Claire Prentice

Dr. Walter Freeman was a neurologist, and the man who invented the transorbital lobotomy, performed with surgical picks and a medical hammer. The picks looked like ice picks.

It's not the equipment used, of course, that makes the procedure horrific.

This is a short audiobook, about two hours, but it packs a punch. Freeman began actively, even aggressively, promoting and performing lobotomies in the 1950s in the overcrowded, underfunded mental hospitals of West Virginia.

The hospitals were seriously underfunded, and West Virginia was a poor state, and conditions in the hospitals were horrific. Psychiatric drugs weren't available yet, or rather, were just in the early stages of being developed. But even once they became available, they take time to work.

The transorbital lobotomy was a ten-minute procedure that had immediate efflect.

Initially, the lobotomies were being performed mostly on violent, difficult to control patients, and many of them were "improved" by the lobotomy. About one third, and that's Freeman's own estimate, not an independent estimate, were well enough to go home.

While some did well when they returned home after lobotomies, others became passive, lost all initiative, had difficulty with simple tasks. Some became unable to even take basic care of themselves--needing to be fed, cleaned, and helped to toilet.

Some died of the procedure, because the smallest slip could cause far more brain damage than intended.

It was disproportionately performed on women, minorities, and the poor. The list of conditions for which Freeman eagerly recommended it kept growing, and minor anxiety in women, or teenage defiance of parents, were included.

Freeman was a showman, who liked to be watched performing, courted the media, and never acknowledged the damage his beloved procedure did to so many of his patients. Opposition to lobotomy grew in the medical community throughout the 1950s, as the consequences became clear and the first effective psychiatric drugs became available, but Freeman kept promoting lobotomy, and performing lobotomies, until 1967, when a long-term patient on whom he had performed two previous lobotomies, died following a third.

This is truly a horrifying story. I'm old enough that I'd heard a good bit of this before, but this book is a fuller story than what I knew, and quite shocking.

Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.… (mais)

I enjoy reading medical stories and mysteries but I didn't know when I borrowed this book it would end up being a horror story. It is the true story of Dr Walter Freeman, the Dr Icepick of the title. He was convinced that transorbital lobotomies were the answer to mental illness and the overcrowding of state mental institutions. This hit especially close to home as I am from WV, where his Operation Icepick got its start. This program got its name from the tool used in the procedure which resembled a long-handled icepick driven into the brain in the eye socket. WV state officials bought Dr Freeman's story and authorized the program which caused much grief to thousands of families over the years before such lobotomies fell from grace with the development of Thorazine and other psychiatric drugs. Better living through chemistry indeed! The author worked at the University of Virginia, which also used the program. The book is extensively researched through studying available records and newspaper articles as well as talking to employees, patients, and families involved. This was a case where politics, medical orthodoxy, and unquestioning newspapers got behind a jealous flawed man and an unproven and relatively untested medical procedure. Could this happen again? One might look to the current opioid crisis, FDA approval and the powerful Sackler family's Oxycontin to realize it certainly could.… (mais)

Doctor Ice Pick. Claire Prentice. (Amazon Original Stories) 2022. Well this was a surprise: I saw the title and thought this book was a gruesome serial murder mystery. It was gruesome, and unfortunately, a true account of the medical career of Dr. Walter Freeman, who perfected the hideous medical practice of performing a prefrontal lobotomy to “cure” mentally ill patients. While most of the medical world felt like the procedure that should only used when all other methods failed. Freeman insisted it was the answer to mental illness and could save thousands and thousands of dollars in the treatment of mental illness. He continued to do the lobotomies for as long as he could and ignored all the evidence that the procedure was barbaric and not effective. With the advent of new drugs the procedure is no longer used, but it is estimated that around 50 thousand lobotomies were performed in America, and the procedure has never been outlawed. Rosemary Kennedy, a sister of President Kennedy, was probably the most famous “victim” of this procedure. Scary and devastating.… (mais)