Howard Dully

Howard Dully was lobotomised by Walter Freeman at twelve years old, at the request of his stepmother, and spent forty years not knowing what had been done to him. He was an ordinary difficult child in San Jose - he daydreamed, he was untidy, he objected to going to bed - and his stepmother took him to six doctors, several of whom told her the problem was her. Freeman did not. His notes, which Dully read decades later, record that the boy objected to going to bed and that the stepmother could not endure him, and conclude that a transorbital lobotomy was indicated. It was performed in December 1960, without Dully being told what it was: he was given electroshock and an instrument was driven through the bone above each eye. Freeman photographed him afterwards. The family did not discuss it; his father did not tell him for years, and Dully spent his adolescence in institutions and his adult life driving buses, doing time briefly, and drifting. In 2003, at fifty-four, he began working with the radio producers Piya Kochhar and Dave Isay on a documentary, went into Freeman's archive at George Washington University and read his own file. My Lobotomy was broadcast on National Public Radio in 2005 and is the most-heard first-person account of the procedure. He published a book in 2007. He has said the operation did not turn him into a vegetable and did not fix anything either, and that what he lost was mostly the forty years.

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