Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Saturday Stuff You Should Know
Speaker 1: Select edition. Chuck here with my pick of the week,
Speaker 1: all the way back to two thousand nine. Lobotomies. Man,
Speaker 1: this one is ca crazy. This is one of us
Speaker 1: is so good. I wish we could go back and
Speaker 1: do it again for the first time. So much fun
Speaker 1: to research, really interesting and grizzly history, medical history. Some
Speaker 1: of my favorite stuff lies in those topics. And this
Speaker 1: one is all about lobotomyes, man, oh man, just get
Speaker 1: ready to learn about the frontal lobe ice pick lobotomy.
Speaker 1: Actually used to do that. Welcome to Stuff you Should
Speaker 1: Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. It's called Stuff you Should Know. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's Josh and Chuck comes in Long Beach together. Now
Speaker 1: you know you're in trouble. What's Chuck think? How long
Speaker 1: you even sitting on that one week? That's good? Thanks?
Speaker 1: Thank you, Chuck. How you doing well, sir? Are you
Speaker 1: pretty good? Don't feel great? Actually, Chuck? I mean glad
Speaker 1: to be alive? Yes, so, Chuck. Yes, I think this
Speaker 1: could arguably pan out to be our greatest podcast ever. No,
Speaker 1: I really don't think so, Chuck did the cheek thing
Speaker 1: twice before this one was kind enough to do it
Speaker 1: a second time. And I don't think we've ever had
Speaker 1: a topic that Chuck and I were more intensely interested
Speaker 1: in than this one. I know. It kind of just
Speaker 1: came out of nowhere, and it's really well, not out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, because it's historical, but um, in our eyes,
Speaker 1: out of nowhere, which if funny, I say, in our eyes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a little foreshadowing from Charles Bryant. Nice one, Chuck. If
Speaker 1: you will get off of L O L Cats for
Speaker 1: a second and go check your iTunes, you'll find that
Speaker 1: the title of this one is how lobotomies work, and
Speaker 1: that's what we're gonna be talking about. Our lobotomy is
Speaker 1: so fascinating, it really is. Lobotomy is kind of exist
Speaker 1: in this little um segment of twentieth century culture medical madness.
Speaker 1: So I guess you could say right right, and pop culture,
Speaker 1: because you still hear it being thrown around like boys
Speaker 1: might lobotomize me, scramble my brain. But it's kind of
Speaker 1: exactly the way it happened. Yeah, yeah, So, Chuck, you're
Speaker 1: a lover of great cinema, right, of course, of course,
Speaker 1: you've seen one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, right, I
Speaker 1: have a poster you do. Yeah, A good one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the one in Jack Nicholson laughing with the watch cap on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good one. Um. So, of course you remember
Speaker 1: the pivotal scene of the movie where McMurphy is um
Speaker 1: lobotomized for being unruly, tries to kill Nurse Hatchet because
Speaker 1: nurse Ratchet. Nurse Ratchet, Hatchet. That was a Freudian slip
Speaker 1: right there. It was she was a hatchet. Yeah. Um so,
Speaker 1: uh she was mean and I'm totally with you. It
Speaker 1: was a Freudian slip. Part that got me. I had
Speaker 1: like eight chokes going in my head at once, and
Speaker 1: I was like, I can't say that. I can't say that.
Speaker 1: I can't say that. It's like the Terminator exactly right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um so yeah. So he tries to kill Nurse Ratchet
Speaker 1: because she was a terrible nurse and kind of evil,
Speaker 1: very evil, And so he gets lobotomized and they don't
Speaker 1: show the procedure. Don't worry if you ever want to
Speaker 1: know what one was like, we're going to go into
Speaker 1: grizzly detail a minute. Um. And he comes out just
Speaker 1: kind of this drooling imbecile, which I have to remind
Speaker 1: everybody was actually a medical term before it was imbecile,
Speaker 1: moron an idiot? Were all degrees of mental retardation? Aren't
Speaker 1: that weird? Yeah? Of course this is at the same
Speaker 1: time that people were performing lobotomy, so it seems like
Speaker 1: very archaic, even though it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: let's set the scene. Okay, all right, so we're talking
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties, and the nineteen thirties were a
Speaker 1: terrible time to be nuts. Basically, you got locked up
Speaker 1: in a straight jacket to keep you from eating your
Speaker 1: own feces um or throwing it at orderlies or doing
Speaker 1: anything really crazy. And that was about it. Um. They
Speaker 1: had certain um, certain techniques like shock therapy. Right, what
Speaker 1: do they use? Uh they still use shock therapy here
Speaker 1: and there actually so well you have like electro convulsive therapy,
Speaker 1: and you had apparently they also used to use insulin. Okay, insulin, right,
Speaker 1: we know how bad that is from I can't remember
Speaker 1: one of our aging podcasts, right, Um. And they would
Speaker 1: basically inject a hefty dose of insulin into a patient.
