Speaker 1: What's grease and m door knobs. I'm Robert Evans hosted
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards for part two of our episode on
Speaker 1: the inventor of lobotomy, and the door to the recording
Speaker 1: studio has been greased with olive oil, which I'm informing
Speaker 1: listeners of so that they can truly get into the
Speaker 1: behind the Bastard spirit by greasing their own doors with
Speaker 1: olive oil. So everybody play look at home, Grease, grease
Speaker 1: something near you up with olive oil. All wait, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm here as with in part one with Daniel van Kirk. Daniel,
Speaker 1: how are you? How are you? How are you? How
Speaker 1: are you? How are you doing today? I am great.
Speaker 1: I'm so glad to be back for the conclusion of
Speaker 1: this story about a horrific man who justified his means. Yep,
Speaker 1: he's a bad man. And speaking of bad men, were
Speaker 1: about to talk about a president. Although a president most
Speaker 1: people like, um, so I may be pissing some people off.
Speaker 1: John and Robert Kennedy are probably the two most famous
Speaker 1: brothers in American history. One was the president until he
Speaker 1: got shot, another would have been the president if he
Speaker 1: hadn't been shot. Both men have come to symbolize fairly
Speaker 1: or unfairly, an era of just in decent governance in
Speaker 1: the United States of America, one that will probably never
Speaker 1: come again. But the Kennedy brothers had a sister as
Speaker 1: well as another brother named Ted, who we don't talk
Speaker 1: about much because of that lady he drunkenly killed. This
Speaker 1: woman's name was Rosemary Kennedy, and her life was stolen
Speaker 1: by Dr Watts, Dr Freeman, and wild unchecked misogyny. Now,
Speaker 1: Rosemary's birth was, in the words of the Irish Times,
Speaker 1: complicated by medical misadventure. Depending on which source you read,
Speaker 1: you will hear different things about the exact extent of
Speaker 1: her intellectual disabilities. Some articles I've read say she was
Speaker 1: severely mentally handicapped and unable to lead a normal life.
Speaker 1: Others argue she had learning disabilities but was otherwise bright
Speaker 1: and capable. I'm not a doctor, but I did teach
Speaker 1: special ed once, and it seems fair for me to say,
Speaker 1: whatever the precise extent of her issues, Rosemary Kennedy would
Speaker 1: have been capable of living a real, satively independent life
Speaker 1: with some specific help. Now you get very different versions
Speaker 1: of Rosemary story depending on which right up you read.
Speaker 1: For example, here's people. As Rosemary entered her late teens,
Speaker 1: her parents saw less of the affectionate, dutiful and eager
Speaker 1: to please young woman they knew and loved, and more
Speaker 1: of her violent outbursts. She began screaming and yelling and
Speaker 1: throwing things. She was violent and throwing vases across the room.
Speaker 1: She was out of control. One person says now that
Speaker 1: article paints Rosemary is a deeply disturbed young woman, and
Speaker 1: her lobotomy is tragic, but purely the result of her
Speaker 1: parents not having better options to care for such a
Speaker 1: disabled child in a more primitive era. Another Irish Times
Speaker 1: article I found, which interviewed one of her biographers, a
Speaker 1: man named Irvine, takes a different route. Irvine has a
Speaker 1: more filled out picture in his head. He sees her
Speaker 1: as stunningly beautiful. It was often said she was the
Speaker 1: most beautiful of the Kennedy's, beautiful and poetic. She did
Speaker 1: have learning disabilities, It's hard to say how much, but
Speaker 1: she wrote letters, she kept a diary. She became a
Speaker 1: Montessori teacher for a while, and she taught young children.
Speaker 1: Her favorite book was Winnie the Pooh, and she could
Speaker 1: read that to children. So yeah, yeah, great book. He
Speaker 1: has the sense of a fairly normal, deeply loving young woman.
Speaker 1: Every letter that she wrote a show drenched in this
Speaker 1: want for her father to acknowledge her and love her.
Speaker 1: Every one of those letters is heartbreaking. It's all about
Speaker 1: I'm doing my best and I hope this pleases you.
Speaker 1: She would send reports about her weight because wait was
Speaker 1: a huge thing in the Kennedy family, monitoring the weight
Speaker 1: of all the children. There's so much correspondence where Joe
Speaker 1: and Rose are just talking about the weight of their children.
Speaker 1: So yeah. Meanwhile, an Irish Central article I found on
Speaker 1: her describes her this way. By kindergarten, Rosemary was called
Speaker 1: retarded in the lingo of the times, and such children
Speaker 1: were considered defective. For Joe Kennedy, obsessed with the family image,
Speaker 1: it was a disaster. Rosemary never proceeded mentally beyond third
Speaker 1: or fourth grade intelligence, and she was packed off to
Speaker 1: a boarding school for misfits. From there, she wrote her
Speaker 1: father a heartbreaking letter, Darling, Daddy, I hate to disappoint
Speaker 1: you in any way. Come to see me very soon.
Speaker 1: I get very lonesome every day now. Rosemary finally caught
Speaker 1: a break when her father became ambassador to Britain, and
Speaker 1: she thrived in a London convent school. But back in
Speaker 1: the States, Rosemary, who again was very attractive, began attracting
Speaker 1: admirers at twenties. She was a picturesque young woman, a
Speaker 1: snow princess with flushed cheeks, gleaming, smile, plump figure in
Speaker 1: a sweetly ingratiating manner to almost everyone she met. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course, as Larson writes, her parents found her
Speaker 1: sexuality dangerous. And I think this gets to the core
Speaker 1: of kennedy family issues with Rosemary more than anything, um.
Speaker 1: And it seems to me, based on what I've read,
Speaker 1: that the argument that she was mentally retarded is very oversold.
Speaker 1: I think she had learning disabilities. I think she was
Speaker 1: someone who had difficulty thriving in a normal school. But
Speaker 1: I think she was basically it seems like she was
Speaker 1: basically a functional, intelligent person UM who was a young,
Speaker 1: attractive woman and people wanted to fuck her, and she
Speaker 1: wanted to funk them, and this was not okay with
Speaker 1: Joe Kennedy. So I think that's the core of the issue. Um.
Speaker 1: The Kennedy's were a powerful, wealthy, high society family just
Speaker 1: got to stay in line on that family got to
Speaker 1: stay in line, in line. She has some learning disabilities,
Speaker 1: and she's promiscuous and a woman. We can't we gotta
Speaker 1: can't take out this part of it too. Yeah, she
Speaker 1: maybe having some mood disorders. So maybe she like flies
Speaker 1: off the handle and gets like yelly and stuff and
Speaker 1: like that. They'd assume, like, well, she's not happy in
Speaker 1: the family, so she must be broken. Yeah, that's and
Speaker 1: she's a woman's here to disregard her exactly, Like that's
Speaker 1: going to carry on the name, Yeah, exactly. I think
Speaker 1: she was a strong willed young woman who wanted to
Speaker 1: live a life that would have been inconvenient to the
Speaker 1: family goals. And it's my opinion that this, more than
Speaker 1: anything else, sealed her fate. And before we go any further,
Speaker 1: I want you to take a look at this picture
Speaker 1: of Rosemary. Will be on our website too, Sophie, can
Speaker 1: you show that to Daniel. Oh she looks like fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she looks fun. She looks like a normal, healthy young woman.
