Walter Freeman

These medical tools and this procedure seem like something out of a Saw film or the Hostile franchise. But they are the medical tools of one very infamous doctor.

Like many scientists and doctors, Walter Freeman began with the best of intentions.  He wanted to help subdue severely violent tantrums and fits that he witnesses psychiatric patients throw at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital.  His intentions were truly benevolent. After all, he just wanted to cure the patients of their violent outbursts.  This wouldn’t just protect the patients, though, it would also protect the health care workers working with these patients on a daily basis.  

Initially, Freeman had to drill six holes into a person’s head in order to conduct a lobotomy.  The first few lobotomies were met with moderate success.  According to the website, Medicalbag.com - In fact, his first patient, “a 63-year-old woman who was suffering from insomnia and agitated depression.”  According to the doctor, “when it was finished she emerged ‘transformed’ and lived for another five years” (“Walter Freeman: The Father of the Lobotomy”).  It is clear that Freeman cared little for his patients.  Freeman argued that since little surgery was needed - just an icepick into the eye socket is all, that psychiatrists - really untrained in any type of surgery - “should be allowed to perform lobotomies by hammering ice-pick-like tools through patients’ eye sockets. And he argued that, while their patients’ skulls were open anyway, VA surgeons should be permitted to remove samples of living brain for research purposes” (“One Doctor’s Legacy”).  

Soon, though, an outcry came from the medical establishment and the general public once people began to actually die from the procedure.  His last patient was lobotomized in 1967, however, like many of his patient’s before, and they died during surgery when they suffered a hemorrhage and bled to death before him.