EXTRA CREDIT BLOG!!
Go to http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080 and click on "listen now."
This is approximately 22 minutes long and is a fascinating (also somewhat disconcerting and disturbing) story of a man who was lobotomized as a child. When done, post your thoughts on the procedure. However be sure to carefully listen to the parts of the story when Howard Dully talks to people who felt the procedure had benefits.
Post response by Friday, May 15 for the extra credit!
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Why would we want to listen to people who thought it had benefits???
ReplyDeleteHoward Dully
One of the most poignant parts of the story was the belief Dr. Freeman held that his procedure had benefits. Mr. Dully, you interviewed some people who believed the procedure did their relatives some good (as hard as it is to believe). Unless I direct the readers to carefully consider Freeman's perspective, I would not be doing my job as a teacher.
ReplyDeleteMost of my students do consider Dr. Freeman a "monster" who should have been stopped well before your stepmother brought you to him.
Thank you for sharing your story and insights on this abomidable procedure.
Mr. Yip
Catie Chatowsky
ReplyDeleteMy initial thoughts on the procedure were that it was disgusting. I first saw the picture of the procedure in class and felt slightly sick. After reading the article I still am not feeling great but I'm glad that I read it because I truly had no idea that this procedure ever happened. I feel really bad and want to cry for all the people who have endured this extreme procedure; in particular the people who have turned into "vegetables" and no longer have a life.
As for Dr. Freeman I have no respect for him or the belief that he deserves any scientific merit at all. No matter how little technology he had while conducting these procedures he should have seen that it was wrong. How could he think that making people unable to function is a solution? Maybe he was slightly ill himself. He sounded like he took tons of pleasure in his procedure and even showed off by doing it with two ice picks at once or the 25 women in a day! He is one man that I will never respect.
In addition to the people who believed that this procedure had benefits I want to scream. Even if there may have been a slightly positive result for a few people, if they took the time to look at all the other people's lives that have been ruined then I feel that it should change their minds. The negative effects of ruining someone's life should be superior to any positive effect and make any type of benefit look out of the picture!
Mr. Dully (if you read this) I'm glad you are okay and thanks for sharing your story with us! :)
In my opinion, this procedure is disturbing and unethical. I feel for Howard Dully and all of the patients and relatives of patients who have all lost a part of them that Dr. Freeman took away with his icepick. The transorbital lobotomy was first used on mental patients to control them since there were no drugs yet, but once they started lobotomizing everyday people, I feel that it got out of hand. Mr. Dully refered to many of the woman lobotomized as housewives. It seems rediculous to me that a common housewife would want to have their brain chipped away in a doctors office just to relieve a migrane. Many of these people were never the same again, as their children spoke about parents who were never really there after the procedure. This is an awful thing to happen especially since so many of these opperations were performed. In Howard's case, his stepmother made the decision for the opperation because she could not control him. He was really just a normal boy and his stepmother's actions changed his life forever. Howard's father even commented on how he was taken to many psychlogists previous to Dr. Freeman who thought Howard was completly normal. I believe that the people who thought this opperation had benefits were lucky. Lucky that their loved ones did not die from brain hemmoraging or lose their personality. These people who were advocates of the lobotomy obviously were just concerned with the magic of this special procedure because it was new, exciting, and popular. The side effects weren't considered back in the 1930-1950's, and if the opperation were more thought out, I feel it would have a lot less advocates, as it does today.
ReplyDeleteJess C.
ReplyDeleteI had a very similar reaction as Catie's while listening to Howard Dully's Journey. I too had never heard of a Lobotomy before and find it hard to believe that it ever happened yet alone that he performed this operation on 2,500 patients. I'm curious as to how many "success" stories there really were and how many ended up in a vegetative state. While some may call them success stories I don't consider it a success at all. Did it truly change anyone for the better, or were the cases that are considered a "success" only because there wasn't anything wrong in the first place and the patient was lucky enough not to have anything damaged?
When it comes to Dr. Freeman I see a man who at first had good intentions and wanted to as he said, "revolutionize medicine." However he went about everything the wrong way and truly did become the monster he is so rightfully called. His procedure to me is slightly barbaric and it disgusts me that he would consistently show off to doctors and nurses as a form of entertainment. To do this when you have a persons life in you're hands is despicable. Surely Dr. Freeman had to have known the dangers of his procedure and seen the negative effects. If I had the chance to ask him a few questions I would want to know if he truly believed his procedures were beneficial(though I can't see how he or anyone else could think this), and how he could continue to perform lobotomies when he knew that it often caused a vegetative state.