Speaker 1: I would describe her as looking playful and lively and coy,
Speaker 1: like a willful young woman with a spirit behind her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she falls into uh like fun girl. Winter, Yeah, fun
Speaker 1: girl fall. Now, within mere months of this photograph, she
Speaker 1: would be reduced to a shambling ruin of herself by
Speaker 1: the treatments of doctor's Freeman and Watts. But the final
Speaker 1: decision on whether or not to perform the lobotomy on
Speaker 1: Rosemary was up to the family patriarch Joseph from People Quote,
Speaker 1: Without his wife's knowledge, he took Rosemary to see Dr
Speaker 1: Walter Freeman, a controversial neurologist, psychiatrist and professor at George
Speaker 1: Washington University who had gained fame for popularizing lobotomies in America.
Speaker 1: He took her to the best at the time, and
Speaker 1: at the time time readers, Digest, Newsweek, everybody was touting
Speaker 1: the best thing for mental illness, the lobotomy. It was
Speaker 1: the cure. All people were so eager for some help
Speaker 1: that they just grabbed onto it. You see, that's Freedman
Speaker 1: from the last episode being smart about just playing into
Speaker 1: the press. He did. He'd gotten this ship into the press,
Speaker 1: and fucking Joe Kennedy reads this in a Newsweek as
Speaker 1: he's sipping fucking Manhattan's and his his his can of
Speaker 1: Bunkport retreat or wherever the funk it is. And if
Speaker 1: you need to wonder about how much you Kennedy cared
Speaker 1: about the like agency or um agency. She's a girl, exactly,
Speaker 1: writes of a woman. Not only is he taking his
Speaker 1: daughter to get her brain carved out, he's not telling
Speaker 1: his own wife that he's doing it. No, why would he? Exactly? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is all double it's a double smack. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: Freeman diagnosed Rosemary with agitated depression and promised Joe that
Speaker 1: a lobotomy would put an into her rages and render
Speaker 1: her happy and content. What did he diagnose her with
Speaker 1: agitated depression? This sounds like that ship where they're like, Oh,
Speaker 1: what do you want me to call it? What do
Speaker 1: you want here? Joe? Yeah, she's not she's not happy
Speaker 1: and that's a problem. That means she's broken, right, But
Speaker 1: the agitated is why we have to do something about it,
Speaker 1: because it's just getting worse. The family's got money and
Speaker 1: she's not happy. So the only thing to do was
Speaker 1: to break a brain us, okay, sorry. In the file
Speaker 1: of Dr Freeman assisted by Dr James Watts for him
Speaker 1: to prefrontal lobotomy and Rosemary at George Washington University Hospital
Speaker 1: rather than curing her. The lobotomy essentially erased Rosemary Kennedy.
Speaker 1: The procedure itself literally involved Dr Watts scraping away at
Speaker 1: her brain tissue while Dr Freeman asked her to repeat
Speaker 1: stories from her childhood and lists the month of the year.
Speaker 1: When she could no longer answer, the procedure was pronounced
Speaker 1: a success. Whoa yeah, tell us when we've taken enough
Speaker 1: you tell us, yeah, tell us when you don't remember
Speaker 1: who you are, and then we'll be like, part we
Speaker 1: got it perfect, We got her Because I wondered that too,
Speaker 1: like if somebody got their lobotomy right. And then they
Speaker 1: were still like the in the last episode, the doctor
Speaker 1: who went out and got drunk. Still like what they
Speaker 1: were like, well, we gotta go in and dig a
Speaker 1: little deeper. I guess they often did that. Not always.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about some other cases later, um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: that was not uncommon. For the one. They were like,
Speaker 1: let's get it all, just keep talking it all. Just
Speaker 1: get the whole girl out of there. Yeah, just make
Speaker 1: her a shell now. Rosemary spent the rest of her
Speaker 1: life completely dependent on a small handful of caretakers until
Speaker 1: her father's stroke. She lived isolated and hidden from the
Speaker 1: rest of the family at St. Koleta's, a Catholic facility
Speaker 1: in wisconsant for inconveniently disabled members of which families. When
Speaker 1: Joe finally stroked out, her nieces and nephews attempted to
Speaker 1: reintegrate her back into the family, but any hope she'd
Speaker 1: ever had of an independent life of forging in existence
Speaker 1: for herself was obliterated by doctors Freeman and Watts. Unice
Speaker 1: Kennedy would eventually create the Special Olympics in honor of Rosemary,
Speaker 1: and in nineteen eighties seven story in the Saturday Evening
Speaker 1: Post brought the whole sordid tale to light, but that
Speaker 1: was far too late to stop the career of Walter
Speaker 1: Freeman from reaping an unspeakable toll in human lives. By
Speaker 1: nineteen forty five, at the end of Freeman and Watts's collaboration,
Speaker 1: around a hundred fifty lobotomies were being performed annually nationwide.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen forty six, Walter Freeman introduced his revolutionary
Speaker 1: transorbital lobotomy technique and started teaching it to surgeons and
Speaker 1: non surgeons all around this glorious land. By nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 1: some five of thousand lobotomies were being performed annually, so
Speaker 1: that's great. Many of those were performed by Dr Freeman himself,
Speaker 1: who started traveling the nation showing off his skills to
Speaker 1: rooms full of doctors in the press. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to quote now from the book The Lobotomist. Patricia Darien,
Speaker 1: a student nurse at the University of Virginia and Charlottesville,
Speaker 1: watched Freeman perform a transorbital lobotomy at a nearby state hospital.
Speaker 1: Freeman selected the patients for operations, she reported, by twisting
Speaker 1: their joints to determine their flexibility, not by reading or
Speaker 1: taking histories. After a special luncheon honor of the occasion
Speaker 1: of his visit, he occupied a conference room and had
Speaker 1: each patient shocked and photographed. When all was ready, he
Speaker 1: would plunge the lucatom in. Darien noted he wore no gown, mask,
Speaker 1: or gloves. Afterwards, he would sit the patients up and
Speaker 1: have them walked out of the room. He was very
Speaker 1: proud of the fact that the people walked in and
Speaker 1: walked out, none had to be carried, although one or
Speaker 1: two of them sagged badly on the way out. She remembered.
Speaker 1: After several operations, Freeman enlivened the demonstration by cutting nerve
Speaker 1: fibers on both sides of the brain simultaneously. Then he
Speaker 1: looked up at us, smiling. I thought I was seeing
Speaker 1: a circus act. He moved both hands back and forth
Speaker 1: in unison, cutting the brain identically behind each eye. It
Speaker 1: astonished me that he was so gay, so high, so up.
Speaker 1: Darien recalled the sequence of events as a living nightmare,
Speaker 1: a deeply disturbing performance. He's reached his final form. Yeah now.
Speaker 1: Frank Freeman, Walter's son, was occasionally enlisted to help his
Speaker 1: father in these lobotomy exhibitions. They would spend weeks at
Speaker 1: a time on the road, crossing thousands of miles, visiting
Speaker 1: numerous hospitals, and lobotomizing huge numbers of people. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two, Frank helped his father perform a lobotomy. The
Speaker 1: process started when Walter immobilized the patient with a series
Speaker 1: of powerful electro shocks, and then, as Frank recalled, I
Speaker 1: was there to hold the person's legs down. We all
Speaker 1: went for a ride when he threw the switch. When
Speaker 1: the patient stopped seizing, Walter would lift the eyelid, jam
Speaker 1: his ice pick inside and shattered the bone that separated
Speaker 1: it from the brain. He would carefully hammer away at
Speaker 1: gray matter until both sides of the frontal lobe had
Speaker 1: been disconnected. Frank recalled, I was kind of impressed. He
Speaker 1: made it look so easy. That's good, right, Well, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so easy because he loves it. He's so you know,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, do what you love and you'll
Speaker 1: never work a day in your life of hammering into
Speaker 1: people's brains with a nice pet. But he also seems
Speaker 1: obsessed with the celebrity of it, like he wants to
Speaker 1: like be the guy and come to your town and
Speaker 1: put on his brain show. He wants to put on
Speaker 1: a show. He wants to do it with both hands.
