00:38:20,319
Speaker 1: like schizophrenia. Yeah, yeah, that's wild, that's horrific. Yeah, it's

745
00:38:20,320 --> 00:38:24,400
Speaker 1: pretty bad, dude. The fact, when do you think, so

746
00:38:24,440 --> 00:38:29,440
Speaker 1: it probably should have really ended by like sixty five, Yeah,

747
00:38:29,880 --> 00:38:32,319
Speaker 1: I mean he stopped sixties seven was his last one.

748
00:38:32,360 --> 00:38:35,560
Speaker 1: I think it probably should have stopped by the fifties.

749
00:38:36,480 --> 00:38:39,400
Speaker 1: I guess you understandable. You know, she was like the

750
00:38:39,480 --> 00:38:41,279
Speaker 1: late forties. I think, oh she was, that's right. I

751
00:38:41,360 --> 00:38:43,480
Speaker 1: keep thinking, so I was thinking of the person that

752
00:38:43,520 --> 00:38:45,680
Speaker 1: was in sixty two, but yeah, she was in the forties.

753
00:38:45,719 --> 00:38:47,759
Speaker 1: That's right. They started in the late thirties. You could

754
00:38:47,840 --> 00:38:50,719
Speaker 1: argue that there was maybe a decade there where, just

755
00:38:50,880 --> 00:38:53,279
Speaker 1: if you assume medical science is going to have some

756
00:38:53,320 --> 00:38:56,080
Speaker 1: really rough patches, just because it's hard to figure it out,

757
00:38:56,400 --> 00:38:58,480
Speaker 1: maybe a decade where people would have done this before

758
00:38:58,520 --> 00:39:02,680
Speaker 1: realizing oh, this actually is just turning people off and

759
00:39:02,760 --> 00:39:07,040
Speaker 1: not fixing any problems. Um. But it went on for

760
00:39:07,080 --> 00:39:10,319
Speaker 1: a long and most doctors by the fifties certainly were

761
00:39:10,360 --> 00:39:13,279
Speaker 1: aware that like, oh, this is not the thing you

762
00:39:13,320 --> 00:39:16,640
Speaker 1: do for everybody who's got a mental illness. There's better treatments.

763
00:39:17,080 --> 00:39:20,160
Speaker 1: But he kept right on rolling almost to the seventies,

764
00:39:21,400 --> 00:39:27,759
Speaker 1: like he damn near made it to Disco. Well, thank

765
00:39:27,800 --> 00:39:31,000
Speaker 1: god for that. Yeah, thank god that we stopped it

766
00:39:31,120 --> 00:39:35,319
Speaker 1: before Disco. Yeah, yeah, that would have really tarnished America's

767
00:39:35,360 --> 00:39:38,239
Speaker 1: brightest period. Also, I love when we get to give

768
00:39:38,280 --> 00:39:41,279
Speaker 1: the CIA credit for things they didn't do. Yeah, the

769
00:39:41,320 --> 00:39:44,920
Speaker 1: CIA was like, this seems real fucked up, which should

770
00:39:44,920 --> 00:39:47,120
Speaker 1: tell you all you need to know. We're just gonna

771
00:39:47,160 --> 00:39:50,160
Speaker 1: abduct people off the street and give them toxic doses

772
00:39:50,160 --> 00:39:56,000
Speaker 1: of LSD. That seems like the humane option. Oh man,

773
00:39:56,880 --> 00:40:01,280
Speaker 1: Like in between assassinating democratically a elected leaders and running

774
00:40:01,280 --> 00:40:03,840
Speaker 1: death squads, the CIA looks back at this and it's like,

775
00:40:03,960 --> 00:40:06,719
Speaker 1: oh boy, that's gonna piss people off. If we do this,

776
00:40:06,960 --> 00:40:09,399
Speaker 1: that's good. That's gonna really look bad. We're not looking

777
00:40:09,440 --> 00:40:11,640
Speaker 1: to get into that ice pick game. Yeah, we don't

778
00:40:11,640 --> 00:40:14,360
Speaker 1: want to. We don't want to be monsters. No, and

