Walter Freeman

Walter Freeman performed or supervised around three and a half thousand lobotomies, including Rosemary Kennedy's, and toured the United States in a van he called the lobotomobile. He was a neurologist, not a surgeon, and never qualified to operate; his early procedures were done with the neurosurgeon James Watts, who eventually broke with him over what the work became. He had taken up the operation after Egas Moniz in Portugal reported cutting the connections to the frontal lobes in 1935, and he promoted it in an America whose asylums held half a million people with almost nothing to offer them; the appeal was that it was quick, cheap and appeared to make disturbed patients manageable. In 1946 he devised the transorbital method, driving an instrument modelled on an icepick through the thin bone above the eye and sweeping it, which needed no operating theatre and no anaesthetist beyond electroshock. He could do a dozen in a day. He performed them in offices and motel rooms, sometimes two-handed for photographers, and operated on at least nineteen children, the youngest four years old. Rosemary Kennedy was twenty-three in 1941 and was left unable to speak intelligibly. Moniz received the Nobel Prize in 1949, which is among the most contested awards in its history. Freeman lost his operating privileges in 1967 after a patient died of a brain haemorrhage on his third procedure. Chlorpromazine had arrived in 1954 and made the whole practice obsolete within a decade. He kept photographs of his patients and followed them up for decades, which is how much of the outcome data exists. His own son later described watching him operate. Howard Dully, lobotomised by him at twelve in 1960, published an account in 2007.

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