Speaker 1: That you're really impressed. And see they all walked out
Speaker 1: of here. Did you see him all walk out like
Speaker 1: well to be carried himself. But yeah, he was lazy
Speaker 1: when he came in. Yeah. Now, over the course of
Speaker 1: a very long career, Walter would perform more than three thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred and thirty nine lobotomies in fifty five hospitals
Speaker 1: in twenty three states. The entire time he believed himself
Speaker 1: to be something of a heroic medical radical, pulling his
Speaker 1: discipline forward into the future. His motto was lobotomy gets
Speaker 1: them home, which meant in effect that lobotomizing people allowed
Speaker 1: them to exist comfortably and without complaint in Americans Itty.
Speaker 1: It is impossible to know how many of Freeman's patients
Speaker 1: truly benefited from his treatment. His summaries of his results
Speaker 1: were always very biased, and it's never possible to analyze
Speaker 1: them outside of the lens of his own opinions. Objective
Speaker 1: scientific analysis of the results of lobotomies in this period
Speaker 1: are essentially impossible to find. We know that at least
Speaker 1: four hundred and ninety of his patients died as a
Speaker 1: result of his services. We also know that lobotomizing human
Speaker 1: beings was not simply a matter of medical necessity. The
Speaker 1: longer Freeman worked as a solo lobotomist, the more he
Speaker 1: leaned into the performance art side of the field. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post now, shocking his colleagues,
Speaker 1: for instance, grew into a great source of pleasure. Once,
Speaker 1: during a lobotomy demonstration at a nursing home in Baltimore
Speaker 1: before a group of surgeons who replaced his surgical hammer
Speaker 1: with a carpenter's mallet. He delighted in reporting how other
Speaker 1: lobotomy demonstrations made a Columbia University professor emeritus of neurology
Speaker 1: weakened with faintness, sickened students in England, and so outraged
Speaker 1: a German neurologist that Freeman said, I almost had to
Speaker 1: push him out of the way in order to perform
Speaker 1: the operation. Several times he shut off his virtuosity with
Speaker 1: the Luca toome by performing two handed lobotomies, working both
Speaker 1: eye sockets simultaneously on people. That's forget that there's a
Speaker 1: person on the other end of this hammer and pick yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: His cross country trips in pursuit of lobotomy patients and
Speaker 1: his self appointment as the Transorbital Procedures International Ambassador only
Speaker 1: heightened Freeman's sense of professional solitude and caused him to
Speaker 1: commit serious erras of judgment. More than once, he worked
Speaker 1: the luke toome forcefully enough to break it inside a
Speaker 1: patient's brain at Cherokee State Hospital in Iowa. He accidentally
Speaker 1: killed a patient when he stepped back to take a
Speaker 1: photo during the surgery, and allowed the lucatome to sink
Speaker 1: deep into the patient's mid brain. That's all from jack
Speaker 1: al High. Yeah that's pretty fucked up. Huh yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also we don't know what his scale is. It still
Speaker 1: might have been deemed a success by him. The guy's
Speaker 1: not complaining anymore now. Many of Walter's patients were unable
Speaker 1: to walk away or really think after his ministrations, but
Speaker 1: this caused less of an issue than you might think.
Speaker 1: The bulk of his clientele were inmates at asylums, and
Speaker 1: the folks paying for surgeries didn't so much want those
Speaker 1: folks healed as they wanted them quieter. People in charge
Speaker 1: of hospitals often welcomed Freemen into their institutions because the
Speaker 1: lobotomized patients. Some of them, you know, would go home
Speaker 1: because they'd actually be helped by the procedure, and the
Speaker 1: others were generally easier to manage. Freeman himself wrote, the
Speaker 1: noise level of the ward went down, incidents were fewer,
Speaker 1: cooperation improved, and the ward could be brightened when curtains
Speaker 1: and flower pots were no longer in danger of being
Speaker 1: used as weapons, so it mainem easier to deal with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no more biting no more biting, no more problems at all,
Speaker 1: because they can't do anything anymore because he just erased
Speaker 1: them basically in a lot of cases, and we don't
Speaker 1: have to like technically say we killed them. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean hundreds of people were improved by his work,
Speaker 1: hundreds more it's less clear, and of course hundreds and
Speaker 1: hundreds died. But this in part one, it's almost seems
Speaker 1: like though they're using the exception to prove the rule. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's like it's there's some people that's benefited, so
Speaker 1: we should do this for everyone. We think we needs it,
Speaker 1: Like exactly, they don't. Those the numbers don't really match up.
Speaker 1: If the people are benefited from you're like, well five
Speaker 1: of these people five percent, it might not work out
Speaker 1: for I'm still not favor for it, but I get
Speaker 1: what your logic is. But being like, oh, a few
Speaker 1: percentage of people, this really small group, this really helps, well,
Speaker 1: then that doesn't mean we should be doing it for everyone. Also,
Speaker 1: when I was I keep thinking, I was like, I'm
Speaker 1: sure this happened to people who are autistic, right, oh god,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, because but that wasn't even like they didn't
Speaker 1: even know. I didn't was autism even diagnosed in the seventies. No, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I don't think at this point. I I think it
Speaker 1: was even after that that they really had a handle
Speaker 1: on it. But like it's possible that's what was going
Speaker 1: on with Rosemary. She may have had like aspergers or
Speaker 1: something like that. I really don't know. I don't think
Speaker 1: anybody does. I'm gonna guess a lot of his patients
Speaker 1: were aught histic and they just got written down as
Speaker 1: imbeciles or retarded, which is like the lingo they would
Speaker 1: have used at the time. And you know, because they
Speaker 1: required different means to like reach and teach and like
Speaker 1: work with you know, because they had a different sort
Speaker 1: of brain. Uh, they just sort of hammered into their
Speaker 1: brain until they weren't a problem anymore. Right, How many
Speaker 1: women wouldn't have gotten a lobotomy if they hadn't been married.
Speaker 1: That's a scary question, because they was a man saying, well,
Speaker 1: you're the problem, you aren't making the food, you fight
Speaker 1: with me, you have your own thoughts, which I'm sick
Speaker 1: of hearing. But if they had just never if they
Speaker 1: had become a to use it, the lingo of the
Speaker 1: of the era a Spinster, they would have never gotten
Speaker 1: a lobotomy because they would have had an oppressive man
Speaker 1: in their life to be like, I'm sick of you. Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: Marriage doomed them. Yeah, that's fair to say, probably hundreds
Speaker 1: of cases at at least. Yeah, Now, Freemen had plenty
Speaker 1: of problems with Oh. Actually, before before we get into
Speaker 1: Freeman's problems, you know what's not a problem our advertisers. Great,
Speaker 1: you know, who won't lobotomize their wives? Who the products
Speaker 1: and services that advertise on this show. Great? Then I
Speaker 1: then I want to hear about him, because now I'm
Speaker 1: interested products. We're back and we're talking about Walter Freeman,
Speaker 1: and of course the issues that came as a result
Speaker 1: of him hammering ice picks into the brains of thousands
Speaker 1: of people. Uh. In ninety seven, Freeman operated on a
Speaker 1: Washington cop after the brain ice picking, said cop hemorrhaged
Speaker 1: on both sides of his brain, and, in Freeman's words,
Speaker 1: was never able to do more than the simplest tasks
Speaker 1: around the house. Even so, Freeman did a brisk business
Speaker 1: in Washington State. In the late nineteen forties. He met
Speaker 1: the actress Francis Farmer at Western State Hospital. She'd been
Speaker 1: a patient there for five years, largely as a result
Speaker 1: of behaved your her parents considered wild and unconventional, but
Speaker 1: we today would probably just call being a human. We
Speaker 1: don't know for sure if Freeman lobotomized her, but some
Speaker 1: reports say he did, and Frank Freeman says his father did.
