WEBVTT - Part Two: The Bastard Who Invented The Lobotomy 0:00:02.640 --> 0:00:06.920 What's grease and m door knobs. I'm Robert Evans hosted 0:00:06.920 --> 0:00:09.559 Behind the Bastards for part two of our episode on 0:00:09.600 --> 0:00:12.560 the inventor of lobotomy, and the door to the recording 0:00:12.640 --> 0:00:16.360 studio has been greased with olive oil, which I'm informing 0:00:16.440 --> 0:00:19.799 listeners of so that they can truly get into the 0:00:19.840 --> 0:00:22.920 behind the Bastard spirit by greasing their own doors with 0:00:22.960 --> 0:00:26.640 olive oil. So everybody play look at home, Grease, grease 0:00:26.720 --> 0:00:30.400 something near you up with olive oil. All wait, all right, 0:00:30.800 --> 0:00:34.240 I'm here as with in part one with Daniel van Kirk. Daniel, 0:00:34.280 --> 0:00:35.919 how are you? How are you? How are you? How 0:00:35.960 --> 0:00:38.240 are you? How are you doing today? I am great. 0:00:38.400 --> 0:00:41.159 I'm so glad to be back for the conclusion of 0:00:41.200 --> 0:00:45.400 this story about a horrific man who justified his means. Yep, 0:00:45.840 --> 0:00:49.279 he's a bad man. And speaking of bad men, were 0:00:49.280 --> 0:00:52.040 about to talk about a president. Although a president most 0:00:52.040 --> 0:00:56.840 people like, um, so I may be pissing some people off. 0:00:57.080 --> 0:00:59.640 John and Robert Kennedy are probably the two most famous 0:00:59.640 --> 0:01:02.760 brothers in American history. One was the president until he 0:01:02.800 --> 0:01:04.920 got shot, another would have been the president if he 0:01:05.000 --> 0:01:07.960 hadn't been shot. Both men have come to symbolize fairly 0:01:08.040 --> 0:01:10.800 or unfairly, an era of just in decent governance in 0:01:10.840 --> 0:01:13.640 the United States of America, one that will probably never 0:01:13.760 --> 0:01:17.360 come again. But the Kennedy brothers had a sister as 0:01:17.360 --> 0:01:19.440 well as another brother named Ted, who we don't talk 0:01:19.480 --> 0:01:22.319 about much because of that lady he drunkenly killed. This 0:01:22.360 --> 0:01:25.600 woman's name was Rosemary Kennedy, and her life was stolen 0:01:25.640 --> 0:01:30.080 by Dr Watts, Dr Freeman, and wild unchecked misogyny. Now, 0:01:30.280 --> 0:01:33.240 Rosemary's birth was, in the words of the Irish Times, 0:01:33.280 --> 0:01:37.360 complicated by medical misadventure. Depending on which source you read, 0:01:37.400 --> 0:01:39.840 you will hear different things about the exact extent of 0:01:39.840 --> 0:01:43.319 her intellectual disabilities. Some articles I've read say she was 0:01:43.400 --> 0:01:46.559 severely mentally handicapped and unable to lead a normal life. 0:01:46.800 --> 0:01:49.920 Others argue she had learning disabilities but was otherwise bright 0:01:49.960 --> 0:01:52.680 and capable. I'm not a doctor, but I did teach 0:01:52.720 --> 0:01:55.080 special ed once, and it seems fair for me to say, 0:01:55.320 --> 0:01:58.600 whatever the precise extent of her issues, Rosemary Kennedy would 0:01:58.600 --> 0:02:01.400 have been capable of living a real, satively independent life 0:02:01.440 --> 0:02:04.600 with some specific help. Now you get very different versions 0:02:04.600 --> 0:02:06.760 of Rosemary story depending on which right up you read. 0:02:06.800 --> 0:02:10.000 For example, here's people. As Rosemary entered her late teens, 0:02:10.000 --> 0:02:12.320 her parents saw less of the affectionate, dutiful and eager 0:02:12.360 --> 0:02:14.040 to please young woman they knew and loved, and more 0:02:14.080 --> 0:02:16.760 of her violent outbursts. She began screaming and yelling and 0:02:16.800 --> 0:02:19.600 throwing things. She was violent and throwing vases across the room. 0:02:19.639 --> 0:02:22.720 She was out of control. One person says now that 0:02:22.840 --> 0:02:25.840 article paints Rosemary is a deeply disturbed young woman, and 0:02:25.880 --> 0:02:28.440 her lobotomy is tragic, but purely the result of her 0:02:28.440 --> 0:02:30.720 parents not having better options to care for such a 0:02:30.760 --> 0:02:34.400 disabled child in a more primitive era. Another Irish Times 0:02:34.480 --> 0:02:36.720 article I found, which interviewed one of her biographers, a 0:02:36.720 --> 0:02:39.560 man named Irvine, takes a different route. Irvine has a 0:02:39.639 --> 0:02:41.520 more filled out picture in his head. He sees her 0:02:41.560 --> 0:02:43.880 as stunningly beautiful. It was often said she was the 0:02:43.919 --> 0:02:46.480 most beautiful of the Kennedy's, beautiful and poetic. She did 0:02:46.520 --> 0:02:48.800 have learning disabilities, It's hard to say how much, but 0:02:48.880 --> 0:02:51.360 she wrote letters, she kept a diary. She became a 0:02:51.360 --> 0:02:54.079 Montessori teacher for a while, and she taught young children. 