#walter freeman

This is Rosemary Kennedy. She's about twenty years old in this photo. Three years before this picture was taken, she attended her first formal dance. Three years after it was taken, a neurologist who had never held a scalpel in his life sat beside her in an operating room and asked her to sing "God Bless America" while a surgeon pushed a blade into her brain.

She sang it.

Then she stopped singing. She stopped talking. She stopped being Rosemary.

She was twenty-three.

Her name was Rose Marie Kennedy. Third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Sister to a future president, a future senator, and the future founder of the Special Olympics. She had a mild intellectual disability. She could read and write at about a fourth-grade level, keep a diary, do multiplication, hold conversations, and travel across Europe. In May 1938 she curtsied before King George VI at Buckingham Palace. She tripped slightly. The family called it a triumph.

She wrote to her father in 1940: "Darling Daddy... I am so fond of you. And I love you so very much."

By her early twenties, Rosemary was having seizures and mood swings. Rages that scared the nuns at her convent school. She was sneaking out at night. Her father, Joe Kennedy, wasn't worried about her health. He was worried about headlines. He had sons to put in office. A daughter who might get pregnant or cause a scandal was a threat to the brand he was building.

So Joe found Walter Freeman.

Freeman was the most famous lobotomy advocate in America. Yale-trained neurologist. No surgical credentials. He'd read about a Portuguese doctor named Egas Moniz who was cutting nerve fibers in patients' brains, and Freeman had decided to bring the technique to America and turn it into a mass operation. He renamed it "lobotomy." By 1941, he and his partner Dr. James Watts had performed about two hundred of them.

In November 1941, Joe Kennedy brought Rosemary to George Washington University Hospital. He didn't tell his wife.

Here is what happened next, according to Watts's own account given to journalist Ronald Kessler and published in The Sins of the Father (1996).

Rosemary was awake. Mildly sedated but conscious. Watts cut through the top of her skull. Small incisions, about an inch on each side. He pushed an instrument into her frontal lobes. He described it later as looking like a butter knife. He swept it back and forth, severing white matter.

While Watts cut, Freeman talked to her. He asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer. She recited it. He asked her to sing. She sang. He asked her to count backward.

They decided how deep to cut based on how she responded.

When her words turned to mumbling, they kept going. When the mumbling collapsed into silence, they stopped. That was the endpoint. The moment her voice disappeared was the moment they decided they'd cut enough.

She came out of that room unable to speak. Unable to walk without help. Incontinent. Her left arm paralyzed. The cognitive capacity of a two-year-old. She was twenty-three years old and she would stay that way for sixty-three more years.

The family told people she'd gone to become a kindergarten teacher.

Her father built a private cottage on the grounds of a Catholic care facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, called St. Coletta. Two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, became her world. They cared for her every single day for decades while the Kennedy dynasty played out on television screens across America.

Joe Kennedy never visited her. Not once. He died in 1969 without ever going to Wisconsin.

Rose Kennedy didn't see her daughter for twenty years.

The family kept the lobotomy secret for forty-six years. In 1962, Rosemary's sister Eunice published an article admitting Rosemary had an intellectual disability. She didn't mention the surgery. That didn't come out until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

But Eunice didn't just break the silence. She built something.

Camp Shriver, 1962. Her Maryland farm. Kids with intellectual disabilities swimming and running and competing because Eunice remembered what her sister was like before that operating room.

July 20, 1968. Soldier Field. Chicago. One thousand athletes. The first Special Olympics.

Today it serves six million athletes in over 200 countries.

JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act on October 31, 1963. It was the last law he ever signed. Twenty-two days later he was dead.

Walter Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies across 23 states. An estimated 490 of his patients died. He was banned from operating in 1967 after a woman died during her third lobotomy at his hands. Egas Moniz still has his Nobel Prize. Every petition to revoke it has been denied.

Rosemary Kennedy died on January 7, 2005. She was eighty-six. She spent sixty-three years in that cottage in Wisconsin because her father wanted a quiet daughter and a doctor promised him one.

Nobody asked her. The Sick History. Medicine. Monsters. Death. Full story with complete sourcing

PSINKTOBER_DAY01

Prompt: "Mustache"

Apologies to Kayla E., whose work I've been thinking a lot about recently (as the featured guest at this year's Nashville Comic Arts Fest) and whose tone and general approach I realized I unconsciously emulated heavily in this one (after I'd already started drawing, of course). I guess I have 30 days to make better (or, more precisely, more original) comics.

(via Everything You Never Wanted to Know About the Lobotomy)

Walter Freeman, the P.T. Barnum of the lobotomy, pioneered the transorbital lobotomy, a simplified procedure that didn’t even require an operating room; he eschewed the formality and sterility of operating rooms, and would just lobotomize patients anywhere. In fact, it’s so efficient, Freeman could finish a lobotomy in under 10 minutes. Fun fact: Freeman had no formal surgical training.

These instructions are taken from Walter Freeman’s Psychosurgery by way of Jack El-Hai’s excellent biography The Lobotomist. If you were to follow them, you would be guilty of multiple crimes and someone would probably die.

The supplies needed

An icepick

A small hammer

An electroconvulsive therapy machine

The procedure

To perform a lobotomy, Freeman would:

Sterilize his icepick. Usually. Sometimes he didn’t bother.

Administer shocks of high-enough voltage to induce unconsciousness with an electroconvulsive therapy machine. Sometimes Freeman did it with no anesthesia, however.

Slide the icepick beneath the victim’s upper eyelid, next to the tear duct, keeping the shaft parallel to the bony ridge of the nose and aimed slightly away from the center of the head.

The tip of the icepick would now be resting against the thinnest portion of the skull. Freeman would give a light tap with a hammer to break through the bone.

Now he would be able to easily push the icepick into the brain. Freeman advised going 5cm deep. Not too deep, or the “patient” would probably die.

Pull the handle of the icepick “as far laterally as the rim of the orbit will permit.” This should sever the fibers at the base of the frontal lobe. Hopefully.

According to Freeman, this step is the “ticklish part” because arteries are in reach. He would return the instrument to its previous position and drive it further to a depth of 7cm from the margin of the upper eyelid. Then move the ice pick 15 to 20 degrees medially and about 30 degrees laterally. If this was done wrong, the person would die. If done correctly, they’d only maybe die.

Withdraw the icepick with a twisting motion while applying pressure on the eyelid to prevent hemorrhage.

Resterilize the icepick.

Repeat with the other eye. A true showman, Freeman would sometimes do both sides at once.

The lobotomy is now complete!

In this image Dr. Walter Freeman performs a lobotomy at Western State Hospital in Virginia, using an ice-pick-like instrument he invented for the procedure, July 1949.

Freeman traveled to 23 states to demonstrate his "miracle cure." In all, he performed some 3,439 lobotomies—some on patients not yet in their teens. Despite the obvious risks and lack of concrete success rates, hospitals let Freeman continue; however, everything changed in 1967, when Freeman performed a lobotomy in Berkeley, California. He severed a blood vessel and his patient died of a brain hemorrhage—finally putting an end to Freeman’s haphazard brain hacking.

Transorbital Lobotomy

The simplified procedure of lobotomy, Transorbital Lobotomy is in which a pick-like instrument is forced through the back of the eye sockets to pierce the thin bone that separates the eye sockets from the frontal lobes. The pick's point was then inserted into the frontal lobe and used to destroy the neuronal tracts in the brain that were thought to give rise to mental illness. 

Madness : A History

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.

“Uhhh doctor freeman sir, the patients first words after surgery were ‘eughueheugu’ and then vomiting”