As Catie also mentioned in her last paragraph, I too can't see how anyone could find this procedure successful. People's lives have been destroyed because of this procedure and, though you can argue that any surgery has some risk, surgeries that are approved today don't have as high as a risk then lobotomies, and are certainly not done to just anybody as Dr. Freeman appeared to do. Recent medical studies today can prove how severing the frontal lobes in a persons brain doesn't cause a person to no longer have mental retardation or fix behavioral problems therefor proving that lobotomies were not the great revolution of medicine Dr. Freeman said they were. These procedures should have never occurred and Dr. Freeman stopped sooner than he was.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteCameron Blais
ReplyDeleteInitially, I also felt that the lobotomy was a gross, crude and foul procedure that went against everything that the human spirit represents. That this so called doctor was nothing but a crude ruthless sadistic madman. He was truly a Frankenstein, thinking he could bend the soul, and bend life to do his bidding. How could any man truly believe that? This crude procedure has no right being called a surgery. It was a mutilation. Not just of the body, but of the mind, the heart, and the soul. I was almost physically ill when Dr. Freeman's son was speaking of his father with a glowing pride, as if the man deserved an award. In my opinion, that man deserved only a padded cell, a place where he put so many of his patients.
The atrocities committed by Dr. Freeman are some of the most heinous acts that I have ever heard of. It seemed that he, in the beginning, truly believed that he was doing a good thing. He truly believed that he was helping people. Then came the theatric of massive amounts of lobotomies per day, to the almost flourishing two handed lobotomy. The two handed lobotomy is a horrible, horrible thing. That careless, almost lighthearted approach to something so atrocious is despicable, and I have trouble seeing how the human mind is capable of doing something like that. It seems a bit Hitleristic, even of the motivation behind the act WAS for the so called, "greater good".
At first blush I must force myself to believe that Dr. Freeman truly wanted to help people, but looking back it seems that he was just a man who was so obsessed with the limelight that he would do anything in his power to achieve a place in the annals of medical history. Albeit the man had vision, and he had charisma, but what villain in history didn't have these gifts? It seems to me that the only difference between him and Josef Mengele are a pair of high black boots and a goose step.
Personally, I disagree with the lobotomy procedure and think it was right to be banned. Freeman and Watts claimed 52 percent of their surgeries had "good" results. Not only is 52 percent an extremely low percentage to be taking such a risk, these "good" results varied from forgetting simple instinctual things like how to eat to how to use the bathroom. Some people even died from this procedure. The biggest problem I see with it all is the fact that Freeman didn't even receive consent from many of the patients he performed on. These patients would be oblivious to the fact the horrid life they would have after the procedure, not being able to connect with people or put together thoughts at all. It says that families were desperate and "would try anything" to help their mentally ill family members, but if they end up in a vegetative state, how is that any better from dying? Even though some patients were successfully operated on, I think the risk was too high to be okay. Freeman was a man who just wanted a fame, and I don't even believe he truly cared about making people's lives better.
ReplyDeleteNick
ReplyDeleteI think that this procedure is rediculuos. I have never heard of something so bazarr. the fact that he didnt just try and do his job but he tried to set records or try an show off just conveys how dumb of a man he could be and how dumb of a procedure this is. Dr. Freeman's desire to speed the process up so that he could do more lobatomies in one day shows the unprofessionalism he operated with. Also the sentence were it says that he would just stick the "ice pick" through the orbital socket and more his hand back and forth also does not sound as if he could even be sure if the results could be consistant throught the pacients. I feel that the people that believe that the operation was benificial are not taking in the fact that although it may have worked for them or their family members there are also many people that the procedure did not help at all but made worse or killed. I think that this operation was in a time where people did not have the pacients to deal with mentally unstable people and also did not have the correct knowledge of the brian structure that was needed.
I surprised myself and actually went and listened to this story, and I'm glad I did. Just like most of the people who blogged I had no idea what a lobotomy was until today. The actual procedure is horrific and greusom. My initial though on the surgery was "wow this was really gross and shouldn't have been done." But if you look at the positive side of the surgery it actually helped some people, and hurt some others. In the medical field these kinds of things happen, especially with major surgeries, like on cancer patients. There is usually a 50, 50 percent chance you could live healthy or die during the surgery. The lobotomy, though not as extreme, is quite similar. You could either fix whatever mental issue you were having at the time, or possibly become a vegetable for the rest of your life. Also, at the time not many people knew that you could cure these mental issues with therapy and medication, so this was their first and only hope. These people didn't really have anyone else to turn to.