Speaker 1: There's a picture that is almost certainly of miss Farmer's operation.
Speaker 1: It shows a man Walter in a sleeveless shirt with
Speaker 1: hairy arms and ungloved hams, hammering a lucatom, the surgical
Speaker 1: device he invented to replace his ice pick into a
Speaker 1: woman's eye. As a crowd watches and there goes what
Speaker 1: would have been my Halloween costume. Yep, yep, tragic sleeveless
Speaker 1: Harry ice pick m hmm. By ten fifty four, tranquilizers
Speaker 1: like chlorpromazine replaced lobotomies as the preferred treatment for agitated
Speaker 1: people in asylums. Freeman left Washington for Los Altos, California,
Speaker 1: and for the next eighteen years he split his time
Speaker 1: between lobotomizing people and hiking. Actual medical science gradually left
Speaker 1: him behind, but Freeman continued his research on transorbital lobotomies
Speaker 1: because he loves it. He loves he loves it. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty four, he conducted an experiment meant on fourteen
Speaker 1: disturbed mental defectives, mostly young schizophrenics. In a letter to
Speaker 1: a colleague, he explained that this experiment tested the efficacy
Speaker 1: of injecting hot water into the brain after stabbing it
Speaker 1: with an ice pick. I was prepared to accept two fatalities,
Speaker 1: but fortunately all the patients survived, and he invited to
Speaker 1: return next May. What is he new, tiede. He's just
Speaker 1: trying to come. He's like, well, but now we do
Speaker 1: this thing like that would just shoot some water in there.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. I don't see how any of these
Speaker 1: patients could improve, but at least one can now be
Speaker 1: cared for at home again. His his concern is that
Speaker 1: they be easy to care for now that they get better. Really,
Speaker 1: if we you know what else, you remove the whole head.
Speaker 1: You can do whatever you want with that. But real
Speaker 1: fucking easy, to be real easy. They don't complain. There's
Speaker 1: you don't even have to feed him. M hmm. Now,
Speaker 1: since Walter worked at a variety of different hospitals during
Speaker 1: this period, he enlisted a number of different nurses to
Speaker 1: help him in his thousands of procedures. One of these
Speaker 1: people was Helen Comer, a nurse in West Virginia for
Speaker 1: thirty four years. I found her account in an article
Speaker 1: written by Story Corps in nineteen fifty four. I assisted
Speaker 1: Dr Freeman and doing a transorbital lobotomy. I was a
Speaker 1: new nurse at the time and I was drafted to
Speaker 1: work in there with him. Had no idea about what
Speaker 1: I was getting into, but I was curious and I
Speaker 1: wanted to see it. And I saw it. Oh my,
Speaker 1: The room was full of people. Everyone wanted to see
Speaker 1: what was going on. People from town and everywhere else
Speaker 1: came up to witness the occasion. He came and I
Speaker 1: held the patient's head and he did the lobotomy. He
Speaker 1: had an instrument. To me, it looked like a nail,
Speaker 1: a great big nail. It had a sharp point, and
Speaker 1: he inserted this in the corner of the individual's eye
Speaker 1: and banged it with a mallet I guess it was.
Speaker 1: And then he pulled from one side and pulled to
Speaker 1: the other. It wasn't easy. It wasn't easy to watch.
Speaker 1: I know that day we lost one patient because they
Speaker 1: couldn't stop the bleeding, and I can't remember if any
Speaker 1: others died. It wasn't what I thought it might be.
Speaker 1: To me, it was cruel, but that was just my opinion.
Speaker 1: I was just doing the job I was employed to do. Remember,
Speaker 1: I've seen all kinds of things in my line of work,
Speaker 1: so if I stopped and dwelled on each little thing,
Speaker 1: I'd be hurting. I remember he was relaxed. He was
Speaker 1: very calm while he was operating. He made it look
Speaker 1: easy to do. I think he just had an extremely high,
Speaker 1: self confident person anality. He didn't have any qualms. He
Speaker 1: wanted to prove that he was right. He was convinced
Speaker 1: that he was right. I thought, how can a man
Speaker 1: be relaxed just going blindly into a brain. But of
Speaker 1: course I didn't have the authority to say stop. That.
Speaker 1: These patients were not young ones. I think they were
Speaker 1: all about thirty or forty years old. I knew two
Speaker 1: of them. After the operation, I found that they had
Speaker 1: changed in their personality. My impression, which I remember still,
Speaker 1: was that they didn't ask any questions. Expression of deep
Speaker 1: turmoil in their heart or in their soul was subdued.
Speaker 1: There was something missing emotions. I would say, you know,
Speaker 1: if you were to converse with somebody, there's always emotion
Speaker 1: with it. Just take all of your emotion out of
Speaker 1: a conversation with somebody and what's left. Uh yeah, when
Speaker 1: they're like, oh, I can't believe he just kept doing it?
Speaker 1: And how I mean, and I know you've probably covered this,
Speaker 1: just the amount of people who had some sort of
Speaker 1: like like they were a sociopath and the medical field
Speaker 1: gave them that outlet. I mean, it happens in the military.
Speaker 1: I I feel like Freeman might have been a sociopath,
Speaker 1: like he's he's described as having a lot of difficulty
Speaker 1: like necting to people, a shallow affect, like yeah, he
Speaker 1: kept trophies like I do think he thought he was
Speaker 1: helping people, But I think his understanding of what helping
Speaker 1: people was was helping the people who had to care
Speaker 1: for these folks. I don't think he actually cared about
Speaker 1: the patients because he's broken anyway. You just don't care.
Speaker 1: You just don't give a You lack empathy, and if anything,
Speaker 1: you do these things to people to like sponge off
Speaker 1: of their emotion and their feelings and their reaction. Yeah. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: the most common diagnosis for which Freeman prescribed brain scraping
Speaker 1: with schizophrenia. This does not mean that most of his
Speaker 1: patients were actually schizophrenic, just that he hastily declared them
Speaker 1: to be schizophrenic before jamming in ice pick through based
Speaker 1: on how well they could bend their joints. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Other common ailments treated via ice picking were chronic pain
Speaker 1: and suicidal depression. In seven New York Times article listed
Speaker 1: the various symptoms for which lobotomies were often prescribed. Tension, apprehension, anxiety, depression, insomnia,
Speaker 1: suicidal ideas, delusions, hallucinations, crying spells, melancholia, obsessions, panic states, disorientation, psycholesia,
Speaker 1: pains of psychic origin, nervous indigestion, and hysterical paralysis. Nervous indigestion. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: if you know anything about the fifties and sixties c
Speaker 1: i A, you know that nobody fucked around with human
Speaker 1: brains in new and exciting ways without drawing their attention.