0:02:54.320 --> 0:02:56.280 Her favorite book was Winnie the Pooh, and she could 0:02:56.320 --> 0:03:00.680 read that to children. So yeah, yeah, great book. He 0:03:00.760 --> 0:03:03.880 has the sense of a fairly normal, deeply loving young woman. 0:03:03.960 --> 0:03:05.920 Every letter that she wrote a show drenched in this 0:03:05.960 --> 0:03:08.240 want for her father to acknowledge her and love her. 0:03:08.440 --> 0:03:10.840 Every one of those letters is heartbreaking. It's all about 0:03:10.919 --> 0:03:13.359 I'm doing my best and I hope this pleases you. 0:03:13.600 --> 0:03:15.840 She would send reports about her weight because wait was 0:03:15.840 --> 0:03:18.119 a huge thing in the Kennedy family, monitoring the weight 0:03:18.120 --> 0:03:20.639 of all the children. There's so much correspondence where Joe 0:03:20.639 --> 0:03:22.960 and Rose are just talking about the weight of their children. 0:03:23.639 --> 0:03:27.720 So yeah. Meanwhile, an Irish Central article I found on 0:03:27.800 --> 0:03:30.800 her describes her this way. By kindergarten, Rosemary was called 0:03:30.800 --> 0:03:33.120 retarded in the lingo of the times, and such children 0:03:33.120 --> 0:03:36.600 were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image, 0:03:36.600 --> 0:03:39.800 it was a disaster. Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third 0:03:39.880 --> 0:03:41.880 or fourth grade intelligence, and she was packed off to 0:03:41.920 --> 0:03:44.600 a boarding school for misfits. From there, she wrote her 0:03:44.600 --> 0:03:47.680 father a heartbreaking letter, Darling, Daddy, I hate to disappoint 0:03:47.680 --> 0:03:49.520 you in any way. Come to see me very soon. 0:03:49.600 --> 0:03:54.600 I get very lonesome every day now. Rosemary finally caught 0:03:54.640 --> 0:03:57.200 a break when her father became ambassador to Britain, and 0:03:57.240 --> 0:04:00.240 she thrived in a London convent school. But back in 0:04:00.240 --> 0:04:03.560 the States, Rosemary, who again was very attractive, began attracting 0:04:03.600 --> 0:04:07.160 admirers at twenties. She was a picturesque young woman, a 0:04:07.200 --> 0:04:10.280 snow princess with flushed cheeks, gleaming, smile, plump figure in 0:04:10.280 --> 0:04:13.760 a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met. Uh. 0:04:13.800 --> 0:04:16.560 And of course, as Larson writes, her parents found her 0:04:16.560 --> 0:04:20.120 sexuality dangerous. And I think this gets to the core 0:04:20.240 --> 0:04:24.480 of kennedy family issues with Rosemary more than anything, um. 0:04:24.520 --> 0:04:26.400 And it seems to me, based on what I've read, 0:04:26.400 --> 0:04:30.040 that the argument that she was mentally retarded is very oversold. 0:04:30.080 --> 0:04:32.520 I think she had learning disabilities. I think she was 0:04:32.560 --> 0:04:35.640 someone who had difficulty thriving in a normal school. But 0:04:35.760 --> 0:04:37.599 I think she was basically it seems like she was 0:04:37.640 --> 0:04:42.760 basically a functional, intelligent person UM who was a young, 0:04:42.880 --> 0:04:45.480 attractive woman and people wanted to fuck her, and she 0:04:45.520 --> 0:04:47.760 wanted to funk them, and this was not okay with 0:04:47.839 --> 0:04:52.880 Joe Kennedy. So I think that's the core of the issue. Um. 0:04:53.040 --> 0:04:56.000 The Kennedy's were a powerful, wealthy, high society family just 0:04:56.000 --> 0:04:58.320 got to stay in line on that family got to 0:04:58.360 --> 0:05:03.000 stay in line, in line. She has some learning disabilities, 0:05:03.320 --> 0:05:07.960 and she's promiscuous and a woman. We can't we gotta 0:05:08.040 --> 