Speaker 1: Um too, the okay, chuck my paper wrestling was going
Speaker 1: to get the wrath. They they know we used crib sheets,
Speaker 1: buddy um. So they inject a patient with the hefty
Speaker 1: dose of insulin and um would basically shock their system,
Speaker 1: possibly causing convulsions. There was another drug was just to
Speaker 1: subdue them. Hold on, I'm getting to that. This is
Speaker 1: the craziest part. This is this was the grasp that
Speaker 1: medical science had on mental illness at the time. There's
Speaker 1: another drug called metrozol which was a respiratory and um
Speaker 1: circulatory stimulant, and the hefty doses it to produce shock
Speaker 1: and convulsions. So if you'll notice, all three of these
Speaker 1: produced convulsions shock therapy. And the reason that they did
Speaker 1: that was because there was a suspicion that there is
Speaker 1: a link between epilepsy, convulsions, and mental illness and that
Speaker 1: if you had one, you couldn't have the other. So
Speaker 1: by producing convulsions, they thought that they were treating mental illness. Unbelievable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you could have just had epilepsy and that that
Speaker 1: they would set you in the electro convulsive shock therapy
Speaker 1: chair and to treat you. Yeah, they'd stick a little
Speaker 1: paddle in your mouth and turn on the juice. Tell
Speaker 1: you what, man, I like. I sometimes look back and say,
Speaker 1: by the nineteen fifties, that would have been cool to
Speaker 1: lift back then. But then you hear stories like this
Speaker 1: and you kind of forget about the downside. Yeah, ect
Speaker 1: is definitely one of the downside idea of this era,
Speaker 1: right alright. So um, another problem with this was that
Speaker 1: the mental um mental care. Wow, have you had lobotomy?
Speaker 1: I had a little bit of and yeah, um no,
Speaker 1: I had some metro's all earlier. I'm all jacked up. Um.
Speaker 1: The the the state of mental hospitals in the US
Speaker 1: in the in the thirties and forties was that they
Speaker 1: were overcrowded, right, because I mean, if you can't treat anybody, really,
Speaker 1: you can't treat their mental illness, which they come in
Speaker 1: there in yeah, right. They wanted docile patients, they wanted
Speaker 1: people that didn't cause trouble and really anyway that they
Speaker 1: could get there was kind of okay at the time.
Speaker 1: And this right, and this was also before drug therapy
Speaker 1: was created. So in the thirties, nineteen thirty six, this
Speaker 1: new procedure comes about, right, Well, it was the thirty
Speaker 1: in Portugal you're right. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was doctor Antonio IGAs Monies and Dr Almida Lima in Portugal.
Speaker 1: H performed the first lobotomies by drilling holes into the
Speaker 1: skull on either side of the preforntal cortex and injecting
Speaker 1: alcohol in there to destroy the fibers connected it. And
Speaker 1: this was actually based on UM an earlier study from
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three by a couple of Yale researchers who
Speaker 1: removed the prefrontal cortex is from a pair of monkeys
Speaker 1: and the other one Binky will say yeah. Um, these
Speaker 1: two monkeys had their prefrontal cortex core texas removed and um.
Speaker 1: The researchers found that they could still They still had intellect,
Speaker 1: but they were lacking the emotion that led to violent
Speaker 1: outbursts when they didn't get their way. Zecky, by the way,
Speaker 1: I like Binky better. Um can we stay with Binky? Okay?
Speaker 1: So the the doctor um, oh, the Portugue Fulton and Carlisle.
