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Throughout the history of medicine, there have been few surgical practices more barbaric and cruel yet sometimes surprisingly helpful than the lobotomy. Famous lobotomy patients range from children of politicians and English lords to singers who were on their way to stardom before finding themselves waylaid by mental illness. The personality, memory, and IQ of lobotomy patients before and after surgery varies wildly, and doctors were not able to fully understand what was happening and why. These true stories about lobotomy patients are at times emotionally draining, but a few of them also reveal an unexpected beacon of light.
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Humans as a species don't have the best track record when it comes to finding solutions to
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serious brain-related problems, and mental health care as a concept is still relatively new
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Still, it might surprise you to learn that chiseling a needle into your skull used to be
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a widely accepted treatment. Somewhat less surprising is the fact that this treatment
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rarely worked as intended, and left most patients with irreparable brain damage
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So, today, we're hammering into some of the darkest before and after lobotomy stories from history
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Okay, this will only hurt for a second, I think. Throughout the history of medicine, there have been few surgical practices more barbaric and cruel
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yet sometimes surprisingly helpful, than the lobotomy. Famous lobotomy patients range from children of politicians and English lords
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to singers who were on their way to stardom before finding themselves waylaid by mental illness
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The personality, memory, and IQ of lobotomy patients before and after surgery varies wildly
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and doctors are still not able to fully understand the specific details of this outlandish surgery
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Born in 1928, the Earl of Galloway was a slightly eccentric child who was eventually
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diagnosed with schizophrenia. When he turned 23, his parents took the unsuspecting Earl to a hospital
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in London where he was lobotomized. After the surgery, Stuart spent the next 15 years in the
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mental wing of the Crichton Royal Infirmary. Then, in 1970, his parents placed him in the
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Monastery of the Transfiguration in Roslyn. Kind of sounds like the procedure wasn't all that
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helpful. After finally leaving the monastery and marrying a commoner and shop girl, Stuart said
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I was never the same again, referring to the lobotomy. Many have wondered about his ability to live post-surgery
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Even if it cured some of his severe symptoms, the procedure left the Earl completely unable to live on his own
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without the support of the various institutions he frequented or his eventual wife
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As a 12-year-old boy, Howard Dully was described as defiant and savage-looking
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His doctor's notes on him at the time reveal a preteen with some mental health issues
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who was trying to test his boundaries with his father and stepmother. From Dr. Walter Freeman's notes, he doesn't react either to love or to punishment
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He also wrote that Howard never wanted to go to bed. They dreamed constantly and turned on lights even when it was still bright outside
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In other words, he was a 12-year-old boy. In December 1960, Dr. Freeman performed a lobotomy on Howard Dully
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and his entire nature seemed to change. Dully stepmother noted that he sat quietly grinning most of the time and offering nothing That sounds less like calm and more like creepy It took dully decades to understand what happened to him
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and he still suffers from memory loss, with a constant feeling that he's missing something
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Reflecting on his experience, he said, Walter Freeman's operation was supposed to relieve suffering
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In my case, it did just the opposite. It may be hard to believe, but not every lobotomy case was a failure
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According to Patricia Moen, after being married to her husband for 13 years
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she suddenly started crying constantly in 1962 at the age of 36
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She told NPR, I just mentally was no good. And one night while she was home alone
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she took an entire bottle of pills in a last ditch attempt to ease her suffering
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That's when Dr. Walter Freeman, yeah, he's back, suggested that she get a lobotomy, although he did warn her that there was a possibility
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that she would end up catatonic. According to Patricia, even though she couldn't remember the
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surgery or her time at the hospital, she did feel different after the doctor tinkered with her brain
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She later claimed, I was a more free person after I'd had it. Just not to be so concerned about
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things, I went home and started living again. She went on to explain that the lobotomy allowed her
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to get back to cooking and shopping and generally taking care of the household. And she considered
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that success enough. In 1944, Jenny Polarski was admitted to a state psychiatric facility
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known as the Manteno State Hospital in Manteno, Illinois, after she and her parents had a
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disagreement about where she would live post-college. When she was admitted to the facility
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a doctor described her as neat, clean, tidy, extremely quiet, but friendly and agreeable
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cooperative in ward and routine. He even noted that there were no signs of active pathology
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For some reason, instead of releasing Jenny on her own recognizance, the hospital staff subjected her to hydrotherapy
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repeatedly plunging her into and out of ice water. Afterward, she asked, is life a farce
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If you're in a position to ask that question, the answer is usually yes
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By May of 1953, Jenny had undergone 187 electric shock therapies, roughly two a week
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And on February 18, 1955, she was subjected to an extensive neurosurgery with bilateral extirpation
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of most of the frontal and temporal lobes. That's the gussied-up scientific way to say she was lobotomized
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This unnecessary surgery left Jenny mute and totally dependent on commands for functioning of everything
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from toilet urges on up. None of this was reported to anyone
