Customer Reviews

My Lobotomy

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read a review of this book in my local paper. What prompted me to buy it was the outrage of all those who heard Mr. Dully on NPR, causing their website to crash. Not hearing his intereview, I knew I had to read "his story."

While ultimately one rejoices with Mr. Dully, this is such a painful book to read. One will surely feel outrage towards all those who were involved with the horrors perpetrated against Dully.

Not only a powerful memoir on how people can rise above even the worst scenarios and the indomitability of the human spirit, this book gives a small window into what can happen when "agencies," and other "institutions" come into the fray and take over, and how one's life can be so diabolically altered by just one professional's own bizarre beliefs.

This book will also give one a whole new appreciation for anyone labeled "mentally ill" or "mentally unstable."

This reader hopes Dr. Freeman is rotting in hell.

I read this book in one 6-hour sitting. It's real, riveting, and heart-wrenching. Howard Dully didn't stand a chance against the odds he faced. The fact that he found the courage to ask the hard question~ Why? ~speaks highly of his nature and spirit. I recommend this book to anyone struggling with the issues of childhood and trying to come to terms with what it all means.

I'd heard Howard Dully on NPR before I bought this book and was fascinated.

I almost set it aside because the the first two chapters were slow and monotonous, they read almost like bulleted lists. And then I remembered I was hearing the author's voice and he's been lobotomized.

The book is flat where it ought to be screaming at you. It's factual where it should be rage filled and scientific where it should be sad.

Every so often I had to set this aside because my stomach simply lurched too much.

The story is difficult to read because it's real but the story is compelling. I'm not sure that psychiatrists now aren't doing the same thing by medicating school aged children who irritate their teachers. It's an important read.

A shocking story of the tragic abuse inflicted by parents and the psychiatric profession upon a helpless child. This barbaric procedure was performed on thousands of unsuspecting children and adults at the hands of an unqualified quack more absorbed with his legacy than the welfare of the lives he destroyed. Heartbreaking for its simplicity of message and survival of the defenseless.

I just finished My Lobotomy. I absolutely loved this book and already have a list of friends wanting to borrow it, and who have already bought their own copy!

Reading this book in Howard Dully's own words really made the story stick and made it more personal. I grew to love Howard and his bravery for tackling this project and not just letting it go, as so many people would be inclined to do. At first I was afraid this would be another 'poor soul overcomes' type of story, but this one went above and byond all my expecatations.

Bravo Howard! God bless you.

As a child psychotherapist I work with children who are emotionally disturbed in a special school. I often see how some children fall between the cracks in society and really have noone to pull them out, even clinical social workers as myself. It can be disheartening at times. This memior gives anyone who deals with struggles an opportunity to read about the true feelings of a (I feel) neglected child, and then what became a successful man through his journey after being the victim of a horrific surgery. I am sorry that Howard Dully didn't have someone to pull for him. However, I think that due to this memior more people will open their eyes about how children were treated with behavioral issues back then and how they are treated now. What a riviting look at mental illness. A great read and I encourage Howard to continue writing.

This is not a whodunit. We know whodunit. It was Lou Dully, Howard Dully's stepmother. She engineered a lobotomy for twelve-year-old Howard in 1960 because she hated him and found him irritating.

Howard's mother died of cancer when he was five. This death may well have contributed to Howard's less than stellar behavior as a child. Also likely impacting Howard's behavior was his father, Rod, who was a cold, sometimes cruel, man.

In the years before his lobotomy, Howard seems to have been rather slovenly and a bit insensitive. The child probably just needed the love and affection that his parents wouldn't give him; instead, he got an ice pick in the brain. If Howard "needed" a lobotomy, so did the majority of the country.

Actually performing the surgery was Walter Freeman. He performed some 2,500 (one source says 3,500) lobotomies from 1936-1967. It is a shameful reflection on the medical community/the government/society that Freeman could slice brains for so long.

Many of Freeman's patients (the book indicates fifteen percent) died as a result of the operation. Many survived as "vegetables." Others lived out their lives in a passive state, not "vegetables," but unable to survive independently. Many showed no long-range change in the behavior that had led to the lobotomy. Enough showed improvement in their (usually depressed or aggressive) behavior to lend credibility to the procedure.

The lobotomy severs the connection between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain. This seems to block the development of strong emotions that can lead to depression, defiance, and aggression.

After the operation, Howard drifted about for decades. During his teen years, Lou did not want him in the family home, so he went from institution to institution. The experts who examined him agreed that he was "normal." But there seemed to be no other place for him. He later moved from job to job, and lived for long stretches on small welfare checks. He shacked up with various women. He drank heavily and used drugs. He wrote bad checks for flop-around money. Once after he was busted for bad checks the police gave him a choice: get admitted to an institution for the insane or go to jail.

Friends and family (never Lou) helped him from time to time. His father maintained contact and occasionally helped.

Howard finally pulled himself together in his forties. He got an associate degree and started driving buses. He got married and settled down. In the final chapter, Howard described an MRI examination of his brain in 2007 which showed the serious damage that Freeman had caused, but indicated that he was "lucky" to have been victimized at age twelve because his brain was still growing and the new growth helped to compensate for the lobotomy's damage. This likely is why Howard kept his personality and intellect intact.

Howard attracted national attention in 2005 when he appeared on an NPR broadcast during which he interviewed other lobotomy victims, Freeman's sons, and, touchingly, his own father. Rod Dully refused to accept blame for his son's lobotomy, claiming that he was "manipulated" and tricked by Lou. But, in the end, Rod had approved the operation, although he had stated just days before that Howard was "normal."

