Frontal Lobotomy : Walter Freeman

The field of mental health suffers weird offbeat and arguably despicable characters, but in the earlier 2000 the father of lobotomy appeared. This father was called Walter Freeman, that performed about 3,000 lobotomies over his long career. That took this procedure , Walter lifted the patients eyelid and inserted an leucotome through a tear duct . A few taps with a surgical hammer breached the bone . Freeman took a position behind the patients head , pushed the leucotome about an inch and a half into the frontal love of the patients brain , and moved the sharp tip back and forth .Then he repeated the procedure for the other eye socket .Freeman attended to Yale University and to Pennsylvania University of medicine. Concerned with the tragedy of wasted lives in mental hospitals, he introduced insulin shock therapy and ECT for patients in the George Washington University Hospital. When he found that chimpanzees became passive when their frontal loves were damaged . 

So he decided to start try Portuguese physician and neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz’s procedure . This experiments started with his colleague James Watts that started practicing on brains from the hospital morgue . In 1936 they were ready for their first patient called Mrs. Hammatt who was 63 years old , who suffered from agitated depression and sleeplessness . The procedure of the experiment of Moniz consisted of entering the frontal lobes through the eye sockets, and for that they drilled six holes into the top of her skull. The operation of Mrs. Hammatt was successful she could go to the movies and watch the movie normally , and she lived five years more . Freeman and Watts claimed that 52 percent of their first surgeries had good results, but they did not offer a clinical yardstick for what constituted an improvement for patients brains . Patients often had to be re taught how to do many basic things like eating and going to the bathroom. Relapses were common, and three percent died from the procedure. President Kennedy’s sister was mentally ill and Freeman attended her. Freeman operated Rosemary from the frontal lobe but she died after that because she need full time care. Freeman believed lobotomies worked because the procedure severed connections between the frontal lobes of the brain and the thalamus , he thought it was the seat of human emotion . Although his theories have been not given so much credit , he was one of the few psychiatrists of the era who believed that mental illness had a physical biological component . I n his final stages of his career of lobotomy he had his license removed after killing a patient , Freeman had fallen and society really didn’t needed him because pills for mental illness were invented . 

http://www.mcmanweb.com/lobotomy.html