ReplyDeleteSince our generation is very advanced in medical research I would say that Howard Dully's procedure was a waste. He was a child going through a phase, if his mother hadn't been so self-centered Dully could have lived without the sense that he was missing something. His mother allowed him to have the procedure out of angst and hate for him instead of love.
As for Dr. Freeman, he really did revolutionize medicine. His procedure, though dangerous, was the first and last of it's kind, but still opened the eyes of many. He found a new way of coming in contact with the brain. If Dr. Freeman had the technology and science we have today I think that his procedure has the potential to help many people, instead of helping a few and hurting many. In my opinion Dr. Freeman really didn't seem to care much about his patients. You could tell by the fact that he didn't research much about his procedure and it's consequences, he shocked his patients to keep them still during the procedure, and he only took ten minutes tops with each patient. I hate just being another link on the chain, but I would have to agree that Dr. Freeman really is a monster, just look at all of the lives he has hurt from this procedure, and when they tried to stop it, he kept on doing his surgeries. He wanted recognition for his work, and he certainly got it, but not in the way he expected. I definitely agree with Cam’s point that this surgery is mutilation. In the beginning of my blog it might not have seemed so, but that’s my honest opinion.
Dear Mr. Dully,
If you ever reply to this blog I would greatly appreciate if you could answer my questions.
Do regret having the procedure done on you? If you were to go back in time, do you think you would stop the lobotomy from being preformed on you? How do you think that would have impacted your life? I know these questions are somewhat impossible to answer, but I would just like to know your opinion on them, and if you have ever given thought to these questions before.
Thanks,
Sarah Albanese
Unlike most of the people who answered this blog, I did have a faint understanding of what a lobotomy was before class yesterday. However, I did not realize how crude and disgusting the techniques for this procedure were. I think, like Catie, that there probably was something a little off about Dr.Freeman. It is unfathomable to me that anyone could even think it was a good idea to literally scramble peoples' brains, never mind actually take pleasure in it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everyone that in this case a few good results should be overshadowed by the tragic stories, the kids and adults who were made into destroyed, vegetative beings. Mr.Dully was extremely lucky that the effects of his lobotomy were not more prominent in his life, like in the case of the Kennedy daughter. Now that I have heard his story here, I am looking forward to reading his book as well.
Rebecca Remillard said...
ReplyDeleteSheesh. I'm so disturbed by this whole thing. This Freedman guy should have been locked away while he was still alive. I can't imagine how many people were psychologically scarred by his procedures. I'm not sure that I even really understand what was done. Were the patients awake while ice picks were shoved through their eye sockets? It doesn't seem like that could be possible. How could people have survived such a thing? It does make me think that the human brain must be fairly resistant to be able to be poked and prodded like that without major mental damage in most patients. I feel so horrible for the man in the report. To be twelve years old and unknowingly walk yourself into a psychologist's office and end up having a labotomy done is so terrifying to me. When I listened to the recording, I also thought that it was strange that in the 1960s there was procedures like this going on. The 60s wasn't that long ago, and this kind of a thing seems so crude and illegal now. It was an interesting report, and although disturbing it was eye opening.
Rachael Shaw said...
ReplyDeleteI found this article pretty interesting, even though it may have been crazy. This procedure seems to have no real scientific research backing it up. They literally just shoved ice picks into peoples eye sockets. I am completely astounded that it showed positive results, and even more amazed and interested to how it worked. I do understand the reasons people were so willing to test it though, because back then there really weren't any other ways. That was just like how people used to bleed people who had diseases, there was just nothing else that could be done.
Colin said...
ReplyDeleteBrain development is not an exact process. There can be many wiring differences between two individuals, even if both possess perfectly functioning brains.
It's not all a tangle, though - brain scans have identified regions that seem to play the same role in every human mind. So, how much modularity is there? The results of Freedman's lobotomies suggest that there isn't much, because the same procedure results in wildly different outcomes.
Freedman's theory, which attributed most mental illness to a single area of the brain, was, of course, incredibly crude. But even the more sophisticated modular theories of today encounter some difficulties. How do we know if the "lit up" regions in brain scans are incontrovertible proof of a module's existence? Our tools for exploring the mind are still primitive.
A great deal of processing could be distributed across the entire brain, making it almost impossible to observe - scientists aren't sure. Epistemological modesty: gotta have it.
zachary said...