0:05:10.800 can't take out this part of it too. Yeah, she 0:05:10.880 --> 0:05:13.679 maybe having some mood disorders. So maybe she like flies 0:05:13.720 --> 0:05:16.040 off the handle and gets like yelly and stuff and 0:05:16.080 --> 0:05:18.279 like that. They'd assume, like, well, she's not happy in 0:05:18.279 --> 0:05:21.400 the family, so she must be broken. Yeah, that's and 0:05:21.480 --> 0:05:25.440 she's a woman's here to disregard her exactly, Like that's 0:05:25.440 --> 0:05:28.160 going to carry on the name, Yeah, exactly. I think 0:05:28.200 --> 0:05:30.479 she was a strong willed young woman who wanted to 0:05:30.520 --> 0:05:32.760 live a life that would have been inconvenient to the 0:05:32.800 --> 0:05:35.880 family goals. And it's my opinion that this, more than 0:05:35.920 --> 0:05:39.359 anything else, sealed her fate. And before we go any further, 0:05:39.440 --> 0:05:41.080 I want you to take a look at this picture 0:05:41.120 --> 0:05:43.200 of Rosemary. Will be on our website too, Sophie, can 0:05:43.200 --> 0:05:47.360 you show that to Daniel. Oh she looks like fun. Yeah, 0:05:47.400 --> 0:05:50.360 she looks fun. She looks like a normal, healthy young woman. 0:05:50.920 --> 0:05:53.960 I would describe her as looking playful and lively and coy, 0:05:54.160 --> 0:05:57.080 like a willful young woman with a spirit behind her. Yeah, 0:05:57.200 --> 0:06:03.400 she falls into uh like fun girl. Winter, Yeah, fun 0:06:03.480 --> 0:06:07.359 girl fall. Now, within mere months of this photograph, she 0:06:07.360 --> 0:06:09.800 would be reduced to a shambling ruin of herself by 0:06:09.800 --> 0:06:12.680 the treatments of doctor's Freeman and Watts. But the final 0:06:12.720 --> 0:06:15.279 decision on whether or not to perform the lobotomy on 0:06:15.360 --> 0:06:19.640 Rosemary was up to the family patriarch Joseph from People Quote, 0:06:19.760 --> 0:06:22.200 Without his wife's knowledge, he took Rosemary to see Dr 0:06:22.200 --> 0:06:25.640 Walter Freeman, a controversial neurologist, psychiatrist and professor at George 0:06:25.640 --> 0:06:29.279 Washington University who had gained fame for popularizing lobotomies in America. 0:06:29.720 --> 0:06:31.039 He took her to the best at the time, and 0:06:31.080 --> 0:06:34.279 at the time time readers, Digest, Newsweek, everybody was touting 0:06:34.320 --> 0:06:36.880 the best thing for mental illness, the lobotomy. It was 0:06:36.920 --> 0:06:39.080 the cure. All people were so eager for some help 0:06:39.120 --> 0:06:42.080 that they just grabbed onto it. You see, that's Freedman 0:06:42.200 --> 0:06:45.000 from the last episode being smart about just playing into 0:06:45.040 --> 0:06:48.360 the press. He did. He'd gotten this ship into the press, 0:06:48.400 --> 0:06:51.800 and fucking Joe Kennedy reads this in a Newsweek as 0:06:51.839 --> 0:06:56.400 he's sipping fucking Manhattan's and his his his can of 0:06:56.440 --> 0:06:58.520 Bunkport retreat or wherever the funk it is. And if 0:06:58.520 --> 0:07:01.000 you need to wonder about how much you Kennedy cared 0:07:01.120 --> 0:07:08.200 about the like agency or um agency. She's a girl, exactly, 0:07:08.279 --> 0:07:10.720 writes of a woman. Not only is he taking his 0:07:10.800 --> 0:07:13.360 daughter to get her brain carved out, he's not telling 0:07:13.440 --> 0:07:18.000 his own wife that he's doing it. No, why would he? Exactly? Yeah, 0:07:18.120 --> 0:07:22.600 this is all double it's a double smack. Yeah. Now, 0:07:22.760 --> 0:07:26.640 Freeman diagnosed Rosemary with agitated depression and promised Joe that 0:07:26.680 --> 0:07:29.040 a lobotomy would put an into her rages and render 0:07:29.080 --> 0:07:31.400 her happy and content. What did he diagnose her with 0:07:32.360 --> 0:07:36.400 agitated depression? This sounds like that ship where they're like, Oh, 0:07:37.600 --> 0:07:38.760 what do you want me to call it? What do 0:07:38.760 --> 0:07:41.880 you want here? Joe? Yeah, she's not she's not happy 0:07:42.120 --> 0:07:44.320 and that's a problem. That means she's broken, right, But 0:07:44.360 --> 0:07:46.840 the agitated is why we have to do something about it, 0:07:46.880 --> 0:07:50.280 because it's just getting worse. The family's got money and 0:07:50.320 --> 0:07:52.280 she's not happy. So the only thing to do was 0:07:52.320 --> 0:07:56.320 to break a brain us, okay, sorry. In the file 0:07:56.360 --> 0:08:00.160 of Dr Freeman assisted by Dr James Watts for him 0:08:00.240 --> 0:08:03.800 to prefrontal lobotomy and Rosemary at George Washington University Hospital 0:08:04.320 --> 0:08:08.240 rather than curing her. The lobotomy essentially erased Rosemary Kennedy. 