Walter Jackson Freeman II, a physician with a traumatic childhood and Yale background, revolutionized psychosurgery by adapting Antonio Moniz's leucotomy into the aggressive lobotomy. While Moniz used careful surgery for last-resort cases like Miss Hammett, Freeman employed an ice pick to sever frontal lobe connections without anesthesia or consent, often rendering patients catatonic rather than cured. His transorbital method, marketed as simple enough for untrained psychiatrists and demonstrated at an AMA convention with a monkey, led to ethical scandals and a rift with partner Watts. Ultimately, Freeman's drive to subdue patients quickly prioritized capitalist productivity over compassion, leaving a legacy of suppressed personalities and severe side effects that challenged medical standards. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Morning People and Con Artists00:05:10
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's not a morning person?
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the show where we talk about the worst people in history, and I introduced the show badly.
Today, we have an unusual morning recording at an ungodly hour.
What is it, Sophie?
It's 11:39 a.m.
I feel like I'm the first person who's ever been awake this early.
Aside from my guest today, of course, Mr. Daniel Van Kirk.
Hello.
Thanks for having me back.
How are you doing, Daniel?
I'm great, my man.
I am wonderful.
How are you?
Daniel.
Go ahead.
No, no.
Oh, I was going to say, I've been up for two hours.
So that's very impressive.
Do you like mornings?
I do not, but I've recently found out that I am able to get so many more things done the earlier I get up, which would seem to be very simple math, but nothing that I had personally made any efforts to experience until recently in my life.
So I would say on average nowadays, I'm up around before 8, maybe sometimes 6.30.
But I am not a morning person.
I hate sunrises.
I love sunsets.
Robert would say, 6.30, that's the middle of the night.
Well, if you're wondering if you're not.
That is when I went to bed last night.
It is.
Thereabouts.
Maybe 5.30.
Well, I appreciate you making this effort then, man.
That's crazy.
My sleep schedule is still all fucked up from the flight.
Sure.
Now, Daniel, we've established that you're sort of ambivalent towards mornings, leaning towards not liking them.
How do you feel about brains?
How do you feel about your brain?
I feel pretty good about it.
You do?
Yeah, it's held up pretty well.
My memory is still very good.
That's good.
I haven't gotten to the point where I have to have a calendar.
I would say I use it for about 50% of my stuff.
I should be using it for a lot more, but mine's held up so far, I think.
Well, I think most people like their brain except for the moments when they hate them.
And I think that probably for the listeners of this show, statistically, they have spent like, I don't know, about 50% of their waking hours not liking their brain because this is a show for depressed people who like to hear about terrible things.
As a general rule, that's our demo, isn't it, Sophie?
I hope not.
Okay, we like depression and I like screwed up, fucked up shit.
So I mean, me too.
Maybe I'm describing the author of the show and its primary cast more than the listeners.
I hope the listeners are happy, but I'm making an assumption here.
Statistically Depressed Listeners00:03:54
Either way, you're here for them.
As of a 2017 study by the Journal of Psychiatric Services, more than 8 million Americans suffer from severe psychological distress.
Now, this is a blanket term for, quote, feelings of sadness, worthlessness, restlessness that are hazardous enough to impair physical well-being.
That sounds pretty familiar to me.
And that number doesn't include all the Americans struggling with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, psychosis, depression, and a whole galaxy of other brain-based thingama-jigs to deal with.
And to some extent, it's always been this way.
Huge chunks of people have always had brains that don't let them comfortably interface with mainstream society.
Now, we're not great at helping people with mental illnesses in 2019, but a few decades ago, we were much worse at it.
And today we're going to talk about the man who was perhaps the very, very worst of all at it.
So, you know, the name Walter Jackson Freeman II.
I do now.
Well, he invented lobotomies, and that's who we're talking about today.
Oh, the just the like, well, we'll just remove it.
Yep.
We'll just scramble it up a little bit, actually.
Yeah.
Oh, you yell too much?
We'll remove it.
Oh, you had an unwanted pregnancy?
We'll remove it.
And not just the pregnancy part.
No, actually, we will keep the pregnancy, but we'll scramble that brain up.
Yeah.
Oh, and I've heard, well, I'm sure we'll touch on some of them, but I've just heard horror stories of like, well, we had a sister, and then she just wouldn't stop arguing with her parents, so she went away.
She liked boys.
Yeah.
So we stuck a needle in her brain.
Oh, what a time it was.
And I was not all that long.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, man.
I am going to bunk her down for this.
Yeah.
My dog is a registered therapy dog if you need to pet her.
Okay, great.
Yeah.
Awesome.
Is she a registered lobotomist, Sophie?
Because I feel like there's a lot of money in that.
No, but we'll look into it.
We'll look into it.
Walter Jackson Freeman II was born on November 14th, 1895 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
His father, Walter I, was also a doctor, but not a very good one.
He hated the work and he did it only grudgingly.
He was like an ear, nose, and throat doctor, and it was said that his ideal world would have been one in which people didn't have ears, noses, or throats, so he wouldn't have to work.
Well, his son kind of took that one next level then.
Like, oh, you want things just removed that you don't want to deal with?