ReplyDeleteMany would consider Dr. Walter Freeman as a good man, and others would consider him a monster. It all depends on from which side you look at it from. Due to some of the results that can happen from a lobotomy, it does seem like a cruel thing to do to someone just so you can change them. Sure some of the time you can actually change a person's begavior, but then they aren't thier own person and sometimes end up being like a zombie. The only advantage to this medical procedure is it can change some people's lives, personalities, and other things about them to make them somewhat more decent people.
Lauren said...
ReplyDeleteI think that Walter Freeman was crazy to do these lobotomies. I think that it was terrible to stick ice picks into people’s brains through their eyeballs. This image is absolutely horrifying for me. And in the video it said that he gave them an electric shock in order to make them unconscious. I think that the electric shock would give them a mental illness if they didn’t have one already. I feel as though there were better ways to cure mental illness and that Freeman should have not had used this method. Although I suppose Freeman’s method was better than the man from Portugal by who drilled holes in the person’s head. Also, I think that this procedure was used to freely, Freeman did it on two many people who necessarily didn’t need. I don’t see why people were so enthused about this method; it wasn’t always 100 percent accurate. There were some very unpleasant results, and very tragic results. Even though there were some excellent results, lobotomies should have been outlawed. This video has truly shocked me, I never realized things like this actually happened.
This procedure is horribly crude and cruel. It is an example of dangerous medicine pioneered by a seemingly self-serving, unresponsible doctor. The process seems especially terrible for Howard Dully, who was operated on because his stepmother attributed his normal adolescent behavior to a mental illness. In his case, the procedure was used as a punishment and a manipulative tool. It is shocking that the medical community allowed Dr. Freeman to carry out his procedures despite the damaging and sometimes fatal results. Cutting the brain is no way to help a mentally ill person; these patients would have been better off institutionalized than lobotomized. Though there were some positive results from the operations, the procedure was too risky and horrifying to have been performed on thousands of people.
ReplyDeleteEmma Hart
ReplyDeleteI believe that the idea of lobotomy was just cruel, to destroy someone's life to just make them "normal". While listening to this story, I was wondering to myself... Did the people, who had their brother, sister, or mother know of the high risks of that person completely changing into a different person? While listening, I felt terrible for the woman who's mother had the lobotomy done to her just to change her headaches. This poor woman could never call her own mother "mom" because this procedure had changed her so much. If I was Mr. Dully I would have similar questions. During his quest to find answers, I found that the stories that the families told about their family members was horrifying. Why would someone who knew the procedure could permanently change that person follow through with it? While listening, I asked myself... Did Dr. Freeman tell these people the risks for having a lobotomy? He obviously did not because these people would have never done the procedure. Also, why would this man do these procedures to people who did not need them? He was "only trying to help" which then turned into a death of a patient. What kind of procedure is it if you end up killing a patient? Dr. Freeman only did this for fame which aggravates me. A doctor is someone that cures another. I feel as though Dr. Freeman did not cure these people, he just killed their personalities. I also believe that Mr. Dully was brave to go on a quest for answers. Thank you for sharing your story with us Mr. Dully.
This procedure was not only radical, but dangerous and crude. It is difficult to believe the medical community was not objecting publicly to this type of practice. While Freeman believed that this revolutionary method would be a breakthrough and carry him to be famous for his cure, he never really had any sure data that proved anything valid. I think he was too consumed with his own place in medical history to really see things clearly. Otherwise, he would not have convinced the father of a “normal” boy to undergo such an operation. This was unethical and would be a huge lawsuit if done in later years. “Overactive emotions” seems like a description of a problem that should be dealt with in a less invasive way. From the father’s interview, there were other doctors that thought the Dully boy was not a candidate for such a procedure. Freedman was not considering the best interests of his patients. They trusted him and he was not to be trusted. The lobotomy as a last-ditch effort to save the mental health of the worst patients still is a procedure that is not acceptable. Thankfully, modern medicine developed drugs to take the place of doctors like Freedman.
ReplyDeletethis was a disturbing tale. its like a car accident, you want to look away but you cant. This story isnt only different but true. How is it that someone can be literally icepicked for beneficial use. The human brain is a living organ that controls the whole body, and cannot be poked touched or even moved without something going wrong, let alone be ice picked. And the twelve year old boy, what kind of mother does this to her child. It was an outrage but an effective learning tool mr yip.
ReplyDelete