Speaker 1: In nineteen fifty two, the agency hired Henley Laughlin, a psychiatrist,
Speaker 1: to report on the potential of lobotomies to help the
Speaker 1: god fearing American government disabled communists. I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from the book Lobotomist. Again in his classified report titled
Speaker 1: some Areas of Psychiatric Interest, Laughlin commented that the procedure
Speaker 1: would be adaptable to intelligence work, and noted that he
Speaker 1: watched Dr Freeman performed twenty two transorbital lobotomies with an
Speaker 1: average of about six minutes per operation. This included time
Speaker 1: for before and after photographs, as well as the keeping
Speaker 1: of notes and records. From an empiric standpoint, the operative
Speaker 1: procedure is relatively simple and could be learned in a
Speaker 1: brief period of time by almost any intelligent person. In addition,
Speaker 1: he wrote, there is not great outward evidence of injury
Speaker 1: or damage to the patient. Besides the behavior changes in
Speaker 1: the black eyes, the average pathologist performing an autopsy would
Speaker 1: have to be a keen and careful observer to detect
Speaker 1: changes in the brain substance made by the operator. Because
Speaker 1: I felt unable to disclose to Dr Freeman the real
Speaker 1: basis of my interest, Laughlin notes he could not solicit
Speaker 1: the lobotomy expert's opinions as to how the procedure might
Speaker 1: be modified for use by the CIA. Laughlin, who also
Speaker 1: professed an interest in the possibilities of taking him not
Speaker 1: at control of patients during the period of unconsciousness following
Speaker 1: electroshock therapy. Formed his own opinions on the potential lobotomy
Speaker 1: presented as an intelligence tool. To date, there has been
Speaker 1: considerable discussion relative to the possible use of the lobotomy
Speaker 1: type operation by this agency as a neutralizing weapon, Laughlin
Speaker 1: wrote in prefacing his conclusions, he described the role of
Speaker 1: the frontal lobes as one that allowed a person to
Speaker 1: pursue a cause and feel devotion to it. Certainly, any
Speaker 1: crusading spirit is apt to be quenched. He reported, community
Speaker 1: enterprise and activities in the way of social uplift, leadership,
Speaker 1: and executive abilities and activities are apt to be lessened
Speaker 1: after operation. On this basis, a zealous and fanatic communist,
Speaker 1: if lobotomized, might retain his interest in communism, but his drive,
Speaker 1: zeal and ability to organize or direct would be substantially reduced.
Speaker 1: So that's good. You take out the fight baby. Also,
Speaker 1: I wondered if for interrogation used like the CIA would
Speaker 1: be like, well, there's so much more agreeable. They'll tell
Speaker 1: you anything. We should lobotomize them then interview them. I
Speaker 1: will say, the good news is that even the CIA
Speaker 1: in this period had too many scruples to lobotomized people
Speaker 1: as a method of social control. What what what what
Speaker 1: are we in the sixties by now? Yeah? Yeah, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: the sixties the LSD, right is they're they're ghosting strangers
Speaker 1: with acid like like Gangbusters. Yeah. But Laughlin wound up
Speaker 1: recommending against lobotomies as a way to disabled communists h
Speaker 1: and his His main reason for doing so is that
Speaker 1: it would look really bad to scramble the opinions of
Speaker 1: people whose opinions differed from the US government, Like, if
Speaker 1: that got out, it would be bad. Um. So it
Speaker 1: is here that I should note that on at least
Speaker 1: one point, Walter Freeman was on the somewhat defensible side
Speaker 1: of medical history. As I previously stated, there was a
Speaker 1: time when mental health professionals believe that all mental issues
Speaker 1: stemmed essentially from repressed memories and traumas and other things
Speaker 1: that a therapist could work out. Freeman was on the
Speaker 1: vanguard of doctors who argued that many brain problems were
Speaker 1: physical or chemical in nature, um and based more on
Speaker 1: circumstances of biology than things that had happened to the patient.
Speaker 1: And Freeman and his fellows wound up being right. We
Speaker 1: know today that many mental health issues do stem from
Speaker 1: hormonal or chemical imbalances, things that can be corrected with
Speaker 1: medication or, in rare cases, surgery. Walter identified the problem
Speaker 1: in mainstream medicine rather correctly. He was just very wrong
Speaker 1: about its solution, and because he was such an advocate
Speaker 1: for his solitary practice of lobotomizing people, he failed miserably
Speaker 1: to advance his theory of mental illness with the Times.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty he treated one Howard dully, On, eleven
Speaker 1: year old boy with what I would describe as mild
Speaker 1: to moderate behavioral issues. Howard fought with his brother, lied
Speaker 1: to his parents, and occasionally stole candy. He was rather
Speaker 1: withdrawn and anti social, but certainly not someone a reasonable
Speaker 1: person would diagnose as in need of major brain surgery.
Speaker 1: His behavioral issues, such as they were, stemmed from understandable causes.
Speaker 1: His mother had died of cancer when he was five.
Speaker 1: His father had remarried a cold and demanding stepmother who
Speaker 1: hated him. Howard was emotionally abused by her and ignored
Speaker 1: in favor of his stepmother's biological children, so he acted
Speaker 1: out more and more as he grew he's acting out.
Speaker 1: He wants attention someone exactly caring parenting. Yeah, And as
Speaker 1: he acted out, his stepmother responded by beating him and
Speaker 1: forcing him to eat alone. This made his behavioral problems worse,
Speaker 1: and his stepmother decided that meant there was something wrong
Speaker 1: with him. She started talking to psychiatrists and eventually wound
Speaker 1: up preferred to doctor Walter Freeman. Now by this point,
Speaker 1: Walter was a thoroughly fringed figure. Lobotomy was still practiced
Speaker 1: far too widely, but most medical professionals no longer believed
Speaker 1: it was anything but a deeply flawed last resort measure.
Speaker 1: But Howard's stepmother didn't care about that. When Walter interviewed
Speaker 1: here steps on, he saw evidence of profound disturbance. Quote.
Speaker 1: He is clever at stealing, but always leaves something behind
Speaker 1: to show what he's done. Freeman records from Yeah He's
Speaker 1: he's a yeah yeah. If it's a banana, he throws
Speaker 1: the peel at the window. If it's a candy bar,
Speaker 1: he leaves the rapper around someplace. He does a good
Speaker 1: deal of daydreaming, and when asked about it, he says,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He has defy at at times. You
Speaker 1: tell me to do this, and I'll do that. He
Speaker 1: has a vicious expression on his face some of the time. Now,
Speaker 1: based on a brief interview, Dr Freeman declared Howard to
Speaker 1: be schizophrenic and prescribed one dose of scrambled brain for
Speaker 1: the young boy. When he met the famous doctor, Howard
Speaker 1: was struck by his round glasses, his suit and his
Speaker 1: stylish goatee and made him look a little like a beatnick.
Speaker 1: He was warm, personable and easy to get along with.
