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FREEMAN, DR WALTER 1895-1972

CHIEF PROMOTER AND PRACTITIONER OF TRANS-ORBITAL OR ICE-PICK, LOBOTOMY IN THE UNITED STATES

Ice-pick Wizard

Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman was a tireless missionary preaching the benefits of the lobotomy to mental-health practitioners during the 1950s. He promoted the transorbital lobotomy, which he had popularized, as such an uncomplicated procedure that psychiatrists not schooled in surgery could perform it with minimal training. Also known as the ice-pick lobotomy, because Freeman performed his earliest surgeries with that common tool before more-precise surgical instruments were designed for his use, transorbital lobotomies were performed by inserting a sharp probe into the frontal lobe of the brain through the eye socket and wiggling the probe vigorously to dislodge portions of the brain thought to cause emotional disruptions. Throughout the 1950s Freeman traveled around the country demonstrating and teaching this procedure, sometimes performing as many as twenty-five lobotomies in a day.

Promoting the Lobotomy

Dr. Freeman was introduced to the notion of what was called psychosurgery in 1936 through a journal article by the surgeon Egas Moniz. The Portuguese doctor advocated treating extreme forms of mental illness by drilling holes in a patient's skull and digging cores of material from his brain. With a medical partner, Dr. James Watts, Freeman became the American master of the technique, personally performing 10 percent of the ten thousand lobotomies in America by 1949. Lobotomy was popular at state mental institutions because it was quick, effective, and cheap. In the days before drugs were available to quiet disruptive patients, lobotomy was viewed as an acceptable means of managing the most difficult inmates among the rapidly growing population at mental institutions. In articles with titles such as "Wizardry of Surgery Restores Sanity to Fifty Raving Maniacs" and "No Worse Than Removing Tooth," the press proclaimed the benefits of Freeman's specialty, referring to it as a miracle cure.

Critics Respond

Critics of lobotomy disputed such claims. They charged that cutting the brain without being able to observe the exact location or extent of the damage amounted to little more than mutilation. They also accused Freeman and the procedure's other supporters of exaggerating its benefits. Even when lobotomy alleviated some or all of a patient's symptoms, mental-health practitioners pointed out, it rarely enabled him to resume a normal life. Lobotomy patients were frequently listless, sloppy, bad-tempered, and childish. Often they relapsed entirely, and the process had to be repeated. And some died during the procedure. In 1951, during one of his lecture tours, four patients died as Freeman was operating on them.

Freeman's Last Years

In 1953 Freeman gave up his position at George Washington University Medical School, which he had held since the mid 1930s, to move to California. There he established a private practice, advised on hospital committees, and continued his research in lobotomy. He realized, however, that his days of influence were coming to an end. After Thorazine was approved for sale by the Food and Drug Administration in March 1954, lobotomy quickly lost ground to chemical therapy as a method of treating mental illness. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy made the procedure seem outmoded, even barbaric. Freeman continued to champion his surgery, but to increasingly hostile audiences. By the early 1960s his colleagues regarded his ability to practice any form of medicine with open suspicion, and he was gradually retired from his few remaining residencies. He devoted his time to writing and to contacting former patients. By the time of Freeman's death in 1972, lobotomy was used almost exclusively to relieve pain in victims of terminal disease.