Speaker 1: I'll know you're going back to Portugal. Yeah. Dr Moniz
Speaker 1: saw Fulton present um. One of the Yale researchers saw
Speaker 1: Fulton present his findings and he thought, huh, my mental
Speaker 1: patients act like monkeys, you know, violent outbursts when they
Speaker 1: don't you know, when they see things that aren't really there. Right,
Speaker 1: So let me get my hands on a cadaver and
Speaker 1: see what I can see, what I can work out
Speaker 1: with the brain. So this early, this early, uh, it
Speaker 1: was called the prefrontal lobotomy. Right, started out, like you said,
Speaker 1: by drilling holes in the school and adding alcohol. And
Speaker 1: the whole reason why chuck the prefrontal cortex. Why the
Speaker 1: frontal lobe? What's so important about that? Well, the pre
Speaker 1: funnel lobe. But cortex, Josh has a number of complex functions,
Speaker 1: um called executive functions is what they're known as. We're
Speaker 1: talking high level decision making, planning, reasoning, understanding. Personality, it's
Speaker 1: personal expression, that right thing. So basically your personality, the
Speaker 1: way you create things, the way you see the world
Speaker 1: and how you react to the world, g emotions, Right,
Speaker 1: this is all this is all generated here. It's originates
Speaker 1: in the prefrontal court. And you're stabbing the front of
Speaker 1: your head right now you speaking, uh. And so that
Speaker 1: as we all know that the brain is connected, it's
Speaker 1: all connected together, sending and receiving signals like like mass email.
Speaker 1: And uh so, what you have here, You've got two
Speaker 1: types of matter, gray and white matter. Gray matter includes
Speaker 1: neurons and brain cells and blood vessels and things like that.
Speaker 1: White matter is axons and nerve fibers, and they connect
Speaker 1: the gray matter and carry messages with electric impulses. So
Speaker 1: what the gray matters where these impulses are generated. The
Speaker 1: white matter translates them or transfers them, transmits, It transmits
Speaker 1: one of the trans uh so, a lobotomy. What that
Speaker 1: does is it is intended to sever the white matter
Speaker 1: between the different areas of gray matter, thus interrupting the
Speaker 1: transmission essentially, right, And the problem um with dr monies
Speaker 1: is technique. The early technique using alcohol is like you said,
Speaker 1: the brains all connected, and alcohol being a liquid, it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to keep in one place. So it
Speaker 1: started to go and destroy other area, is it, right,
Speaker 1: A very good idea. But he was onto something. He
Speaker 1: was onto something by destroying the white matter, right, yes,
Speaker 1: So instead he decided to be a little more precise
Speaker 1: and he kept with the whole drilling method is actually
Speaker 1: based on an ancient um ancient method of brain surgery
Speaker 1: called trepidation, right, which actually what gosh, we could. I'm
Speaker 1: going to be in trouble here. We had a fan
Speaker 1: right in and suggest trepidation and that's what got me
Speaker 1: on the botomies in the first place. And I apologize.
Speaker 1: So if you're out there listening, oh you don't remember
Speaker 1: the fan, thank you, nameless fan. We love you, Binky,
Speaker 1: thanks Binky or Becky uh um. Yeah. And actually in
Speaker 1: the article how the botomies work, um, there's a cool
Speaker 1: relief from a horonymous box Um painting of some early
Speaker 1: physician trepanning a patient and he's got like a little
Speaker 1: segment of the skull lifted off in the brain's exposed
Speaker 1: and he's just poking around in there. Um. But okay,
Speaker 1: so he's still dr Monez is still using the drilling method,
Speaker 1: but now he's inserting instruments in there. He inserted this
Speaker 1: one that sounded like, Um, it's a handle with a
Speaker 1: little loopy wire that comes out. But yes, so when
Speaker 1: you when you push it, when you push down the
Speaker 1: back of it, the loop extends out, and then you
Speaker 1: can pull it in and just basically removed hunks of
Speaker 1: prefrontal cortex of white matter, right, And that's exactly what
Speaker 1: hopefully it didn't matter. Yeah, you would sing UM and
Speaker 1: it was successful. Well yeah, to to again, to varying
Speaker 1: degrees and maybe not again because I think that's the
Speaker 1: first time we've said that. But yeah, the the lobotomy
Speaker 1: was successful to varying degrees, very varying degrees. But there
Speaker 1: was this guy who went and saw UM dr monies
Speaker 1: perform one of these. Yeah, this work gets good. And
Speaker 1: this guy was named Dr Walter Freeman. And for probably
Speaker 1: about what fifty thousand people uh in the U s Alone,
Speaker 1: this meeting between these two men was the worst thing
Speaker 1: that ever happened in the history of humanity, because that's
Speaker 1: about how many people were lobotomized between for about over
Speaker 1: about a seven year period in the US. Was it
Speaker 1: just seven years? Wow? Okay, heavy work, So then there
Speaker 1: was many many more actually um. But yeah, the Dr
Speaker 1: Walter Freeman became an immediate UM evangelists. He was called
Speaker 1: for lobotomies. UM. He he tried monies as technique with
Speaker 1: a with a partner UM and did it successfully for
Speaker 1: a while. But the problem is it was still surgery, right,
Speaker 1: It required a surgeon to do it um operating room. Right.
