Walter Freeman

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Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman II (November 14, 1895 – May 31, 1972) was a physician, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a graduate of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, and an advocate and very prolific practitioner of psychosurgery, specifically lobotomy. He should not to be confused with Walter J. Freeman, author of the 2001 book, How Brains Make Up Their Minds.

[edit] Career

Freeman performed 3,439 such procedures, but his biggest "contribution" was to popularize the lobotomy as a legitimate form of psychosurgery. A neurologist and psychiatrist without surgical training, he initially worked with several surgeons, including James W. Watts. He and Watts performed the first procedure in 1936, and Freeman continued to work with other surgeons and subsequently alone until 1967, when the death of a patient ended his career.

Frustrated by his lack of surgical training and seeking a faster and less invasive way to perform the procedure, Freeman invented the "ice pick" or transorbital lobotomy, which quite literally used an ice pick hammered through the back of the eye socket into the brain; Freeman was able to perform these alone, often in a few minutes. Though Freeman did initially use an ice pick for these operations, he later utilized an instrument created specifically for the operation called a leucotome. In 1948 Freeman developed a new technique which involved wrenching the leucotome in an upstroke after the initial insertion. This procedure placed great strain on the instrument and often resulted in the leucotome breaking off in the patient's skull. As a result, Freeman designed a new, stronger instrument, the orbitoclast.

Freeman embarked on a national campaign in his van which he called his "lobotomobile" to "educate and train" surgeons working at state-run institutions. According to some, institutional care was hampered by lack of effective treatments and extreme overcrowding, and Freeman saw the transorbital lobotomy as an expedient tool to get large populations out of treatment and back into private life. Critics contend that Freeman was a sociopath who greatly enjoyed lobotomizing people.

Freeman's most notorious operation was on the ill-fated Rosemary Kennedy, who was permanently incapacitated by a lobotomy at age 23.

The urban legend that Freeman operated on actress Frances Farmer has been conclusively disproven: the author who initially alleged this admitted in a court proceeding that he had made it up, Farmer's medical records show she was never operated on while institutionalized, and Freeman biographer Jack El-Hai (The Lobotomist), who had access to Freeman's patient records, found no reference to Farmer whatsoever.

Though Freeman has been pilloried for his tendency toward self-aggrandizement and the fact that he lobotomized so many people, some of his patients remained life-long friends and thanked him profusely for allowing them to return to relatively productive and peaceful lives. However, the procedure was highly controversial at the time and has only become more so in intervening years.

With the advent of antipsychotic drugs, notably Thorazine, in the mid-1950s, lobotomy fell out of favor as a treatment, and Freeman saw his reputation crumble quickly. His license to practice medicine was revoked when a patient he was lobotomizing died. He continued to drive cross country in his "lobotomobile" to visit his former patients until his death from cancer in 1972.