Speaker 1: Was I fearful? No? I had no idea what he
Speaker 1: was going to do with me. I'm gonna quote next
Speaker 1: from a right up in the Guardian. When Dully awoke
Speaker 1: the next day, his eyes were swollen and bruised and
Speaker 1: he was running a high fever. He recalls a severe
Speaker 1: pain in his head and the discomfort of his hospital gown,
Speaker 1: which gave open at the back. He had no idea
Speaker 1: of what had happened. I was in a mental flog,
Speaker 1: Dully says. I was like a zombie. I had no
Speaker 1: awareness of what Freeman had done. Eight weeks after the
Speaker 1: doctor first saw him, Dully came around from his operation
Speaker 1: in a state of numbed confusion. The hospital reports stated
Speaker 1: that he had been given a transorbital lobotomy. A sharp
Speaker 1: instrument was thrust through the orbital roof on both sides
Speaker 1: and moved so as to sever the brain pathways in
Speaker 1: the frontal lobes. Dr Freeman's bill came to two hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: Dully was his youngest ever patient. Extraordinarily, he survived. Now
Speaker 1: Howard would go on to live a full life eventually,
Speaker 1: but first he suffered three years of homelessness, mental illness,
Speaker 1: and a deep confusion as a result of the damage
Speaker 1: done to him. He would grow into a school bus
Speaker 1: driving trainer and a living monument to the resilience of
Speaker 1: the human brain. But one cannot help it read his
Speaker 1: story and wonder how much less painful his life might
Speaker 1: have been if a ship heeled doctor hadn't driven an
Speaker 1: ice pick into his fucking brain gleefully, yeah with with
Speaker 1: panash and also the like, uh seems like schizophrenia to me.
Speaker 1: That work, So schizophrenia, I can definitely do this. And
Speaker 1: he's still in the candy bar. And that bitch, that
Speaker 1: bitch of a step mom was like whatever, I don't care.
Speaker 1: I just brought him here to get his brain taken out.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and she's probably mad or long fucking dead hopefully,
Speaker 1: but she's mad that it seems to have been on
Speaker 1: the air, like the side of things, where somebody didn't
Speaker 1: lose all capacity for life. Yeah, he was still a person,
Speaker 1: unfortunately for much of her I'm sure dismay. Now you
Speaker 1: know what won't declare you a schizophrenic for stealing a
Speaker 1: candy bar and scramble your brains with an ice pick?
Speaker 1: The products and services that support this show. Oh then
Speaker 1: I want to know about him? Oh yeah, absolutely, Here
Speaker 1: we go and we're back. We're talking about Walter Freeman
Speaker 1: in the twilight of his career, you know, the sixties
Speaker 1: and ship as medical science starts to pull away from
Speaker 1: Freeman's practices and towards more humane methods of treating them
Speaker 1: mentally ill um and I I guess more humane methods
Speaker 1: includes literally everything that doesn't involve an ice pick. Um.
Speaker 1: So while this was all going on in his field,
Speaker 1: Walter doubled and tripled down on his claim to fame.
Speaker 1: He spent increasing amounts of time doing what he called
Speaker 1: shrink baiting, essentially trying to trigger more respectable physicians and
Speaker 1: writing limericks about his professional enemies. He was known to
Speaker 1: declare that he would rather be wrong than boring. That's
Speaker 1: so true. That's on his tombstone. That's on his tombstone. Now.
Speaker 1: This desire to buck tradition led him to issue other
Speaker 1: basic aspects of professional medical niceties from The Guardian. He
Speaker 1: had a buccaneering disregard for the usual medical formalities. He
Speaker 1: chewed gum while he operated, and displayed impatience with what
Speaker 1: he called all that germ crap, routinely failing to sterilize
Speaker 1: his hands or wear rubber gloves. Despite a fourteen percent
Speaker 1: fatality rate, Freeman performed three thousand and four hundred thirty
Speaker 1: nine lobotomies in his lifetime, and we haven't talked about
Speaker 1: any mail practice suits at all. No on the sixties man. Now,
Speaker 1: in case you aren't aware, a fourteen percent fatality rate
Speaker 1: is essentially criminal. Any modern surgeon who killed that many
Speaker 1: patients with what they considered to be a routine operation
Speaker 1: would be investigated on the suspicion that they were some
Speaker 1: sort of serial killer. But of course Walter Freeman was
Speaker 1: not really a surgeon. He was just a doctor who
Speaker 1: found a lazier way to perform brain surgery using a
Speaker 1: tool from his kitchen God Damnit. Walter's personal life was
Speaker 1: no prettier than his career. In six he watched his
Speaker 1: eleven year old son, the namesake of his grandfather, die
Speaker 1: horribly in Yosemite National Park. The boy was filling up
Speaker 1: a canteen in a stream when he fell over and
Speaker 1: was dashed to death upon the rocks. Walter's wife, Marjorie,
Speaker 1: was a chronic alcoholic, which is not surprising, and the
Speaker 1: doctor cheated on her constantly. Still, his remaining children considered
Speaker 1: him to have been a good father and defend his
Speaker 1: legacy today as a medical trailblazer. I found this quote
Speaker 1: from his son, Frank, now a retired security guard, and
Speaker 1: I think it was meant to sound positive, but it's
Speaker 1: just an intentionally horrifying to me. He is a friendly
Speaker 1: giant of a man. This is talking about Frank. He's
Speaker 1: a friendly giant of a man. Dress smartly in a
Speaker 1: double breasted dark blue suit and a burgundy tie kept
Speaker 1: in place by a thin gold clip. He was a
Speaker 1: marvelous father, Frank said, sitting in a room filled with
Speaker 1: crossword dictionaries and Dick France's novels. He loved a children
Speaker 1: and always made time for us out of his busy schedule,
Speaker 1: taking us camping every summer all across the country. Frank
Speaker 1: recalls being invited to observe a love botomy when he
Speaker 1: was twenty one, and vividly remembers having a little crack
Speaker 1: as the orbital plate fractured. It only took about six
Speaker 1: or seven minutes, and Dad kept up a running commentary. Indeed,
Speaker 1: the original ice pick used for the first transorbital lobotomy
Speaker 1: came from the Freeman family kitchen drawer. We had several
Speaker 1: of them, says Frank, cheerfully. We're using the punch holes
Speaker 1: in our belts when we got bigger. I'm enormously proud
Speaker 1: of my father. I do think he's been unfairly treated.
Speaker 1: He was an interventionalist surgeon, a pioneer, and that took
Speaker 1: guts apple tree fall, yeah for him to like, Oh
Speaker 1: you know, he did a good a good thing, and
Speaker 1: isn't that great? Look here, look I got a nice
Speaker 1: pick of my kids right now. We could go poke
Speaker 1: anybody's eye. We to poke holes in our belts, and
Speaker 1: my dad used to poke holes and brains. This is fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is fine, This is fine. Yeah. Now, thankfully he
Speaker 1: wound up a security guard rather than a brain surgeon,
Speaker 1: which I think would have been a better career for
Speaker 1: his dad too, in retrospect, when his dad was sick
Speaker 1: all the time. Yeah, yeah, he really should have stayed
Speaker 1: that way. Now. In nineteen sixty seven, Freeman was visited
Speaker 1: by Helen Mortenson, one of his earliest patients. She had
Speaker 1: received two lobotomies from Freeman, one in ninety six and
Speaker 1: one in nineteen fifty six after a relapse. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, she relapsed again, likely as a result of
Speaker 1: her brain repairing itself, and she went into Walter for
Speaker 1: a third lobotomy. This was conducted at Herrick Memorial Hospital
Speaker 1: in Berkeley, California, and, unfortunately for Helen, Walter severed a
Speaker 1: blood vessel in her brain. She died three days later
Speaker 1: from the operation, and Freeman's surgical privileges were revoked. He
Speaker 1: lived for five more years, during which he performed no
Speaker 1: additional lobotomies. He died from cancer on May thirty one, night,
Speaker 1: teen seventy two, at the right old age of seventy six.