Speaker 1: If Freeman was actually not a neurosurgeon. He was a neurologist,
Speaker 1: required anesthetic. Yeah, so there there were some some drawbacks
Speaker 1: to it in Freeman's of pin right, expense being one
Speaker 1: of them. Time and resources. So he created something that
Speaker 1: was a lot handier, a lot easier, and a lot quicker,
Speaker 1: and that is what we call the transorbital or ice
Speaker 1: pick lobotomy, Right, Can I say what this is? He
Speaker 1: determined that if you took something which is technically called
Speaker 1: an orbital class, but it really looks sort of like
Speaker 1: an ice pick. You said it yesterday on our webcasts.
Speaker 1: It's a nice pick. Uh, call it a rose by
Speaker 1: any other name exactly. So you put this ice pick
Speaker 1: over over the eyeball, but under the bone there what's
Speaker 1: that called Between the eyeball and the eyelid, The eyeball
Speaker 1: on the island until the back of the orbital bone. Right,
Speaker 1: So once you get to the back of the ordable
Speaker 1: orbital bone, there's a little resist sense there because it's bone,
Speaker 1: and so enter a little silver hammer and so he
Speaker 1: just tinks on that thing until it cracks through and
Speaker 1: then he's got a pretty clean passageway to the frontal cortex.
Speaker 1: And so you've got an ice pick sticking out of
Speaker 1: your eye. He uh, he scrambles it up a little
Speaker 1: bit once it's in there, and then he does the
Speaker 1: same thing on the other side, and uh, ten minutes
Speaker 1: later you're lobotomized, literally, so he do both sides right right, Um,
Speaker 1: he got kind of good at this. Yeah, Dr Freeman
Speaker 1: got really I guess you could say good at this,
Speaker 1: or at least very fast. Um. In one two week
Speaker 1: period in West Virginia, he performed lobotomies on people, and
Speaker 1: in one day, he performed lobotomies on twenty five patients,
Speaker 1: right one day and one day. So he's just basically
Speaker 1: bringing him in and sending him out. He's exactly doing that. Actually,
Speaker 1: I read an interview with one of his assistants at
Speaker 1: the time and he said he would literally not take breaks.
Speaker 1: As the patient left, another one would be brought in
Speaker 1: ten minutes later boom. And I don't think we mentioned yet.
Speaker 1: He he before he does this, he doesn't use anesthetic.
Speaker 1: He knocks them out with electro shock, right. So it's
Speaker 1: making use of two extremely primitive and violent techniques right time.
Speaker 1: And the result was, like we said, varied, I mean,
Speaker 1: it ranged anywhere from people being satisfied, and you know,
Speaker 1: seemingly successful, like a highly emotional people suicidal all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, being more docile and not so worried to
Speaker 1: uh to death and people rendered vegetables literally. So yeah,
Speaker 1: well doctor the map. Dr Freeman actually referred to lobotomyes
Speaker 1: um informally as soul surgery. Yeah. I hate that. The
Speaker 1: reason why is because he was basically removing what kind
Speaker 1: of what makes us human. People could still function under
Speaker 1: successful abotomy. People could still function, they could still talk,
Speaker 1: but they weren't They weren't doing anything, they weren't bringing
Speaker 1: anything to the table. There was no reason for them
Speaker 1: to exist so much anymore for the personality surgery exactly right,
Speaker 1: um and uh he would uh he did it um
Speaker 1: again so fast, it's so so often. And he had
Speaker 1: a touch of a showman to him that he basically did.
Speaker 1: He had a lobotomobile in which he performed demonstrations. Right.