779
00:40:14,440 --> 00:40:22,799
Speaker 1: it's too much evidence. Yeah, LSD wears off. Yeah, So Daniel, Yeah,

780
00:40:23,680 --> 00:40:27,759
Speaker 1: how you feeling well educated? First of all, so I

781
00:40:27,800 --> 00:40:30,440
Speaker 1: appreciate that. I'm so surprised that some people went on

782
00:40:30,480 --> 00:40:32,600
Speaker 1: to live normal lives. I love that Howard went on

783
00:40:32,719 --> 00:40:37,080
Speaker 1: to yeah to actually like kind of be okay. Yeah, yeah,

784
00:40:37,200 --> 00:40:39,920
Speaker 1: that's a horror story. Man. There's so many horror stories

785
00:40:40,080 --> 00:40:45,040
Speaker 1: in this man's life. Yeah, he's a living, like a

786
00:40:45,160 --> 00:40:48,680
Speaker 1: living monument to how resilient human beings can be. He

787
00:40:48,800 --> 00:40:51,560
Speaker 1: had like a family, he like lived it seems to

788
00:40:51,600 --> 00:40:54,000
Speaker 1: have been a pretty happy life after he got you know,

789
00:40:54,480 --> 00:40:56,840
Speaker 1: over some things, and it was like, you know, training

790
00:40:56,880 --> 00:40:59,120
Speaker 1: school bus drivers. That's not an easy job, that's an

791
00:40:59,160 --> 00:41:01,360
Speaker 1: important job. He was apparently good at it, so like,

792
00:41:01,600 --> 00:41:05,799
Speaker 1: but it's like that's amazing. The brain repair can repair itself. Yeah,

793
00:41:06,000 --> 00:41:09,040
Speaker 1: and it probably did the best to it could. Yeah,

794
00:41:09,239 --> 00:41:11,799
Speaker 1: it seems like it did great in his case. Um

795
00:41:12,120 --> 00:41:15,280
Speaker 1: did Watts had up? Uh like really end up distancing

796
00:41:15,360 --> 00:41:19,040
Speaker 1: himself then from Friedman? No, I think he you know,

797
00:41:19,160 --> 00:41:21,680
Speaker 1: he had some major arguments with the man, but he

798
00:41:21,719 --> 00:41:26,000
Speaker 1: always regarded him as a brilliant, pioneering doctor. Um just

799
00:41:26,120 --> 00:41:28,120
Speaker 1: somebody who he think took things a little too far

800
00:41:28,280 --> 00:41:30,000
Speaker 1: and was a little bit too cavalier. But like he

801
00:41:30,080 --> 00:41:33,320
Speaker 1: really respected him. It seems I'm not an expert on Watts,

802
00:41:33,440 --> 00:41:39,600
Speaker 1: No not. Yeah, so, uh you feel happy after this?

803
00:41:40,640 --> 00:41:42,359
Speaker 1: I mean I'm happier that I'm living in a better

804
00:41:42,480 --> 00:41:45,200
Speaker 1: medical time, don't you feel like we're not doing anything

805
00:41:45,320 --> 00:41:47,239
Speaker 1: right now medically that we're gonna look back. I'm sure

806
00:41:47,239 --> 00:41:49,120
Speaker 1: somebody's gonna be like, actually, and then I'm like, oh no,

807
00:41:49,200 --> 00:41:51,040
Speaker 1: I think we're doing lots of ship that we're going

808
00:41:51,080 --> 00:41:53,799
Speaker 1: to look back on. It's early fucked up. Oh yeah, man,

809
00:41:54,120 --> 00:41:56,040
Speaker 1: I think we're doing a ton of stuff that is

810
00:41:56,080 --> 00:41:59,799
Speaker 1: going to be looked back on as deeply um problematic,

811
00:42:00,239 --> 00:42:02,160
Speaker 1: not as I don't think we're doing anything on a

812
00:42:02,280 --> 00:42:05,359
Speaker 1: mass scale that's nearly as bad as the mass lobotomies

813
00:42:05,480 --> 00:42:07,839
Speaker 1: that we're being performed back then. But I think we're

