The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness [Hardcover]

Jack El-Hai (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 17, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0471232920 | ISBN-13: 978-0471232926 | Edition: 1

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman’s documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Although many patients did not benefit from the thousands of lobotomies Freeman performed, others believed their lobotomies changed them for the better. Drawing on a rich collection of documents Freeman left behind and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look into the life of this complex scientific genius and traces the physician's fascinating life and work.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set against the backdrop of changing attitudes toward mental illness in the 20th century, El-Hai's scholarly biography of Dr. Walter Freeman is a moving portrait of failed greatness. Born to a distinguished family of physicians, he rose to become one of the most celebrated doctors of his generation. Best known as the doctor responsible for the widespread adoption of lobotomy in America after WWII, he also made signal contributions to the science of medicine through his career-long involvement with George Washington University Medical School and St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Yet, despite his achievements, the procedure he helped develop and tirelessly champion would ultimately become his undoing. As physicians sought other, less drastic means to treat mental illness, Freeman's unorthodox methods, which often included an ice pick and carpenter's hammer, came to seem barbaric. When he died in 1972, the sharply negative view of psychosurgery expressed in books like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) had become commonplace; a mere decade later, movies like Frances (1982) would openly portray lobotomy as institutionalized torture. Although the title of El-Hai's biography might suggest otherwise, he eschews such lurid oversimplifications and portrays Freeman in all his human complexity. To this end, he chronicles Freeman's crusade to help millions of asylum patients who might otherwise remain incarcerated indefinitely; his indefatigable postoperative commitment to his patients; and his flamboyant personality and macabre sense of humor in and out of the operating room. El-Hai's book succeeds as both an empathetic, nuanced portrait of one of America's most complex public figures and as a record of the cultural shifts that have occurred in the treatment of mental illness over the last century.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Scientific American

Few words conjure up more gruesome connotations than "lobotomy"—surgically severing the brain’s frontal lobe in an attempt to relieve intractable psychiatric symptoms. And yet these operations—first performed in the U.S. in 1936 by psychiatrist and neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman and neurosurgeon James Winston Watts—continued for more than 40 years. In that time, Freeman, the procedure’s champion, cut the brains of 3,500 people. Biographer Jack El-Hai chronicles lobotomy’s reign through Freeman’s quest to treat mental illness surgically. The tale follows this son and grandson of prominent physicians from his youth in Philadelphia during the early 1900s through his rise and eventual fall in national prominence. Freeman emerges not merely as a maniacal devotee of radical "psychosurgery" but as an earnest advocate of potential treatments for otherwise intractable mental illness. Most of Freeman’s work took place when state psychiatric hospitals overflowed with seemingly untreatable patients, many of whom suffered relentlessly. Effective psychiatric medications were not yet available, and lobotomy became a measure of last resort. El-Hai describes how neurosurgeons experimented to transform the complicated prefrontal lobotomy into the simpler transorbital lobotomy—nearly an outpatient procedure in which a physician entered a patient’s brain through a region above the eye with an ice-pick like tool. A skilled practitioner could perform a transorbital lobotomy in minutes. Surprisingly, many of Freeman’s lobotomies were reported as successful, not only by Freeman but also by some patients and their families, who sent hundreds of letters expressing gratitude. Of course, many surgeries failed; Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of President John F. Kennedy who suffered "agitated depression," was left "inert and unable to speak more than a few words," as El-Hai says, and was ultimately institutionalized. In 1950 Freeman and Watts reported that of 711 lobotomies they had performed, "45 percent yielded good results, 33 percent produced fair results, and 19 percent left the patient unimproved or worse off." Not surprisingly, many patients remained confused, disconnected, listless and plagued by complications such as seizures. With the emergence of effective drugs during the 1970s, physicians halted lobotomies altogether The tale of lobotomy’s rise and fall entails far more than one man’s quest to spearhead a dubious surgical method. It is a story of desperation among thousands of patients, families, clinicians and policymakers struggling to manage a population seemingly crippled by illnesses for which there was no help. It is also a worrisome account of physicians groping for solutions to problems that they could not adequately address. In this sense, El-Hai’s treatment of this medical saga is also poignant and illuminating.

Richard Lipkin

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (January 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471232920
• ISBN-13: 978-0471232926
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #994,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Writer of narratives on science, medicine, and history

Jack El-Hai specializes in covering medicine, science, and history. He has written more than 500 articles and essays for The Atlantic, Scientific American Mind, Wired, American Heritage, The History Channel Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Minnesota Monthly, and many other publications.

His books include The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (forthcoming from PublicAffairs Books), Turbulent Air: A History of Northwest Airlines (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press), and The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness (John Wiley & Sons, 2005, winner of the annual book award of the Medical Journalists' Association of the U.K.). El-Hai has taught nonfiction and journalism courses and workshops at the University of Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic, the University of Iowa, the Split Rock Arts Program, and the Loft Literary Center.

You can learn more about his work at http://el-hai.com.