#brain surgery

Thank you!

It was a lot of fun, that. (And pitching for it was the scariest thing I’d ever done that wasn’t brain surgery.) 😏

(but also, per @princesscolumbia:)

...what an odd thing to say...

…Only if you haven’t been a nurse who’s scrubbed in on brain surgery. Which I have been, and did. (Brains are kinda shockingly pink-and-white, if anybody was curious…)

I keep having to remind myself that sometimes people think writers just come out of nowhere, without having had previous—or sometimes very current—careers. Most of us have had. (Otherwise the wisdom about “Don’t Give Up Your Day Job” wouldn’t make much sense.) I passed my State Boards as a registered nurse in New York state in 1974; and as part of that qualification, some of my experience naturally involved a medical-surgical unit including “circulating”* during and scrubbing in on various kinds of surgery. Mine, as it happened, included brain surgery. Which, since my qualification was in psychiatric nursing, was unexpectedly apropos.

The brain surgery was actually a lot calmer than (ten-plus years later) unexpectedly pitching “Where No One Has Gone Before” to Gene Roddenberry, as I knew beforehand what was going to happen in the surgical suite. But at least in Gene’s office I didn’t have to hand anybody any dropped instruments, or worry about sterile field discipline. …Anyway, if anybody had dropped anything, Bob Justman (who was also there, gods rest his good soul) would probably have picked it up. Producers can be so tidy… :)

…Hope this helps resolve any confusion.

A doctor met a 12-year-old boy twice.

After the second appointment he wrote in his notes: "He doesn't react either to love or to punishment. He does a good deal of daydreaming and when asked about it he says 'I don't know.'"

Then he scheduled brain surgery.

The boy's name was Howard Dully. The date was December 16, 1960. The doctor was Walter Freeman, the same man who had by that point driven across the country performing lobotomies in state hospitals, sometimes 25 in a single day, no surgical gown, no gloves, no sterile environment, no anesthesia beyond the electric shock he used to knock patients unconscious first.

Howard's stepmother had brought him to Freeman. She was frustrated. He was dreamy, she said. He didn't listen. He was difficult. Multiple other doctors had examined Howard before this appointment and found nothing wrong with him. Nothing that warranted any kind of intervention.

Freeman diagnosed him with childhood schizophrenia after two visits.

His father paid $200 for the procedure.

what Freeman did: electroconvulsive shock until Howard went limp. Then a metal pick, called an orbitoclast, tapped through the thin bone above the eyeball into the frontal lobe. swept sideways through the brain tissue to sever the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the rest of Howard's inner life.

Howard woke up with two black eyes. He was sent home.

He spent his teenage years in institutions. his twenties in jail. in his thirties trying to get sober. He couldn't understand why he felt like something was wrong with him, why he felt different from everyone around him, why nothing quite connected. He didn't know about the lobotomy until he was an adult.

When he finally tracked down his medical file at George Washington University, the one Freeman had kept on him, he was the first of Freeman's patients to ever receive a copy of their own records. He read Freeman's clinical notes. the ones that called a dreamy 12-year-old boy a schizophrenic.

"I always felt different," he said later. "Now I know why."

He got sober. He became a bus driver. In 2005 he told his story on NPR and millions of people listened. His memoir came out in 2007.

Howard Dully died on February 11, 2025. He was 76.

Freeman died in 1972, of cancer, in his own home, with his medical license intact. He was never charged. He was never sued in any case that produced consequences. He drove his camper around the country in his final years trying to prove his work had value, visiting former patients, filling out charts.

He never said he was wrong.

Walter Freeman performed or supervised an estimated 3,500 lobotomies. An estimated 40,000 to 50,000 Americans were lobotomized between 1936 and the 1970s. The peak years were 1947 to 1954. The New York Times called the procedure "surgery of the soul." The American Medical Association printed approving editorials.