814
00:42:07,840 --> 00:42:10,680
Speaker 1: doing a lot of fund up ship. Um. I think

815
00:42:10,920 --> 00:42:13,400
Speaker 1: particularly what's going to be looked at in the future,

816
00:42:13,520 --> 00:42:15,879
Speaker 1: as as bad as as lobotomies are on that level,

817
00:42:16,320 --> 00:42:19,960
Speaker 1: is how we deal um with people who have uh

818
00:42:20,800 --> 00:42:23,319
Speaker 1: there's evidence that a lot of violent criminals, like people

819
00:42:23,320 --> 00:42:28,640
Speaker 1: who are in prison for violent crimes, have head injuries. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

820
00:42:28,760 --> 00:42:31,080
Speaker 1: They looked at that air in Hernandez case, and that

821
00:42:31,200 --> 00:42:35,200
Speaker 1: that the Boston Globe did the Spotlight team profoundly damage. Yeah.

822
00:42:36,760 --> 00:42:38,880
Speaker 1: I think we're going to look at our treatment of

823
00:42:39,200 --> 00:42:43,440
Speaker 1: prisoners UM as an essentially rooted in our inability to

824
00:42:43,560 --> 00:42:46,520
Speaker 1: recognize or our desire to not give a shit about

825
00:42:46,560 --> 00:42:49,279
Speaker 1: a lot of types of mental illness um and not

826
00:42:49,480 --> 00:42:51,200
Speaker 1: treat it and just lock it up. And I think

827
00:42:51,280 --> 00:42:53,080
Speaker 1: that that is something that will be viewed on the

828
00:42:53,160 --> 00:42:56,320
Speaker 1: same scale as lobotomies are today. I think I was

829
00:42:56,360 --> 00:42:58,920
Speaker 1: trying to like a specific procedure that we're like, oh,

830
00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:01,600
Speaker 1: you never do that anymore. But yeah, I know that's

831
00:43:01,680 --> 00:43:04,719
Speaker 1: a that's all, that's you're you're right on the nose

832
00:43:04,960 --> 00:43:07,080
Speaker 1: with that stuff. Yeah, I think I think there might.

833
00:43:07,920 --> 00:43:09,880
Speaker 1: I don't think it compares in terms of the scale,

834
00:43:09,920 --> 00:43:11,520
Speaker 1: but I think like one of the things a lot

835
00:43:11,560 --> 00:43:14,280
Speaker 1: of people with autism complain about with groups like Autism

836
00:43:14,360 --> 00:43:17,120
Speaker 1: Speaks is that their goal is to like eradicate autism,

837
00:43:17,640 --> 00:43:20,040
Speaker 1: and a lot of people argue, like, well, but wait,

838
00:43:20,120 --> 00:43:22,360
Speaker 1: I'm perfectly happy. I just have a different kind of

839
00:43:22,400 --> 00:43:24,799
Speaker 1: brain and I think about the world differently, and your

840
00:43:24,840 --> 00:43:28,760
Speaker 1: desire to eradicate me is kind of like eugenics and horrible.

841
00:43:28,840 --> 00:43:31,600
Speaker 1: And I do think that we will increasingly recognize that,

842
00:43:32,400 --> 00:43:36,600
Speaker 1: like trying to wipe out autism is incredibly fucked up, um,

843
00:43:36,840 --> 00:43:39,160
Speaker 1: and then instead we should be focusing on like helping

844
00:43:39,200 --> 00:43:43,200
Speaker 1: these people comtegrate with everyone else and like, yeah, um,

845
00:43:44,400 --> 00:43:47,120
Speaker 1: but I don't think the scale of that, and I

846
00:43:47,160 --> 00:43:51,360
Speaker 1: don't think like that's not it's a sliding scale. I

847
00:43:51,360 --> 00:43:53,640
Speaker 1: think it's worse. Two jam I s picks into people's brains.

848
00:43:54,400 --> 00:43:56,160
Speaker 1: I just keep thinking of the show that Nick. Did

849
00:43:56,200 --> 00:44:00,080
Speaker 1: you watch? The Nick No highly recommended Clive Owe and

850
00:44:00,600 --> 00:44:02,560
Speaker 1: Chris Sullivan who's not on the show This is us.