Speaker 1: He toured the country, went all over the place. I
Speaker 1: think he ended up doing. Estimates run from two thousand
Speaker 1: to five thousand. Between nineteen forty six and nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: transorbital lobotomies UM in twenty three states in the US right,
Speaker 1: he'd performed with both hands. He would stick the ice
Speaker 1: picks in with both hands at once to add a
Speaker 1: little flare, but showmanship. Yeah, so he was basically performing shows,
Speaker 1: lobotomy shows. Um. And not everybody reacted well to these. Um.
Speaker 1: There was seasoned surgeons who had seen tons of gore
Speaker 1: and blood and horrible things in their lifetimes. Um would
Speaker 1: commit watching these things. Some had to leave. Um. There
Speaker 1: was a nurse whose account I read of watching a
Speaker 1: lobotomy said, uh, the when he moved the ice picks
Speaker 1: back and forth, it made the sound of tearing cloth. Um.
Speaker 1: Later on in the USSR, which actually banned lobotomies, and
Speaker 1: I think nineteen which is embarrassing. Yeah, well fourteen years
Speaker 1: before we did right. Yeah. Um, a physician named Nikolai
Speaker 1: or serinsky Sky thanks Dudski um he called. He said
Speaker 1: that lobotomies violate the principles of humanity and change an
Speaker 1: insane person into an idiot. Again remember a medical tournament
Speaker 1: at the time. Um. So there I imagine that there
Speaker 1: was something that affected you. Were you human being, like
Speaker 1: a real human being? See being? This this rough violent,
Speaker 1: um misguided or unguided procedure being performed that it would
Speaker 1: affect you in some way, like some very primal party
Speaker 1: of you would say, that's not supposed to happen, right, Plus,
Speaker 1: there was no official scientific basis for this. It was basically, hey,
Speaker 1: look at the result in some cases, that is what
Speaker 1: they were kind of basing this whole thing on. And also,
Speaker 1: as we were saying about Freeman being a showman and
Speaker 1: doing it so fast, there was one visit to a
Speaker 1: mental institution in Iowa. I don't remember what year it was, um,
Speaker 1: but Freeman killed three people in one visit, and one
Speaker 1: of the people this is so awful, um, he was
Speaker 1: doing his little show off thing with the two picks
Speaker 1: at once. Instead of as his own procedure dictated one
Speaker 1: and then the other side. He he was doing two
Speaker 1: picks at once. So the patients on the table um
Speaker 1: with two ice picks sticking out of his eyes, and
Speaker 1: Freeman says, I'm going to take a photo of this,
Speaker 1: steps back to take a photo. One of the ice
Speaker 1: picks slips and kills the patient instantly. So apparently Freeman
Speaker 1: was said to have basically just packed up right then
Speaker 1: and moved on to the next place without missing a
Speaker 1: bead or staying geez, that packed up the lobotomobile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: hit the you know one person he lobotomized, Josh, I
Speaker 1: know you do. He lobotomized John F. Kennedy's sister, Rosemary Dr.
Speaker 1: Freeman did in one. Uh. Rosemary was twenty three years
Speaker 1: old and uh, early on her childhood she was shy
Speaker 1: and easy going, they say, but as a teenager, shocker,
Speaker 1: she became rebellious and moody, which and that's what struck
Speaker 1: me in a lot of these cases is so many
Speaker 1: of them, we're just normal human emotions, like anything from
Speaker 1: postpartum depression to you know, an overactive child. You know,
Speaker 1: it's just unbelievable. So she was lobotomized and uh afterward
Speaker 1: was rendered Basically, she couldn't speak, she had the mental
Speaker 1: capacity of an infant, couldn't control her bodily functions, and
Speaker 1: the Kennedy family basically from that point on said that
Speaker 1: she uh was mentally retarded, which they claimed that she
Speaker 1: may have been before, but who knows. You want to
Speaker 1: talk about another guy, Howie Chuck and I have a
Speaker 1: shared hero. He is an indomitable three fifty pounds six
Speaker 1: ft three bus driver who has this gentle tender personality,
Speaker 1: and his name is Howard Dully. And at the age
Speaker 1: of twelve, Howard Dully met Dr Freeman under unfortunate circumstances,
Speaker 1: meaning Dr Freeman had a couple of ice picks on
Speaker 1: him when they met, and um, Howard ended up under
Speaker 1: Freeman's care because of his stepmother, right chuck, Yeah, he
Speaker 1: It was the kind of the classic story the father
Speaker 1: gets remarried to a stepmother who is not very patient
Speaker 1: and understanding with her son. That sounded like, you know,
Speaker 1: it sounds like he may have been a little ryanbunctious,
Speaker 1: but what twelve year old boy isn't. And I think
Speaker 1: you have some good notes, actual notes. Yeah, well in
Speaker 1: Freeman's notes that Dully turned up later, and we should say,
Speaker 1: how are Dully created this great radio piece that's an MPR.