0:08:08.320 --> 0:08:11.600 The procedure itself literally involved Dr Watts scraping away at 0:08:11.600 --> 0:08:14.160 her brain tissue while Dr Freeman asked her to repeat 0:08:14.240 --> 0:08:16.880 stories from her childhood and lists the month of the year. 0:08:17.120 --> 0:08:19.880 When she could no longer answer, the procedure was pronounced 0:08:19.880 --> 0:08:25.120 a success. Whoa yeah, tell us when we've taken enough 0:08:25.640 --> 0:08:27.800 you tell us, yeah, tell us when you don't remember 0:08:27.840 --> 0:08:30.680 who you are, and then we'll be like, part we 0:08:30.880 --> 0:08:33.840 got it perfect, We got her Because I wondered that too, 0:08:33.880 --> 0:08:36.600 like if somebody got their lobotomy right. And then they 0:08:36.640 --> 0:08:39.680 were still like the in the last episode, the doctor 0:08:39.800 --> 0:08:43.080 who went out and got drunk. Still like what they 0:08:43.080 --> 0:08:44.520 were like, well, we gotta go in and dig a 0:08:44.600 --> 0:08:48.160 little deeper. I guess they often did that. Not always. 0:08:48.200 --> 0:08:50.679 We'll talk about some other cases later, um, but yeah, 0:08:50.760 --> 0:08:53.280 that was not uncommon. For the one. They were like, 0:08:53.360 --> 0:08:55.800 let's get it all, just keep talking it all. Just 0:08:55.840 --> 0:08:58.640 get the whole girl out of there. Yeah, just make 0:08:58.679 --> 0:09:02.800 her a shell now. Rosemary spent the rest of her 0:09:02.840 --> 0:09:06.040 life completely dependent on a small handful of caretakers until 0:09:06.080 --> 0:09:08.559 her father's stroke. She lived isolated and hidden from the 0:09:08.600 --> 0:09:11.200 rest of the family at St. Koleta's, a Catholic facility 0:09:11.200 --> 0:09:15.160 in wisconsant for inconveniently disabled members of which families. When 0:09:15.240 --> 0:09:18.120 Joe finally stroked out, her nieces and nephews attempted to 0:09:18.160 --> 0:09:20.840 reintegrate her back into the family, but any hope she'd 0:09:20.840 --> 0:09:23.480 ever had of an independent life of forging in existence 0:09:23.520 --> 0:09:27.720 for herself was obliterated by doctors Freeman and Watts. Unice 0:09:27.800 --> 0:09:31.120 Kennedy would eventually create the Special Olympics in honor of Rosemary, 0:09:31.160 --> 0:09:33.559 and in nineteen eighties seven story in the Saturday Evening 0:09:33.559 --> 0:09:36.160 Post brought the whole sordid tale to light, but that 0:09:36.240 --> 0:09:38.120 was far too late to stop the career of Walter 0:09:38.200 --> 0:09:41.520 Freeman from reaping an unspeakable toll in human lives. By 0:09:41.600 --> 0:09:44.359 nineteen forty five, at the end of Freeman and Watts's collaboration, 0:09:44.440 --> 0:09:48.040 around a hundred fifty lobotomies were being performed annually nationwide. 0:09:48.400 --> 0:09:51.479 But in nineteen forty six, Walter Freeman introduced his revolutionary 0:09:51.520 --> 0:09:55.040 transorbital lobotomy technique and started teaching it to surgeons and 0:09:55.160 --> 0:09:59.160 non surgeons all around this glorious land. By nineteen forty nine, 0:09:59.440 --> 0:10:03.200 some five of thousand lobotomies were being performed annually, so 0:10:03.280 --> 0:10:06.920 that's great. Many of those were performed by Dr Freeman himself, 0:10:07.080 --> 0:10:09.520 who started traveling the nation showing off his skills to 0:10:09.600 --> 0:10:11.679 rooms full of doctors in the press. And I'm going 0:10:11.679 --> 0:10:15.520 to quote now from the book The Lobotomist. Patricia Darien, 0:10:15.600 --> 0:10:18.119 a student nurse at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville, 0:10:18.160 --> 0:10:21.679 watched Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy at a nearby state hospital. 