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And for the next 45 years, she was shuffled between nursing homes
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in mental wards until she passed in 1998 at the age of 79 In the 1980s the punk band Reagan Youth bashed out an intense politically charged form of
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hardcore that managed to toe the line between blazing circle pit anthems and incisive critiques
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of the racist punk scene that was bubbling over throughout the decade. Unfortunately, the band singer Dave Rubenstein, better known to fans as Dave Insurgent, had
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a serious addiction problem and also got into a fight that left him with a head injury. Doctors
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informed him that he required a lobotomy in order to recover. After the surgery, Rubenstein
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technically recovered, but he was never again the punk rock intellectual that he was while fronting
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Reagan youth. He quit singing with the band and threw himself completely into his addiction
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and in a final bizarre and tragic twist, Rubenstein's girlfriend, Tiffany Bresciani
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was slain by the serial killer, Joel Rifkin. Less than a week later, his mother was fatally
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struck by a car driven by his father, and Rubinstein took his own life shortly afterward
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During the mid-20th century, a young man only known by the initials H.M. was hit by a cyclist
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and cracked his skull. From that injury, he began suffering seizures that lasted for around 40
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seconds at a time. H.M. sought out Dr. William Scoville, a man who was experimenting with
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fractional lobotomies, which eliminated less tissue and supposedly allowed patients to keep
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their original personalities. On September 1st, 1953, Scoville used a hand crank and drill saw
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from a local hardware store to remove a bottle cap's worth of bone from above each one of H.M.'s
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eyes. He then removed a few key parts of H.M.'s brain. After the surgery, H.M. only suffered
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about two seizures a year, a vast improvement, and his IQ jumped from 104 to 117, but he couldn't
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form any new memories. H.M. was forced to move back in with his parents, where he performed odd jobs
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despite having to ask multiple times what he was doing. It was later discovered that due to the
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loss of his hippocampus, H.M.'s brain began to understand time differently. According to Sam Keen
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five minutes lasted subjectively just 40 seconds for him. One hour lasted three minutes. One day
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15 minutes. In fairness to Dr. Scoville, there are people who would pay a large sum of money
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for that experience. H.M. passed in a nursing facility at the age of 82 from respiratory failure
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and his brain was removed for study immediately following his passing. H.M.'s brain was shaved
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into 2,401 slices, each of which was mounted on a glass plate and photographed at 20 times
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magnification to form a digital, zoomable map down to the level of individual neurons
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Rose Williams the older sister of famed playwright Tennessee Williams suffered from schizophrenia and was described by her brother as one of the sweetest most genuine people he ever knew In his memoirs Williams notes that
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when Rose would go on a date, she would talk with an almost hysterical animation, which few young
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men knew how to take. Apparently, she was a member of the Ministry of Silly Walks. In 1926, Rose wrote
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a letter to her grandmother describing her depression. I don't know what was the matter
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with me except that I was so nervous that I couldn't hold the glass to take my medicine in
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She went on to say that she spent the day in bed and struggled her way through a music lesson because her anxiety was so extreme, stating
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By 1943, Rose was beginning to lash out during manic episodes and agreed to undergo a frontal lobotomy
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The surgery technically relieved her anxiety in that it seemed to reduce her to a nearly catatonic state
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She remained institutionalized, albeit in a relatively swanky institution thanks to her brother's fortune
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In a post-surgery letter she wrote to Tennessee, she said, I want some black coffee, ice cream on a chocolate bar, a good picture of you, your devoted sister, XXX Rose
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P.S. Send me one dollar for ice cream. When Rosemary Kennedy was born, the medical community was still decades away from understanding dyslexia and other learning disabilities
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The little sister of John F. Kennedy, Rosemary, was misunderstood by her parents, who
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struggled with her deficient cognitive skills. She also frequently erupted into aggressive tantrums
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when she didn't get what she wanted. Her father, Joe Kennedy, consulted the psychology
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department at Harvard University, where doctors evaluated Rosemary and concluded that she was
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developmentally disabled. Her father consented to giving his daughter a frontal lobotomy when she was 23 years old
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It has been alleged that Kennedy was afraid his daughter might embarrass him and his son
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You know, that president guy, and her their chances in politics. In November 1941, Dr. Walter Freeman performed the surgery
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with Dr. James Watts. And they sliced away at the young woman's frontal lobe
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until the left side of her body was partially paralyzed. After the surgery, Rosemary was sent off to a mental institution
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where she had to relearn how to brush her teeth, walk, and dress herself. The bubbly and sometimes volcanically angry young woman
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was reduced to a shell of her former self, who was unable to talk
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In 2018, People published never-before-seen letters from Rosemary before she was lobotomized
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The letters were addressed to her caretaker, Dorothy Smythe, an Irish woman who cared for Rosemary
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for a month-long period when she was 20. Rosemary recounted her adventures in Europe to Smythe
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and she ended her letters with sign-offs like, best love from your darling sweetheart
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Her surgery remains one of the most infamous lobotomy stories, and likely contributed to the extreme procedure
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mostly falling out of use by the 1970s, which still seems like too long