Speaker 1: You can actually find um by typing in my lobotomy
Speaker 1: and Google. I think it's the first thing that comes up.
Speaker 1: It's one of the most amazing things you've ever heard,
Speaker 1: where he just goes and retraces the steps of his
Speaker 1: lobotomy that he got when he was twelve and tries
Speaker 1: to get to the bottom of what happened. We typically
Speaker 1: don't recommend people go listen to other things that it's
Speaker 1: not us, but that's how good it is, right, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it is that good. Uh, it's way better than us actually.
Speaker 1: Um But he finds the Dr. Freeman's notes on his
Speaker 1: case and apparently a stepmother pled her case to get
Speaker 1: him lobotomized by pointing out that he daydreams a lot,
Speaker 1: and when you ask him what he's daydreaming about, he says,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Uh, he doesn't want to go to bed,
Speaker 1: and when he does, he sleeps well. In my personal favorite,
Speaker 1: he turns on the lights in rooms when there's broad
Speaker 1: daylight streaming in unbelievable. I know that kid deserves the lobotomy.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that I think one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why you and I both look up to
Speaker 1: Howard Dolly, it was because he has wondered his whole
Speaker 1: life how different would he be Like I lived hard
Speaker 1: and fast as a younger man, right right, Yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: way way harder and faster. Um so, But I've I've
Speaker 1: often wondered, you know, how much sharper would I be
Speaker 1: had I not lived like that? But this is my
Speaker 1: own doing, It was my own choosing. Howard Dolly had
Speaker 1: to think that same thing, like, is there something wrong
Speaker 1: with me? Is there a part of me missing through
Speaker 1: no choice or fault of his own? We should also
Speaker 1: say that, Um, when Howard's stepmother found that he was
Speaker 1: not a vegetable, she just got him out of the
Speaker 1: house and he became a ward of the state. So
Speaker 1: he went all around lady. Yeah, so um again in
Speaker 1: the end, he finds, you know, there there really isn't
Speaker 1: something wrong within the he he's a pretty terrific persons
Speaker 1: as he as it turned out, lobotomy or not right.
Speaker 1: It took him a long time though. I mean he
Speaker 1: battled addiction and various forms of mental illness his whole
Speaker 1: life after this, and uh, I think going this the
Speaker 1: special that air, and he wrote a book and went
Speaker 1: and talked to his father. After forty years, he actually
Speaker 1: finally spoke to his dad about it, and that seems
Speaker 1: to have been the thing to get him over the
Speaker 1: edge to not feeling like a freak anymore. As he
Speaker 1: called it. Yeah, you can actually hear him working it
Speaker 1: out in my lobotomy. Yeah, a big deep voice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he sounds kind of like Sam, not Sam Shepherdson. What's
Speaker 1: the guy? Uh, the big Lebowski Sam Elliott, Sam Elliott, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what are you reminded me of the dude. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He also had that big mustache to sort of like
Speaker 1: Sam Ellie, that handlebar biker mustache. So, uh, chuck. Whatever
Speaker 1: happened to lobotomies? Why where? Why did they go the
Speaker 1: way of the dinosaur? Just go? Well? Uh, A couple
Speaker 1: of reasons. I mean, one, there was a lot of
Speaker 1: gaining steam with the criticism of it because they found
Speaker 1: that they were lobotomizing criminals. They were lobotomizing soldiers from
Speaker 1: World War Two because criminals against their will sometimes right,
Speaker 1: but they lobotomized soldiers because hospitals were overcrowded veterans unbelievable,
Speaker 1: and so that that was kind of gaining steam. And
Speaker 1: then the introduction of uh thorzine basically everything. Um. I
Speaker 1: believe that somebody said that thorzine was to the treatment
Speaker 1: of schizophrenia, that insulin I'm sorry, that penicillin was to
Speaker 1: the treatment of infectious diseases, which is a pretty big comparison.