0:10:21.920 --> 0:10:24.920 Freeman selected the patients for operations, she reported, by twisting 0:10:24.920 --> 0:10:27.679 their joints to determine their flexibility, not by reading or 0:10:27.720 --> 0:10:30.800 taking histories. After a special luncheon honor of the occasion 0:10:30.840 --> 0:10:32.840 of his visit, he occupied a conference room and had 0:10:32.880 --> 0:10:35.720 each patient shocked and photographed. When all was ready, he 0:10:35.720 --> 0:10:39.600 would plunge the lucatom in. Darien noted he wore no gown, mask, 0:10:39.760 --> 0:10:42.000 or gloves. Afterwards, he would sit the patients up and 0:10:42.000 --> 0:10:44.040 have them walked out of the room. He was very 0:10:44.080 --> 0:10:45.880 proud of the fact that the people walked in and 0:10:45.920 --> 0:10:48.360 walked out, none had to be carried, although one or 0:10:48.400 --> 0:10:51.000 two of them sagged badly on the way out. She remembered. 0:10:51.200 --> 0:10:54.640 After several operations, Freeman enlivened the demonstration by cutting nerve 0:10:54.640 --> 0:10:57.640 fibers on both sides of the brain simultaneously. Then he 0:10:57.679 --> 0:10:59.959 looked up at us, smiling. I thought I was seeing 0:11:00.000 --> 0:11:02.400 a circus act. He moved both hands back and forth 0:11:02.440 --> 0:11:05.320 in unison, cutting the brain identically behind each eye. It 0:11:05.360 --> 0:11:08.000 astonished me that he was so gay, so high, so up. 0:11:08.080 --> 0:11:10.800 Darien recalled the sequence of events as a living nightmare, 0:11:10.960 --> 0:11:16.439 a deeply disturbing performance. He's reached his final form. Yeah now. 0:11:16.800 --> 0:11:20.040 Frank Freeman, Walter's son, was occasionally enlisted to help his 0:11:20.080 --> 0:11:23.080 father in these lobotomy exhibitions. They would spend weeks at 0:11:23.080 --> 0:11:25.640 a time on the road, crossing thousands of miles, visiting 0:11:25.720 --> 0:11:29.520 numerous hospitals, and lobotomizing huge numbers of people. In nineteen 0:11:29.559 --> 0:11:32.320 fifty two, Frank helped his father perform a lobotomy. The 0:11:32.320 --> 0:11:35.120 process started when Walter immobilized the patient with a series 0:11:35.160 --> 0:11:38.280 of powerful electro shocks, and then, as Frank recalled, I 0:11:38.360 --> 0:11:40.280 was there to hold the person's legs down. We all 0:11:40.280 --> 0:11:42.480 went for a ride when he threw the switch. When 0:11:42.480 --> 0:11:45.400 the patient stopped seizing, Walter would lift the eyelid, jam 0:11:45.520 --> 0:11:48.199 his ice pick inside and shattered the bone that separated 0:11:48.240 --> 0:11:50.800 it from the brain. He would carefully hammer away at 0:11:50.800 --> 0:11:52.880 gray matter until both sides of the frontal lobe had 0:11:52.880 --> 0:11:56.360 been disconnected. Frank recalled, I was kind of impressed. He 0:11:56.400 --> 0:12:00.880 made it look so easy. That's good, right, Well, I mean, yeah, 0:12:00.880 --> 0:12:04.480 it's so easy because he loves it. He's so you know, 0:12:05.000 --> 0:12:07.080 like you were saying, do what you love and you'll 0:12:07.120 --> 0:12:09.440 never work a day in your life of hammering into 0:12:09.440 --> 0:12:11.640 people's brains with a nice pet. But he also seems 0:12:11.640 --> 0:12:14.920 obsessed with the celebrity of it, like he wants to 0:12:15.080 --> 0:12:18.160 like be the guy and come to your town and 0:12:18.200 --> 0:12:21.200 put on his brain show. He wants to put on 0:12:21.200 --> 0:12:22.880 a show. He wants to do it with both hands. 0:12:22.920 --> 0:12:26.080 That you're really impressed. And see they all walked out 0:12:26.080 --> 0:12:28.200 of here. Did you see him all walk out like 0:12:28.240 --> 0:12:33.160 well to be carried himself. But yeah, he was lazy 0:12:33.200 --> 0:12:36.640 when he came in. Yeah. Now, over the course of 0:12:36.679 --> 0:12:40.160 a very long career, Walter would perform more than three thousand, 0:12:40.200 --> 0:12:43.520 four hundred and thirty nine lobotomies in fifty five hospitals 0:12:43.520 --> 0:12:46.960 in twenty three states. The entire time he believed himself 0:12:47.000 --> 0:12:49.680 to be something of a heroic medical radical, pulling his 0:12:49.720 --> 0:12:53.480 discipline forward into the future. His motto was lobotomy gets 0:12:53.520 --> 0:12:57.040 them home, which meant in effect that lobotomizing people allowed 