851
00:44:03,360 --> 00:44:08,279
Speaker 1: I think it's Soderberg, but it was on Showtime, And

852
00:44:08,360 --> 00:44:11,600
Speaker 1: it's all about like the medical advancements in the like

853
00:44:11,760 --> 00:44:15,319
Speaker 1: teens and twenties, and just seeing like what they were

854
00:44:15,360 --> 00:44:17,640
Speaker 1: trying to figure out and the chances they were taking

855
00:44:17,680 --> 00:44:20,279
Speaker 1: that ended up working, and like the advancements they would

856
00:44:20,320 --> 00:44:23,040
Speaker 1: find just even how to like do a transfusion and

857
00:44:23,120 --> 00:44:25,279
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So I just kept thinking of that,

858
00:44:25,920 --> 00:44:28,920
Speaker 1: because my whole thing is like when something very delicate

859
00:44:29,320 --> 00:44:33,840
Speaker 1: and very tricky, maybe that's redundant, but um ends up

860
00:44:33,920 --> 00:44:38,000
Speaker 1: being like common. I always wonder how many times what

861
00:44:38,239 --> 00:44:42,120
Speaker 1: was the trial and error process? It kind of scares me,

862
00:44:42,239 --> 00:44:45,640
Speaker 1: like what was the trial and error process for Walter Jackson,

863
00:44:45,719 --> 00:44:48,759
Speaker 1: Freedman and whatever? And those people are gone, I mean,

864
00:44:49,040 --> 00:44:52,840
Speaker 1: and and those monkeys are gone it's, um, you know,

865
00:44:53,320 --> 00:44:56,880
Speaker 1: there's an extent to which we were going to try lobotomies.

866
00:44:57,040 --> 00:44:59,440
Speaker 1: Of course it was. It was it was going to happen,

867
00:44:59,560 --> 00:45:02,279
Speaker 1: and it's bad. You know, even though some people were

868
00:45:02,360 --> 00:45:05,640
Speaker 1: going to be horribly affected by it. It had to

869
00:45:05,719 --> 00:45:07,880
Speaker 1: happen for medical science to advance. It didn't have to

870
00:45:07,920 --> 00:45:10,800
Speaker 1: happen on this scale. It's like, we were going to

871
00:45:10,960 --> 00:45:14,600
Speaker 1: realize that like riddling could be helpful in treating certain

872
00:45:14,719 --> 00:45:17,040
Speaker 1: kinds of like a d h D. It didn't have

873
00:45:17,200 --> 00:45:20,600
Speaker 1: to be wildly over prescribed to children at the level

874
00:45:20,680 --> 00:45:24,000
Speaker 1: it was in the nineteen nineties and stuff. Um, not

875
00:45:24,160 --> 00:45:25,799
Speaker 1: that I don't think obviously, I don't think giving riddle

876
00:45:25,800 --> 00:45:28,640
Speaker 1: into kids as nearly as bad as thousands of lobotomies

877
00:45:28,680 --> 00:45:32,680
Speaker 1: with ice picks and unwashed hands. But um, there's always

878
00:45:32,719 --> 00:45:34,719
Speaker 1: going to be some sort of like, we figured out

879
00:45:34,760 --> 00:45:37,440
Speaker 1: this new thing, it helps some people, let's massively over

880
00:45:37,520 --> 00:45:40,879
Speaker 1: apply it. That's kind of how human beings are. Um.

881
00:45:41,480 --> 00:45:44,359
Speaker 1: But if like, that's part of why the scientific method

882
00:45:44,480 --> 00:45:46,520
Speaker 1: is supposed to work the way it's supposed to work,

883
00:45:46,680 --> 00:45:49,520
Speaker 1: where scientists are supposed to kind of pull their ego

884
00:45:49,600 --> 00:45:51,239
Speaker 1: out of it and look at like Okay, well, now

885
00:45:51,320 --> 00:45:53,319
Speaker 1: we have data saying we're actually doing this way too

886
00:45:53,440 --> 00:45:55,600
Speaker 1: much and we should stop. But then you get a

887
00:45:55,640 --> 00:45:58,040
Speaker 1: guy like Freeman who bases his whole identity on the

888
00:45:58,120 --> 00:45:59,560
Speaker 1: fact that he's the best at this thing that we

889
00:45:59,560 --> 00:46:04,120
Speaker 1: shouldn't really be doing, um, and then it doesn't stop.

