‘My Lobotomy’: Howard Dully’s Journey
NPR has an amazing audio story that details the experiences of Howard Dully, a former patient of lobotomist Walter Freeman, whose had to live with the consequences of his parents’ poor decision making and Freeman’s misguided treatment.
“On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day, he performed the first-ever transorbital or “ice-pick” lobotomy in his Washington, D.C., office. Freeman believed that mental illness was related to overactive emotions, and that by cutting the brain he cut away these feelings.”