I think it was all summed up beautifully on page 270 of the paperback edition: "We are all the victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn't really our fault, or we can say, 'I want something better than that, and I'm going to try to make myself a life worth living.'" Perhaps these are mostly the words of Charles Fleming, the former Newsweek correspondent who cowrote the book. If they are the words of Howard Duffy, it's a miracle.

I highly recommend this book as an account of the lobotomy insanity. It also is an interesting memoir of a man with little ambition and virtually no direction living in semi-poverty at the mercy of come-what-may in the late twentieth century.

The book is an accurate portrayal of this procedure. I photographed it when Dr. Freeman came to the Cherokee, Iowa State Hospital. I made a montage for Dr. Freeman, which he took on the rest of his tour.He "posed" mid-procedure for some of the photos.We had to see a film prior to procedure & were told there would be only "minor" visible effects. In reality, "post surgery", the patients' faces were black & blue over entire face & down through the neck area. Many of these patients were simply "dumped" at the State Hosp. by families financially, physically, unable to care for them at home, or un-willing to. The families had to give consent & were assured of the expected great improvement. Didn't happen..... True, some were seriously mentally disturbed, but, in retrospect I believe many were just Alzheimers afflicted or generally senile. It was incredibly sad to see their bruised faces & their lost, frightened expressions after procedure. A really barbaric event for patients who had no say in what happened to them. They were simply experimental subjects.

I am a big fan of reading memoirs and just the title alone on this book had me intrigued. This is a painful, yet beautiful story about a 12 yr old boy who just needed more affection and love in his life. Instead, he was given a lobotomy. The story tells about what happened after the lobotomy and how in his 40's he went searching for answers and in the end finally finds peace.

I almost didn't finish the book, as I felt some chapters were a bit choppy and yet other pieces of the story were unnecessarily long. I'm glad that I stuck with it, because the end of this story makes it worth the read.

I had not previously heard the story of Howard Dully, survivor of a lobotomy at age 12, on NPR. But the cover of the paperback edition (showing a young boy praying) and the title of the book immediately grabbed me. One doesn't think of a lobotomy patient as being coherent enough to author a book about the experience afterwards. Mr. Dully is the exception and upon reading his story, I see why the NPR broadcast reportedly had such an overwhelming audience response. I also thanked God that lobotomies have apparently been out of favor for decades, although I'm sure there are other heinous medical practices lurking out there waiting to be unmasked.

Howard Dully recounts how, after losing his mother at a very young age, his father remarried to a woman who simply did not like him and seems to have spent her every waking minute putting him down and finding reasons to punish him. While it's possible he might have been "acting out" due to the loss of his mother, it seems more likely from the full account (including the stepmother's personality generally) that she just took a dislike to young Howard and made him the scapegoat for everything going haywire in her life. His own father either stood idly by or aided and abetted the stepmother in punishing Howard. Finally the stepmother, who by this time seems like one of those classic "Wicked Stepmothers" out of a particularly "grimm" fairy tale, arranges with a prominent lobotomist, Dr. Walter Freeman, to perform the operation on Howard, who at age 12 was the youngest patient ever to be lobotomized. The book also contains some background on Dr. Freeman and some gruesome details of his lobotomy practice that will make you wince and wonder why this guy was allowed to "practice" for so long. One can only surmise that many of his patients, or their families, were at their wit's end and willing to try anything that held out hope of a cure or relief.

The good news is that, through a combination of his young age and the doctor's lack of technique, Howard's lobotomy fails to destroy his brain function to the degree it would have in an adult. In fact, he recovered to such a degree that researchers were skeptical that he even had a lobotomy until medical tests revealed the typical scarring. The bad news is that, following his lobotomy, Howard ends up committing petty crimes, is repeatedly institutionalized and finally becomes a substance abuser. I can't say this was an unexpected result considering all he had been through. However, in the end and with the help of a loving partner and family of his own, Howard is able to turn his life around, including taking responsibility for his past actions and not blaming them all on the lobotomy or playing the victim card. The book ends with his involvement in the NPR broadcast and the reunion with his father that was set up as part of the broadcast, at which point his father still refuses to take any responsibility for what was done to Howard.

I thought it was a miracle not only that Howard survived, beat his addiction and put together a relatively decent life complete with a job and family of his own, but also that he was able to forgive his parents and especially his father for what happened. I wondered if his calmness about it was an aftereffect of the lobotomy, but considering some of the crazy misbehavior he acknowledges getting into in his earlier adulthood, that seemed unlikely. I know I personally just wanted to slap the father by the end of the book, so kudos to Howard for not feeling that way.

I agree with the New York Times reviewer who cited the central tragedy of this book as being not so much the lobotomy as the fact that Howard's father and stepmother didn't seem able to love Howard or, if he actually needed help for behavioral and emotional problems prior to the lobotomy, they didn't get him such help. Those who would condemn Howard for his supposed bad behavior pre-lobotomy are forgetting that he was a child, and a child who is disturbed enough to act out needs help, not more discipline. I don't think parents in the 1950s adequately understood this and I also felt that Howard's stepmother exaggerated the level of his alleged misbehavior.

The recounting of Howard's post-lobotomy misbehavior is very detailed and in that sense honest, but might drag on a little too long for readers who are primarily interested in the lobotomy story. I also felt that the NPR portion of the book was too drawn out; not only did I not care to read about every little step the NPR crew took, but at times I felt like they were exploiting Howard.