0:12:57.080 --> 0:13:00.320 them to exist comfortably and without complaint in Americans Itty. 0:13:00.960 --> 0:13:03.440 It is impossible to know how many of Freeman's patients 0:13:03.480 --> 0:13:06.600 truly benefited from his treatment. His summaries of his results 0:13:06.600 --> 0:13:09.760 were always very biased, and it's never possible to analyze 0:13:09.800 --> 0:13:12.880 them outside of the lens of his own opinions. Objective 0:13:12.920 --> 0:13:15.959 scientific analysis of the results of lobotomies in this period 0:13:16.000 --> 0:13:19.040 are essentially impossible to find. We know that at least 0:13:19.040 --> 0:13:21.440 four hundred and ninety of his patients died as a 0:13:21.480 --> 0:13:24.640 result of his services. We also know that lobotomizing human 0:13:24.679 --> 0:13:27.520 beings was not simply a matter of medical necessity. The 0:13:27.600 --> 0:13:30.320 longer Freeman worked as a solo lobotomist, the more he 0:13:30.400 --> 0:13:32.760 leaned into the performance art side of the field. And 0:13:32.760 --> 0:13:36.079 I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post now, shocking his colleagues, 0:13:36.120 --> 0:13:38.560 for instance, grew into a great source of pleasure. Once, 0:13:38.640 --> 0:13:41.360 during a lobotomy demonstration at a nursing home in Baltimore 0:13:41.360 --> 0:13:43.880 before a group of surgeons who replaced his surgical hammer 0:13:43.880 --> 0:13:46.800 with a carpenter's mallet. He delighted in reporting how other 0:13:46.840 --> 0:13:50.679 lobotomy demonstrations made a Columbia University professor emeritus of neurology 0:13:50.720 --> 0:13:53.920 weakened with faintness, sickened students in England, and so outraged 0:13:53.960 --> 0:13:56.240 a German neurologist that Freeman said, I almost had to 0:13:56.240 --> 0:13:57.840 push him out of the way in order to perform 0:13:57.880 --> 0:14:00.920 the operation. Several times he shut off his virtuosity with 0:14:00.920 --> 0:14:04.040 the Luca toome by performing two handed lobotomies, working both 0:14:04.080 --> 0:14:11.400 eye sockets simultaneously on people. That's forget that there's a 0:14:11.800 --> 0:14:16.960 person on the other end of this hammer and pick yeah, yeah, yeah. 0:14:17.120 --> 0:14:19.600 His cross country trips in pursuit of lobotomy patients and 0:14:19.600 --> 0:14:23.080 his self appointment as the Transorbital Procedures International Ambassador only 0:14:23.120 --> 0:14:25.800 heightened Freeman's sense of professional solitude and caused him to 0:14:25.800 --> 0:14:28.440 commit serious erras of judgment. More than once, he worked 0:14:28.480 --> 0:14:31.040 the luke toome forcefully enough to break it inside a 0:14:31.080 --> 0:14:34.560 patient's brain at Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa. He accidentally 0:14:34.600 --> 0:14:36.320 killed a patient when he stepped back to take a 0:14:36.320 --> 0:14:38.920 photo during the surgery, and allowed the lucatome to sink 0:14:38.960 --> 0:14:42.520 deep into the patient's mid brain. That's all from jack 0:14:42.560 --> 0:14:47.200 al High. Yeah that's pretty fucked up. Huh yeah. Yeah. 0:14:47.240 --> 0:14:49.920 Also we don't know what his scale is. It still 0:14:50.000 --> 0:14:52.720 might have been deemed a success by him. The guy's 0:14:52.760 --> 0:14:59.920 not complaining anymore now. Many of Walter's patients were unable 0:15:00.040 --> 0:15:03.320 to walk away or really think after his ministrations, but 0:15:03.400 --> 0:15:05.480 this caused less of an issue than you might think. 0:15:05.720 --> 0:15:08.080 The bulk of his clientele were inmates at asylums, and 0:15:08.080 --> 0:15:10.640 the folks paying for surgeries didn't so much want those 0:15:10.640 --> 0:15:14.200 folks healed as they wanted them quieter. People in charge 0:15:14.200 --> 0:15:17.880 of hospitals often welcomed Freemen into their institutions because the 0:15:17.920 --> 0:15:20.480 lobotomized patients. Some of them, you know, would go home 0:15:20.520 --> 0:15:22.800 because they'd actually be helped by the procedure, and the 0:15:22.840 --> 0:15:26.760 others were generally easier to manage. Freeman himself wrote, the 0:15:26.800 --> 0:15:29.720 noise level of the ward went down, incidents were fewer, 0:15:29.800 --> 0:15:32.520 cooperation improved, and the ward could be brightened when curtains 0:15:32.520 --> 0:15:34.600 and flower pots were no longer in danger of being 0:15:34.680 --> 0:15:37.640 used as weapons, so it mainem easier to deal with. Yeah, 0:15:37.720 --> 0:15:40.840 no more biting no more biting, no more problems at all, 0:15:41.320 --> 0:15:45.560 because they can't do anything anymore because he just erased 0:15:45.600 --> 0:15:47.920 them basically in a lot of cases, and we don't 0:15:47.920 --> 0:15:51.320 have to like technically say we killed them. Yeah yeah, 0:15:51.400 --> 0:15:55.520 I mean hundreds of people were improved by his work, 0:15:56.000 --> 0:15:58.800 hundreds more it's less clear, and of course hundreds and 0:15:58.880 --> 0:16:02.080 hundreds died. But this in part one, it's almost seems 0:16:02.120 --> 0:16:06.240 like though they're using the exception to prove the rule. Yeah, 0:16:06.520 --> 0:16:09.000 so it's like it's there's some people that's benefited, so 0:16:09.200 --> 0:16:11.320 we should do this for everyone. We think we needs it, 0:16:11.760 --> 0:16:15.080 Like exactly, they don't. Those the numbers don't really match up. 0:16:15.640 --> 0:16:19.000 If the people are benefited from you're like, well five 0:16:19.000 --> 0:16:20.960 of these people five percent, it might not work out 0:16:21.040 --> 0:16:23.440 for I'm still not favor for it, but I get 0:16:23.520 --> 0:16:26.480 what your logic is. But being like, oh, a few 0:16:26.480 --> 0:16:29.560 percentage of people, this really small group, this really helps, well, 0:16:29.560 --> 0:16:33.040 then that doesn't mean we should be doing it for everyone. Also, 0:16:33.080 --> 0:16:35.160 when I was I keep thinking, I was like, I'm 0:16:35.160 --> 0:16:38.480 sure this happened to people who are autistic, right, oh god, 0:16:38.560 --> 0:16:41.280 yeah yeah, because but that wasn't even like they didn't 0:16:41.320 --> 0:16:46.160 even know. I didn't was autism even diagnosed in the seventies. No, no, no, no, 0:16:46.200 --> 0:16:48.520 I don't think at this point. I I think it 0:16:48.600 --> 0:16:50.760 was even after that that they really had a handle 0:16:50.800 --> 0:16:52.360 on it. But like it's possible that's what was going 0:16:52.360 --> 0:16:54.680 on with Rosemary. She may have had like aspergers or 0:16:54.680 --> 0:16:56.480 something like that. I really don't know. I don't think 0:16:56.480 --> 0:16:59.440 anybody does. I'm gonna guess a lot of his patients 0:16:59.520 --> 0:17:01.720 were aught histic and they just got written down as 0:17:01.760 --> 0:17:04.440 imbeciles or retarded, which is like the lingo they would 0:17:04.440 --> 0:17:07.240 have used at the time. And you know, because they 0:17:07.760 --> 0:17:11.879 required different means to like reach and teach and like 0:17:12.000 --> 0:17:14.080 work with you know, because they had a different sort 0:17:14.080 --> 0:17:17.080 of brain. Uh, they just sort of hammered into their 0:17:17.119 --> 0:17:20.520 brain until they weren't a problem anymore. Right, How many 0:17:20.520 --> 0:17:23.800 women wouldn't have gotten a lobotomy if they hadn't been married. 0:17:24.359 --> 0:17:28.200 That's a scary question, because they was a man saying, well, 0:17:28.240 --> 0:17:31.320 you're the problem, you aren't making the food, you fight 0:17:31.359 --> 0:17:34.120 with me, you have your own thoughts, which I'm sick 0:17:34.160 --> 0:17:37.359 of hearing. But if they had just never if they 0:17:37.400 --> 0:17:40.199 had become a to use it, the lingo of the 0:17:40.320 --> 0:17:43.680 of the era a Spinster, they would have never gotten 0:17:43.720 --> 0:17:46.560 a lobotomy because they would have had an oppressive man 0:17:46.640 --> 0:17:50.440 in their life to be like, I'm sick of you. Yep, yep. 0:17:50.720 --> 0:17:55.879 Marriage doomed them. Yeah, that's fair to say, probably hundreds 0:17:55.880 --> 0:18:00.879 of cases at at least. Yeah, Now, Freemen had plenty 0:18:00.880 --> 0:18:03.560 of problems with Oh. Actually, before before we get into 0:18:03.560 --> 0:18:10.159 Freeman's problems, you know what's not a problem our advertisers. Great, 0:18:10.800 --> 0:18:16.040 you know, who won't lobotomize their wives? Who the products 0:18:16.040 --> 