890
00:46:04,280 --> 00:46:09,080
Speaker 1: So it's this kind of problem where in an ideal world,

891
00:46:09,160 --> 00:46:11,360
Speaker 1: if we treated science the way we're always supposed to

892
00:46:11,440 --> 00:46:13,640
Speaker 1: treat it, somebody would have walked up to Freeman in

893
00:46:13,719 --> 00:46:16,560
Speaker 1: like the late forties or early fifties and been like, actually,

894
00:46:16,680 --> 00:46:18,319
Speaker 1: this is being done way too much, and he would

895
00:46:18,320 --> 00:46:21,520
Speaker 1: be like, ah, damn, okay, well let's figure out something better.

896
00:46:21,640 --> 00:46:23,400
Speaker 1: But instead he doesn't ye because he just wants to

897
00:46:23,440 --> 00:46:25,160
Speaker 1: do this. He wants to do this thing. He wants

898
00:46:25,200 --> 00:46:29,759
Speaker 1: to funk with people's brain exactly. Also, are you are

899
00:46:29,840 --> 00:46:31,920
Speaker 1: you a Song of Ice and Fire guy at all?

900
00:46:32,280 --> 00:46:35,040
Speaker 1: Or yeah? I love it? Yeah yeah yeah. Makes me

901
00:46:35,120 --> 00:46:39,640
Speaker 1: think of Qui born umah, the character, because there's always

902
00:46:39,680 --> 00:46:42,160
Speaker 1: that too in medical history, whether it's like because I

903
00:46:42,280 --> 00:46:44,920
Speaker 1: look at it, then there's more, I'm sure, but just

904
00:46:45,560 --> 00:46:47,200
Speaker 1: in the sake of this conversation, like I look at

905
00:46:47,280 --> 00:46:51,200
Speaker 1: like there's people who learn what medicine works, and they

906
00:46:51,280 --> 00:46:53,520
Speaker 1: dedicate their life to helping people. And then there's the

907
00:46:53,840 --> 00:46:56,840
Speaker 1: other type of person who has no problem just poking around,

908
00:46:57,280 --> 00:47:00,080
Speaker 1: putting things together and then seeing what comes of and

909
00:47:00,160 --> 00:47:01,840
Speaker 1: a lot of times you get advancements out of that

910
00:47:01,960 --> 00:47:04,160
Speaker 1: or you find out something that works. But they might

911
00:47:04,239 --> 00:47:07,600
Speaker 1: not necessarily be the same type of traditional doctor who

912
00:47:07,680 --> 00:47:11,759
Speaker 1: wants to help someone. They're just very curious and have

913
00:47:12,000 --> 00:47:15,080
Speaker 1: the ability to just dig around in people's innards to

914
00:47:15,120 --> 00:47:18,279
Speaker 1: see what can work where. And that always creeps me

915
00:47:18,360 --> 00:47:23,800
Speaker 1: onto it isn't that great? Yeah, yeah, you wanna plug

916
00:47:23,880 --> 00:47:28,000
Speaker 1: your plug doubles Daniel I do. Um. People should go

917
00:47:28,160 --> 00:47:30,319
Speaker 1: to Daniel van Kirk dot com. There you can see

918
00:47:30,680 --> 00:47:33,960
Speaker 1: all of my dates and where I'm going to be. Um.

919
00:47:35,560 --> 00:47:38,840
Speaker 1: I've got December two, I'm doing a show at Largo

920
00:47:39,160 --> 00:47:42,839
Speaker 1: on November two, I will be headlining in Pedalouma, California,

921
00:47:43,080 --> 00:47:46,239
Speaker 1: and other tour dates and things as well. But most importantly,

922
00:47:46,760 --> 00:47:50,520
Speaker 1: you can get my album Thanks Diane. It drops on November.