Speaker 1: So thorazine was developed in nineteen fifty and as it
Speaker 1: began to fall into widespread use. Um, lobotomy is kind
Speaker 1: of fell out of widespread use, and Dr Freeman himself
Speaker 1: he uh, he had one last one, one last lobotomy
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty seven, right, Yeah, he killed a woman
Speaker 1: with the brain hemorrhage after the third try. I think
Speaker 1: this is her third lobotomy, and uh, she wasn't just
Speaker 1: you know, some mental patient in Iowa. This is a housewife.
Speaker 1: And when she died of I believe of hemorrhage after
Speaker 1: the procedure, that third procedure, that was it. He was
Speaker 1: banned from surgery performing any kind of surgery from that
Speaker 1: that point on and actually spent the rest of his
Speaker 1: days until he died in nineteen seventy two, traveling the
Speaker 1: country and the camper, which if it was his lobotomobile, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He wasn't pitching it. He was actually
Speaker 1: going around trying to um find. He was visiting old
Speaker 1: patients to prove that he had done good, and he
Speaker 1: had done some good in a couple of of cases,
Speaker 1: in several cases, I imagined. His first one was a
Speaker 1: woman I can't remember her first name, but it was
Speaker 1: ian Esco and she uh, she was violently suicidal, is
Speaker 1: described by her daughter. And afterwards she went on to
Speaker 1: to live a happy, fulfilled life. Yeah, but you know,
Speaker 1: every every successful case I read about, they would say
Speaker 1: things like they weren't violently suicidal anymore and they were just,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of happy, but it still seemed to
Speaker 1: be that lights wrong. But no one's home thing like
Speaker 1: the couple the er, yeah, the married couple was. The
Speaker 1: husband had his wife lobottom eyes because she was so
Speaker 1: emotional and she was suicidal as well. Yeah, and she
Speaker 1: says that she was happy as a clam and he
Speaker 1: was satisfied. He said that she came home and she
Speaker 1: never calls any more trouble and she was just happy
Speaker 1: and she could still back talk. Yeah, she could still cooking,
Speaker 1: clean and do all the things she could do before.
Speaker 1: And she agreed, I just haven't been worried about things
Speaker 1: since then. And she was in her eighties. But you know,
Speaker 1: you read that, and emotions are normal, mood swings are normal.
Speaker 1: It's agreed. But I do I do think that there
Speaker 1: is a certain threshold and if you're violently suicidal, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe a lobotomy was a better option. Yeah, But I
Speaker 1: also want to know what the criteria for all this
Speaker 1: was back then. There wasn't any so yeah, so put
Speaker 1: that in your pipe. And but one of the most
Speaker 1: unsettling things, one of the most unsettling things that I
Speaker 1: found from this article is that lobotomies are still performed
Speaker 1: today in England, right, the UK is one of a
Speaker 1: few countries um where it's it's no longer called the
Speaker 1: botomies because lobotomy is such a horrible stigma attached to it,
Speaker 1: and for good reason, neurosurgery for a mental disorder and
Speaker 1: m D and today apparently they use m r s
Speaker 1: as guides to be more precise. But pretty much this
Speaker 1: type of surgery, psychosurgery as it's called um is, it's
Speaker 1: pretty much the same thing. It's destroying white matter connections
Speaker 1: and you're removing people's emotional selves, right. I mean, there
Speaker 1: may be something too to that, but certainly it was
Speaker 1: so non specific and non technical to jam ice picks
Speaker 1: and and just blindly move them back and forth. Said no,
Speaker 1: wonder that was all kinds of results. So Chuck, we
Speaker 1: are both kind of nuts. And I'm really glad it's
Speaker 1: not like nineteen because yeah, yeah, my wife Emily and
Speaker 1: I would both be on the the lobotomy table. I
Speaker 1: think I drive you to the sea Freeman. Thanks, sure,
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Yeah. Well that's it. That's it for lobotomies, buddy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I encourage people to go out and listen to Howard
Speaker 1: Dully's uh radio show there. It's really great. Hopefully you
Speaker 1: guys enjoyed this one. You can read all about Lobotomyes
Speaker 1: on how stuff works dot com. You know what to do.