Speaker 1: Between nineteen thirty six and the late nineteen fifties, the
Speaker 1: wave of lobotomies Walter ignited led to more than forty
Speaker 1: tho lobotomies and perhaps more than fifty. Some aspects of
Speaker 1: the techniques Dr Freeman pioneered are still in use, but
Speaker 1: only on a profoundly limited scale. Less than twenty brain
Speaker 1: operations per year on average are performed in the US
Speaker 1: to treat psychiatric disorders. Most of these use lasers or
Speaker 1: radiation to lesion off small sections of a particular chunk
Speaker 1: of the brain, primarily to treat obsessive compulsitive disorder or Parkinson's.
Speaker 1: Transorbital lobotomies are no longer practiced, and most of the
Speaker 1: young men and women Dr Walter Freeman I spect have
Speaker 1: long since followed him to the grave. And that's the episode. Wow,
Speaker 1: so there's still done. But I'm sure nowadays somebody washed
Speaker 1: into hands beforehand any sort of brain surgery to deal
Speaker 1: with any sort of psychosis. Some of the things he
Speaker 1: like pioneered are performed on a very limited basis um
Speaker 1: or are part of more humane treatments. But again, like
Speaker 1: twenty people a year received something vaguely similar, and they're
Speaker 1: not even that similar. It's just that they removed similar
Speaker 1: parts of the brain because it does help certain people.
Speaker 1: But again, you look at how many thousands of operations
Speaker 1: he performed, and the actual needs seems to be somewhere
Speaker 1: like maybe a couple dozen people a year benefit really
Speaker 1: form of what he did, he liked it right. It's
Speaker 1: like when he was good to get an oil change
Speaker 1: and you can tell they just want to change breaks.
Speaker 1: They're like, new breaks, do you really, Well, that's what
Speaker 1: we do here as breaks, So that's what we're gonna say,
Speaker 1: you need. I think a lot of it was that
Speaker 1: he um he was He was good at performing a lobotomy,
Speaker 1: and most people weren't. Most people couldn't do that sort
Speaker 1: of work without like breaking down because it was just
Speaker 1: horrifying to a normal human being to shove an ice
Speaker 1: pick into a skull um. And Freeman didn't give a ship,
Speaker 1: and he didn't like working with other people, so he's
Speaker 1: able to do this alone and he was the best
Speaker 1: stat it and that's all he wanted from his career.
Speaker 1: So that's the only thing he really did right. And
Speaker 1: he didn't grow up with much of an affinity for
Speaker 1: the female gender, so he was more than happy to
Speaker 1: shut up a wife. Oh yeah, your wife's talking sounds
Speaker 1: like schizophrenia. Yeah, yeah, that's wild, that's horrific. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty bad, dude. The fact, when do you think, so
Speaker 1: it probably should have really ended by like sixty five, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean he stopped sixties seven was his last one.
Speaker 1: I think it probably should have stopped by the fifties.
Speaker 1: I guess you understandable. You know, she was like the
Speaker 1: late forties. I think, oh she was, that's right. I
Speaker 1: keep thinking, so I was thinking of the person that
Speaker 1: was in sixty two, but yeah, she was in the forties.
Speaker 1: That's right. They started in the late thirties. You could
Speaker 1: argue that there was maybe a decade there where, just
Speaker 1: if you assume medical science is going to have some
Speaker 1: really rough patches, just because it's hard to figure it out,
Speaker 1: maybe a decade where people would have done this before
Speaker 1: realizing oh, this actually is just turning people off and
Speaker 1: not fixing any problems. Um. But it went on for
Speaker 1: a long and most doctors by the fifties certainly were
Speaker 1: aware that like, oh, this is not the thing you
Speaker 1: do for everybody who's got a mental illness. There's better treatments.
Speaker 1: But he kept right on rolling almost to the seventies,
Speaker 1: like he damn near made it to Disco. Well, thank
Speaker 1: god for that. Yeah, thank god that we stopped it
Speaker 1: before Disco. Yeah, yeah, that would have really tarnished America's
Speaker 1: brightest period. Also, I love when we get to give
Speaker 1: the CIA credit for things they didn't do. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: CIA was like, this seems real fucked up, which should
Speaker 1: tell you all you need to know. We're just gonna
Speaker 1: abduct people off the street and give them toxic doses
Speaker 1: of LSD. That seems like the humane option. Oh man,
Speaker 1: Like in between assassinating democratically a elected leaders and running
Speaker 1: death squads, the CIA looks back at this and it's like,
Speaker 1: oh boy, that's gonna piss people off. If we do this,
Speaker 1: that's good. That's gonna really look bad. We're not looking
Speaker 1: to get into that ice pick game. Yeah, we don't
Speaker 1: want to. We don't want to be monsters. No, and
Speaker 1: it's too much evidence. Yeah, LSD wears off. Yeah, So Daniel, Yeah,
Speaker 1: how you feeling well educated? First of all, so I
Speaker 1: appreciate that. I'm so surprised that some people went on
Speaker 1: to live normal lives. I love that Howard went on
Speaker 1: to yeah to actually like kind of be okay. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a horror story. Man. There's so many horror stories
Speaker 1: in this man's life. Yeah, he's a living, like a
Speaker 1: living monument to how resilient human beings can be. He
Speaker 1: had like a family, he like lived it seems to
Speaker 1: have been a pretty happy life after he got you know,
Speaker 1: over some things, and it was like, you know, training
Speaker 1: school bus drivers. That's not an easy job, that's an
Speaker 1: important job. He was apparently good at it, so like,
Speaker 1: but it's like that's amazing. The brain repair can repair itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it probably did the best to it could. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like it did great in his case. Um
Speaker 1: did Watts had up? Uh like really end up distancing
Speaker 1: himself then from Friedman? No, I think he you know,
Speaker 1: he had some major arguments with the man, but he
Speaker 1: always regarded him as a brilliant, pioneering doctor. Um just
Speaker 1: somebody who he think took things a little too far
Speaker 1: and was a little bit too cavalier. But like he
Speaker 1: really respected him. It seems I'm not an expert on Watts,
Speaker 1: No not. Yeah, so, uh you feel happy after this?
Speaker 1: I mean I'm happier that I'm living in a better
Speaker 1: medical time, don't you feel like we're not doing anything
Speaker 1: right now medically that we're gonna look back. I'm sure
Speaker 1: somebody's gonna be like, actually, and then I'm like, oh no,
Speaker 1: I think we're doing lots of ship that we're going
Speaker 1: to look back on. It's early fucked up. Oh yeah, man,
Speaker 1: I think we're doing a ton of stuff that is
Speaker 1: going to be looked back on as deeply um problematic,
Speaker 1: not as I don't think we're doing anything on a
Speaker 1: mass scale that's nearly as bad as the mass lobotomies
Speaker 1: that we're being performed back then. But I think we're
Speaker 1: doing a lot of fund up ship. Um. I think
Speaker 1: particularly what's going to be looked at in the future,
Speaker 1: as as bad as as lobotomies are on that level,
Speaker 1: is how we deal um with people who have uh
Speaker 1: there's evidence that a lot of violent criminals, like people
Speaker 1: who are in prison for violent crimes, have head injuries. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: They looked at that air in Hernandez case, and that
Speaker 1: that the Boston Globe did the Spotlight team profoundly damage. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think we're going to look at our treatment of
Speaker 1: prisoners UM as an essentially rooted in our inability to
Speaker 1: recognize or our desire to not give a shit about
Speaker 1: a lot of types of mental illness um and not
Speaker 1: treat it and just lock it up. And I think
Speaker 1: that that is something that will be viewed on the
Speaker 1: same scale as lobotomies are today. I think I was
Speaker 1: trying to like a specific procedure that we're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you never do that anymore. But yeah, I know that's
Speaker 1: a that's all, that's you're you're right on the nose
Speaker 1: with that stuff. Yeah, I think I think there might.