0:18:18.960 and services that advertise on this show. Great? Then I 0:18:19.080 --> 0:18:20.600 then I want to hear about him, because now I'm 0:18:20.640 --> 0:18:31.679 interested products. We're back and we're talking about Walter Freeman, 0:18:31.720 --> 0:18:33.919 and of course the issues that came as a result 0:18:33.960 --> 0:18:36.359 of him hammering ice picks into the brains of thousands 0:18:36.400 --> 0:18:39.679 of people. Uh. In ninety seven, Freeman operated on a 0:18:39.720 --> 0:18:43.359 Washington cop after the brain ice picking, said cop hemorrhaged 0:18:43.359 --> 0:18:45.639 on both sides of his brain, and, in Freeman's words, 0:18:45.760 --> 0:18:48.080 was never able to do more than the simplest tasks 0:18:48.080 --> 0:18:51.240 around the house. Even so, Freeman did a brisk business 0:18:51.280 --> 0:18:53.960 in Washington State. In the late nineteen forties. He met 0:18:53.960 --> 0:18:57.159 the actress Francis Farmer at Western State Hospital. She'd been 0:18:57.160 --> 0:18:59.560 a patient there for five years, largely as a result 0:18:59.560 --> 0:19:02.960 of behaved your her parents considered wild and unconventional, but 0:19:03.000 --> 0:19:05.960 we today would probably just call being a human. We 0:19:06.000 --> 0:19:08.720 don't know for sure if Freeman lobotomized her, but some 0:19:08.760 --> 0:19:11.680 reports say he did, and Frank Freeman says his father did. 0:19:12.000 --> 0:19:14.960 There's a picture that is almost certainly of miss Farmer's operation. 0:19:15.240 --> 0:19:17.800 It shows a man Walter in a sleeveless shirt with 0:19:17.880 --> 0:19:21.600 hairy arms and ungloved hams, hammering a lucatom, the surgical 0:19:21.600 --> 0:19:24.119 device he invented to replace his ice pick into a 0:19:24.160 --> 0:19:27.159 woman's eye. As a crowd watches and there goes what 0:19:27.200 --> 0:19:31.439 would have been my Halloween costume. Yep, yep, tragic sleeveless 0:19:31.600 --> 0:19:36.520 Harry ice pick m hmm. By ten fifty four, tranquilizers 0:19:36.560 --> 0:19:40.800 like chlorpromazine replaced lobotomies as the preferred treatment for agitated 0:19:40.840 --> 0:19:44.640 people in asylums. Freeman left Washington for Los Altos, California, 0:19:44.680 --> 0:19:46.680 and for the next eighteen years he split his time 0:19:46.720 --> 0:19:50.880 between lobotomizing people and hiking. Actual medical science gradually left 0:19:50.920 --> 0:19:54.399 him behind, but Freeman continued his research on transorbital lobotomies 0:19:54.480 --> 0:19:57.919 because he loves it. He loves he loves it. In 0:19:58.000 --> 0:20:00.880 nineteen sixty four, he conducted an experiment meant on fourteen 0:20:00.960 --> 0:20:04.600 disturbed mental defectives, mostly young schizophrenics. In a letter to 0:20:04.640 --> 0:20:07.520 a colleague, he explained that this experiment tested the efficacy 0:20:07.560 --> 0:20:10.320 of injecting hot water into the brain after stabbing it 0:20:10.359 --> 0:20:13.600 with an ice pick. I was prepared to accept two fatalities, 0:20:13.640 --> 0:20:16.439 but fortunately all the patients survived, and he invited to 0:20:16.440 --> 0:20:20.280 return next May. What is he new, tiede. He's just 0:20:20.280 --> 0:20:22.919 trying to come. He's like, well, but now we do 0:20:23.080 --> 0:20:25.720 this thing like that would just shoot some water in there. 0:20:26.040 --> 0:20:28.920 Oh my god. I don't see how any of these 0:20:28.920 --> 0:20:31.159 patients could improve, but at least one can now be 0:20:31.240 --> 0:20:33.639 cared for at home again. His his concern is that 0:20:33.680 --> 0:20:36.160 they be easy to care for now that they get better. Really, 0:20:37.119 --> 0:20:39.160 if we you know what else, you remove the whole head. 0:20:39.440 --> 0:20:41.240 You can do whatever you want with that. But real 0:20:41.359 --> 0:20:44.280 fucking easy, to be real easy. They don't complain. There's 0:20:44.400 --> 0:20:47.720 you don't even have to feed him. M hmm. Now, 0:20:47.760 --> 0:20:50.240 since Walter worked at a variety of different hospitals during 0:20:50.240 --> 0:20:52.520 this period, he enlisted a number of different nurses to 0:20:52.560 --> 0:20:55.000 help him in his thousands of procedures. One of these 0:20:55.000 --> 0:20:57.800