Strong parallels with Lobotomy - What has changed?

One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital or "ice pick" lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness.

Freeman's operation reflected the neurologist's peculiar combination of zealotry, talent, hubris and, as one of his trainees noted, craziness.

Undaunted by his failures, Freeman's pitch that lobotomy cured mental illness was seized on by the press -- the Washington Star called it among "the greatest innovations of this generation," and the New York Times pronounced it "history-making." Many doctors embraced it as a 10-minute operation that promised to empty mental hospitals and return patients to their families. Opponents, mostly psychiatrists who practiced Freudian talk therapy, didn't matter much: In those days public criticism of a doctor by his peers was regarded as unethical.

The story of how Freeman sold his procedure to credulous colleagues, assiduously courted the press and convinced desperate families that sticking an ice pick through a patient's upper eye sockets and twirling it like a swizzle stick through brain matter would cure psychosis, depression or troublesome behavior is the ultimate in cautionary medical tales.

The issue at the heart of this powerful and unsettling film is not, as one writer puts it, "how a man could go off the rails, but how science could go off the rails."

'Lobotomist' Serves as a Warning

Documentary Shows Damage Done When Medicine Goes Awry

By Sandra G. Boodman

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 15, 2008; Page HE01