Speaker 1: Uh you know handy search bar, etcetera. Uh, and Chuck,
Speaker 1: let's let's talk some audible stuff. So our sponsored audible
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Speaker 1: Dot audible podcast dot com slash stuff and sign up
Speaker 1: to get one free download from audible dot COM's fifty
Speaker 1: thousand plus titles of audio books, stand up comedy, spoken
Speaker 1: word speeches, pretty much anything you can listen to is
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Speaker 1: morning and I found one of my all time favorite
Speaker 1: books by Charles Mann Good One Great. One man runs
Speaker 1: around um the America's basically two archaeological sites and gets
Speaker 1: the scoop on the most recent findings and finds that
Speaker 1: there were way more people in the America's before Columbus
Speaker 1: showed up than we realized. Uh and yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lag between the arrival of Columbus uh to Hispaniola and
Speaker 1: the second wave that followed within the next fifty years.
Speaker 1: The second wave found that this, you know, that was
Speaker 1: Virgin Territory. There's almost no one there. Turns out it's
Speaker 1: because about a hundred million people died of smallpox from
Speaker 1: Columbus's first arrival between then and the second wave. It's fascinating.
Speaker 1: That's right there. You just did one. Well, maybe we'll
Speaker 1: do a bigger sewed on it, a bigger said, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what about you you've been on Yeah, I'm gonna recommend
Speaker 1: uh just quickly. Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Rapport. Oh,
Speaker 1: I saw his portraits National Gallery portrait. It was Catonian recently.
Speaker 1: It was awesome with his familiar scowl. Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: that guy. So yeah. He has a very popular book
Speaker 1: that he reads himself called I'm an American and so
Speaker 1: can You. And that's all I need to say about that.
Speaker 1: It's hysterical. Nice check. So you can get either one
Speaker 1: of those titles for free by going to www. Dot
Speaker 1: audible podcast dot com slash stuff and signing up and
Speaker 1: that is Audible right there, baby, let's do a listener.
Speaker 1: Let's do it, Josh. I'm just gonna call this. We
Speaker 1: got a lot of great feedback for the high fruit
Speaker 1: toast corn Syrup. Yeah, so much so that we're gonna
Speaker 1: have probably like three podcasts in a row. We're gonna
Speaker 1: be reading soon that mail. I don't know what it is,
Speaker 1: we should I can bring back Haikus, Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna call it intelligent listener mail because
Speaker 1: Max is a smart guy, and I like these most
Speaker 1: of all. I'm a graduating senior in the Business College,
Speaker 1: but when I'm not in class or listening to podcast,
Speaker 1: I almost always enjoy listening to philosophy. It's more or
Speaker 1: less my passion. More specifically, I'm interested in world religion,
Speaker 1: medical metaphysical theory, and man's relationship to nature in the universe.
Speaker 1: So this guy is obviously smarter than you to say
Speaker 1: that fruit dose, corn syrup or any other man made
Speaker 1: chemical compound does not occur naturally. You're speaking with the
Speaker 1: basic assumption that man is something different than nature. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: for those who can find themselves above nature in a
Speaker 1: portance or authority, this is not the case. It's our
Speaker 1: Western culture and religion that strengthens this point of view.
Speaker 1: Man didn't PLoP into nature is a separate and flawed
Speaker 1: phenomenon in a stupid natural universe. Man came out of nature.
Speaker 1: Man is nature, Man is the universe. To borrow a
Speaker 1: quote from my favorite philosopher Alan Watts, and you're seeing,
Speaker 1: you're hearing, you're talking, you're thinking, you're moving. You express
Speaker 1: that which it is which moves the sun and other stars.
Speaker 1: So to perceive yourself as something different is only an
Speaker 1: inability to identify yourself with the cosmos. So Josh Man's
Speaker 1: manipulation of compounds is really the world's manipulation of itself,
Speaker 1: or perhaps the universe manipulating itself. And that is certainly
Speaker 1: a natural occurrence boom. And that is what happens when
Speaker 1: I off handedly say something is man made nice? Well,
Speaker 1: what's the guy's name? Max? And I think the philosophy too,
Speaker 1: So I thought, what's gonna call? We dig you Max?
Speaker 1: And we really dig anybody who sends us something, especially
Speaker 1: if it's as intelligent as that. Uh. If you want
Speaker 1: to show off your ginormous brain, send us an email
Speaker 1: to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com