923
00:47:51,120 --> 00:47:53,080
Speaker 1: It's if you're hearing this before then you can pre

924
00:47:53,200 --> 00:47:56,640
Speaker 1: buy the album at the Apple Store app in your

925
00:47:56,680 --> 00:47:58,719
Speaker 1: phone or go to Daniel van Kirk dot com and

926
00:47:58,800 --> 00:48:01,000
Speaker 1: you can click through to there. When you do that,

927
00:48:01,120 --> 00:48:03,160
Speaker 1: you'll get an instant track called Don't Be a Dick,

928
00:48:03,280 --> 00:48:05,440
Speaker 1: which I'm proud of. But you'll get the whole album

929
00:48:05,560 --> 00:48:09,799
Speaker 1: onni November and go to Daniel van Kirk dot com

930
00:48:09,880 --> 00:48:11,800
Speaker 1: for all that, or listen to me on my podcast

931
00:48:12,200 --> 00:48:14,640
Speaker 1: Dump People Town, which I do with the Squaw Brothers,

932
00:48:14,760 --> 00:48:20,080
Speaker 1: or pen Pals, which I do with Rory Scoville. Cool Well,

933
00:48:20,800 --> 00:48:22,800
Speaker 1: I am Robert Evans. You can find me on the

934
00:48:22,840 --> 00:48:26,200
Speaker 1: internet at behind the Bastards dot com, where the sources

935
00:48:26,239 --> 00:48:29,439
Speaker 1: for this episode will be, including uh Jack el his

936
00:48:29,440 --> 00:48:33,200
Speaker 1: wonderful book Lobotomist. Uh. You can find us on Twitter

937
00:48:33,239 --> 00:48:35,400
Speaker 1: at Instagram A at Bastard's pod. You can find me

938
00:48:35,719 --> 00:48:38,920
Speaker 1: on Twitter at I right okay, And you can find

939
00:48:39,200 --> 00:48:41,640
Speaker 1: love in your heart as long as you're willing to

940
00:48:41,719 --> 00:48:45,400
Speaker 1: put an ice pick into your brain. So again, this

941
00:48:45,600 --> 00:48:47,799
Speaker 1: is my encouragement to all of our listeners to grab

942
00:48:47,880 --> 00:48:50,880
Speaker 1: an ice pick and start lobotomizing. Be a hero like

943
00:48:51,040 --> 00:48:53,919
Speaker 1: Dr Freeman. So if you can, we can we urge

944
00:48:53,960 --> 00:48:57,480
Speaker 1: people to carry out unlicensed surgery. No, but you could

945
00:48:57,600 --> 00:49:01,520
Speaker 1: plug your other podcast. I have an their podcast. I

946
00:49:01,600 --> 00:49:05,480
Speaker 1: do have another poet friend. Yeah, the Worst Year Ever

947
00:49:06,000 --> 00:49:09,000
Speaker 1: with Katie and Cody Uh from Some More News. We

948
00:49:09,320 --> 00:49:12,600
Speaker 1: talk about election, which will be the worst year ever.

949
00:49:13,120 --> 00:49:15,440
Speaker 1: Um So, if you want a lobotomy to feel like

950
00:49:15,760 --> 00:49:18,399
Speaker 1: sweet release, listen to the Worst Year Ever. This week

951
00:49:18,480 --> 00:49:23,640
Speaker 1: we talk about Tulsi Cabard, so that one's fun. Nice. Yeah, Well,

952
00:49:23,680 --> 00:49:25,279
Speaker 1: thanks for having me on this show man. I love

953
00:49:25,360 --> 00:49:29,120
Speaker 1: coming back and learning. Yeah, I'm thank you for coming. Daniel,

954
00:49:29,160 --> 00:49:32,360
Speaker 1: thank you for learning. Uh and uh, thank you for

955
00:49:32,400 --> 00:49:34,000
Speaker 1: spreading the gospel of the ice Pick