The Lobotomies In the first half of the twentieth century very little was being done to aid the mentally ill. People suffering from a very wide range of mental illness were unwanted by their families and usually sent to asylums where they were, for lack of a better word, warehoused. When Dry. Freeman became director of SST. Elizabeth hospital in Washington D. C, he was appalled. The patients of the hospital had disgusting dirty conditions in which to live, they were agitated, and there was no treatment available to help them. When Dry.

Freeman began practicing the only known reattempt for mental illness was shock therapy. Shock therapy for the era in which it was most popular, worked to a certain standard. It depended on the equipment, and what exactly the desired outcome was. But essentially all that was achieved by these shock therapy treatments was that it caused the patient to become quiet and subdued for a period of time, but never cured them. In September of 1936 Freeman performed the first Lobotomy in United States History with his partner James Watts on a house wife.

Freeman believed that with his surgery he was able to cure the mentally ill. The so-called success of his operation were Judged on the fact that the patients did not exhibit signs of anxiety or depression, only several hours after the surgery had been performed. The medical community was at first outraged that Dry. Freeman would be so reckless as to attempt an untested procedure such as this. However, the overall opinion of lobotomies changed. Dry. Freeman decided that a lobotomy had to be a quick and cheap procedure if it was too be a viable procedure to help such a great amount of people.

Freeman transformed the procedure so that instead of going in through the skull, you would go from behind the eye, using an ice pick to crack through the skull. Lobotomies were being written about in medical journals and used in large hospitals such as John Hopkins. Freeman so confident and in love with his own work would stop in the middle of surgery and photograph his work, or sometimes get bored of using his right hand and and switch to his left hand. By the sass’s opinions had once again changed in regards to lobotomies.

With the new drug Throatier Just hitting the market, and the long term effects of lobotomies Ewing realized, the medical community once again began to frown upon the practice. A lobotomy was said to be, “no more subtle than a gunshot to the head”. And so, Dry. Freeman went out to California, where he performed his procedure on house wives and children under the age of 18. He even operated on a child as young as 4. These children were seen as being as too hyper or energetic, or being too disrespectful, and so lobotomy was the only solution seen by their parent’s. Doctor Walter Freeman is a monster, criminal and a tragic figure all rolled into one.

In his attempt to gain prestige and be a renowned surgeon such as his grandfather had been, he lost sight of what his original intentions had been. Though he started the practice of lobotomies in the United States to aid the mentally ill, he turned it into a mass procedure, and hurt hundreds in the process. Though Freeman’s original intentions were out of good heart, in a time when there was no help being offered to the mentally ill, his later actions can not be ignored. Operating on children as young as tour, and turning a procedure into a show for press is not only criminal, but monster.