Description
Book SynopsisThe 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 lobotomi
Trade Review
Walter Freeman believed that "the despair of psychiatric illness demanded a decisive, drastic remedy." And that remedy was lobotomy, "cutting the neural connections in the prefrontal regions of the brain," a practice that these days, writes Jack El-Hai in The Lobotomist, "seems so obviously wrong." Freeman performed nearly 3,500 lobotomies and "aside from the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele . . . ranks as the most scorned physician of the twentieth century." And yet, "many of the era's most important medical figures . . . lent support to Freeman's work." Nor did he intend to cause harm. "I had to recognize," writes El-Hai, "the persuasive evidence that at times he acted in the best interests of his lobotomy patients, given the limitation of the medical environment in which he worked and the perilous nature of scientific innovation." (Washington Post Book World, March 18, 2007)
Table of Contents
Prologue 1
1 September 1936 7
2 Rittenhouse Square 16
3 The Education of a Lobotomist 33
4 In the Hospital Wards 56
5 A Perfect Partner 83
6 Refining Lobotomy 111
7 The Lines of Battle 134
8 Advance and Retreat 157
9 Waterfall 178
10 Fame 207
11 Road Warrior 236
12 Leaving Home 257
13 Decline 284
14 Ghost 305
Acknowledgments 313
Notes 316
Bibliography 349
Index 355