Speaker 1: I don't think it compares in terms of the scale,
Speaker 1: but I think like one of the things a lot
Speaker 1: of people with autism complain about with groups like Autism
Speaker 1: Speaks is that their goal is to like eradicate autism,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people argue, like, well, but wait,
Speaker 1: I'm perfectly happy. I just have a different kind of
Speaker 1: brain and I think about the world differently, and your
Speaker 1: desire to eradicate me is kind of like eugenics and horrible.
Speaker 1: And I do think that we will increasingly recognize that,
Speaker 1: like trying to wipe out autism is incredibly fucked up, um,
Speaker 1: and then instead we should be focusing on like helping
Speaker 1: these people comtegrate with everyone else and like, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but I don't think the scale of that, and I
Speaker 1: don't think like that's not it's a sliding scale. I
Speaker 1: think it's worse. Two jam I s picks into people's brains.
Speaker 1: I just keep thinking of the show that Nick. Did
Speaker 1: you watch? The Nick No highly recommended Clive Owe and
Speaker 1: Chris Sullivan who's not on the show This is us.
Speaker 1: I think it's Soderberg, but it was on Showtime, And
Speaker 1: it's all about like the medical advancements in the like
Speaker 1: teens and twenties, and just seeing like what they were
Speaker 1: trying to figure out and the chances they were taking
Speaker 1: that ended up working, and like the advancements they would
Speaker 1: find just even how to like do a transfusion and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So I just kept thinking of that,
Speaker 1: because my whole thing is like when something very delicate
Speaker 1: and very tricky, maybe that's redundant, but um ends up
Speaker 1: being like common. I always wonder how many times what
Speaker 1: was the trial and error process? It kind of scares me,
Speaker 1: like what was the trial and error process for Walter Jackson,
Speaker 1: Freedman and whatever? And those people are gone, I mean,
Speaker 1: and and those monkeys are gone it's, um, you know,
Speaker 1: there's an extent to which we were going to try lobotomies.
Speaker 1: Of course it was. It was it was going to happen,
Speaker 1: and it's bad. You know, even though some people were
Speaker 1: going to be horribly affected by it. It had to
Speaker 1: happen for medical science to advance. It didn't have to
Speaker 1: happen on this scale. It's like, we were going to
Speaker 1: realize that like riddling could be helpful in treating certain
Speaker 1: kinds of like a d h D. It didn't have
Speaker 1: to be wildly over prescribed to children at the level
Speaker 1: it was in the nineteen nineties and stuff. Um, not
Speaker 1: that I don't think obviously, I don't think giving riddle
Speaker 1: into kids as nearly as bad as thousands of lobotomies
Speaker 1: with ice picks and unwashed hands. But um, there's always
Speaker 1: going to be some sort of like, we figured out
Speaker 1: this new thing, it helps some people, let's massively over
Speaker 1: apply it. That's kind of how human beings are. Um.
Speaker 1: But if like, that's part of why the scientific method
Speaker 1: is supposed to work the way it's supposed to work,
Speaker 1: where scientists are supposed to kind of pull their ego
Speaker 1: out of it and look at like Okay, well, now
Speaker 1: we have data saying we're actually doing this way too
Speaker 1: much and we should stop. But then you get a
Speaker 1: guy like Freeman who bases his whole identity on the
Speaker 1: fact that he's the best at this thing that we
Speaker 1: shouldn't really be doing, um, and then it doesn't stop.
Speaker 1: So it's this kind of problem where in an ideal world,
Speaker 1: if we treated science the way we're always supposed to
Speaker 1: treat it, somebody would have walked up to Freeman in
Speaker 1: like the late forties or early fifties and been like, actually,
Speaker 1: this is being done way too much, and he would
Speaker 1: be like, ah, damn, okay, well let's figure out something better.
Speaker 1: But instead he doesn't ye because he just wants to
Speaker 1: do this. He wants to do this thing. He wants
Speaker 1: to funk with people's brain exactly. Also, are you are
Speaker 1: you a Song of Ice and Fire guy at all?
Speaker 1: Or yeah? I love it? Yeah yeah yeah. Makes me
Speaker 1: think of Qui born umah, the character, because there's always
Speaker 1: that too in medical history, whether it's like because I
Speaker 1: look at it, then there's more, I'm sure, but just
Speaker 1: in the sake of this conversation, like I look at
Speaker 1: like there's people who learn what medicine works, and they
Speaker 1: dedicate their life to helping people. And then there's the
Speaker 1: other type of person who has no problem just poking around,
Speaker 1: putting things together and then seeing what comes of and
Speaker 1: a lot of times you get advancements out of that
Speaker 1: or you find out something that works. But they might
Speaker 1: not necessarily be the same type of traditional doctor who
Speaker 1: wants to help someone. They're just very curious and have
Speaker 1: the ability to just dig around in people's innards to
Speaker 1: see what can work where. And that always creeps me
Speaker 1: onto it isn't that great? Yeah, yeah, you wanna plug
Speaker 1: your plug doubles Daniel I do. Um. People should go
Speaker 1: to Daniel van Kirk dot com. There you can see
Speaker 1: all of my dates and where I'm going to be. Um.
Speaker 1: I've got December two, I'm doing a show at Largo
Speaker 1: on November two, I will be headlining in Pedalouma, California,
Speaker 1: and other tour dates and things as well. But most importantly,
Speaker 1: you can get my album Thanks Diane. It drops on November.
Speaker 1: It's if you're hearing this before then you can pre
Speaker 1: buy the album at the Apple Store app in your
Speaker 1: phone or go to Daniel van Kirk dot com and
Speaker 1: you can click through to there. When you do that,
Speaker 1: you'll get an instant track called Don't Be a Dick,
Speaker 1: which I'm proud of. But you'll get the whole album
Speaker 1: onni November and go to Daniel van Kirk dot com
Speaker 1: for all that, or listen to me on my podcast
Speaker 1: Dump People Town, which I do with the Squaw Brothers,
Speaker 1: or pen Pals, which I do with Rory Scoville. Cool Well,
Speaker 1: I am Robert Evans. You can find me on the
Speaker 1: internet at behind the Bastards dot com, where the sources
Speaker 1: for this episode will be, including uh Jack el his
Speaker 1: wonderful book Lobotomist. Uh. You can find us on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Instagram A at Bastard's pod. You can find me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at I right okay, And you can find
Speaker 1: love in your heart as long as you're willing to
Speaker 1: put an ice pick into your brain. So again, this
Speaker 1: is my encouragement to all of our listeners to grab
Speaker 1: an ice pick and start lobotomizing. Be a hero like
Speaker 1: Dr Freeman. So if you can, we can we urge
Speaker 1: people to carry out unlicensed surgery. No, but you could
Speaker 1: plug your other podcast. I have an their podcast. I
Speaker 1: do have another poet friend. Yeah, the Worst Year Ever
Speaker 1: with Katie and Cody Uh from Some More News. We
Speaker 1: talk about election, which will be the worst year ever.
Speaker 1: Um So, if you want a lobotomy to feel like
Speaker 1: sweet release, listen to the Worst Year Ever. This week
Speaker 1: we talk about Tulsi Cabard, so that one's fun. Nice. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: thanks for having me on this show man. I love
Speaker 1: coming back and learning. Yeah, I'm thank you for coming. Daniel,
Speaker 1: thank you for learning. Uh and uh, thank you for
Speaker 1: spreading the gospel of the ice Pick