That's what I'm going to do, dad.
Now, Walter Jackson II's grandfather, Keen Freeman, was one of the most celebrated physicians of his age and was like the first doctor who did a bunch of important things.
He's a legitimate like trailblazing medical motherfucker.
So Walter Freeman II was a sick child, which was not unusual in an era where the average fist fight came with a better prognosis than the average surgery.
He developed enlarged lymph nodes when he was 14 months old, which his grandfather had to cut out.
The surgery worked, but it permanently paralyzed some of the muscles in Walter's shoulder and head.
Walter II also underwent a tonsillectomy and suffered from diphtheria, scarlet fever, the measles, whooping cough, the mumps, and pink eye.
I don't want to say that God definitely wanted this baby dead, but I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Yeah, they tried.
Yeah, he did his best.
Young Walter's first memory was of the head of a pickaxe breaking through the wall of his nursery as the result of a home demolition that got a little sloppy, which is a pretty badass first memory.
You got to give it to me.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
Also, not too far off of an analogy of what he would later do to people's own lives.
Anatomy of a Messed Up Culture00:15:00
And not too far off from a great scene in The Shining, which starred Jack Nicholson, who was also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a movie about a lobotomy.
Ooh, that was a good not.
We tied a lot of things together.
Now, the wonderful biography of Walter, The Lobotomist, notes that he also nursed a lifelong fear of horses, but never knew why.
That doesn't come up again.
I just think it's interesting.
People are terrified of something for no reason.
Yeah.
And they can't let it go.
Well, I'm also afraid of horses.
Okay, well, that's not what we're talking about today.
All right, well, you need to put that in.
That needs to go in the book.
Right.
Are you scared of anything on an existential level that makes no sense to you?
I don't.
Well, that's, but if you're scared of it, doesn't it make sense to you?
So, not always.
I don't know.
I'm very afraid of prison.
Okay, that makes total sense.
Yeah.
But it makes sense to me.
But it is like when I just think about not being able to get out of somewhere that they're destined to, like, you know, like, they're like, oh, we decided.
I don't know.
I don't like it.
It bothers me.
That show 60 Days In.
Have you watched that?
No.
That sounds like a fucking nightmare, though.
It's like they embed civilians into a prison system.
The only person that knows that they're not an actual prisoner is the warden.
And then the camera crew sets up as though they're doing a documentary in the prison, but they use that to do like their confessional talking head moments.
So they interview a lot of prisoners, but none of them assume, well, one of us isn't actually even supposed to be here.
And their job is to last 60 days.
And quite a few of them end up just getting beaten up.
Yeah, that makes sense.
One was bad at his cover story of what he was supposed to be in there for.
So once you just start lying to other prisoners, they assume you must be a pedophile.
And that's why you're like no pun intended KG about what you got in there for.
And that didn't end well for that guy either.
Once everybody was like, oh, you're a pedophile.
He's like, no, And then they don't care about that.
That's what they think.
So you get beat up.
Is there a cash prize?
I don't know if there is any cash prize.
I'm trying to think, like, you would have to have to be.
I would only do it for enough money that I would be able to buy a cabin in the woods.
Like, you would have to give me cabin in the woods money in order to do that fucking thing.
That sounds like the worst.
That's like it would have to be nice woods with like a mountain and shit.
So you, for like $350, you would do it.
No, no, no, no.
Like $500 is going to be the low end of that shit.
I'm talking a nice cabin.
See, one time when I toured Alcatraz, they let us go into the solitary confinement.
And they're like, anybody want to check it out?
And then I thought, you know what?
Lean in on your fear.
So I went in and the guy shut the door to like, I don't know what you'd call it, probably a park ranger at this point because of what Alcatraz is.
And then the tour guide, whatever.
And then he pretended that the door was stuck and he couldn't get me out.
And I did not enjoy those few very short moments that felt like very long hours.
See, I would live in Alcatraz if it could just be my house and I had a sack of rifles and an internet connection.
That would be fun.
I could take pot shots at Silicon Valley.
That would be satisfying.
I would sign up for that podcast.
I would need espresso to Robert.
Welcome back to Robert on the Rock.
It's another episode.
Okay, we should probably get back to the podcast.
We were talking, he's scared of horses.
Now, when Walter was a small child, his family moved to an area near Rittenhouse Square, a once fancy but now slummy neighborhood.
And this is again in Philadelphia.
Now, Freeman would later recall it as a rather dingy place where nursemaids wheeled baby carriages and gossiped.
Walter's family was quite well off, and he came up with maids and cooks and nannies to attend to his and his parents' every whim.
He was not overly adventurous as a child and later wrote of himself, On the whole, I think I was a sensitive, imaginative boy, docile, shut in a bit, and full of questions.
His parents nicknamed him Little Walter Why, and the growing boy was particularly intrigued by the family business, medicine.
He had a good relationship with his grandfather, but almost no real friends.
The only boy he played with regularly was his younger cousin, Morris.
The book, The Lobotamus, describes their friendship as basically identical to a Calvin and Hobbes strip.
Walter and Morris nursed a mutual contempt for girls and made grand plans for the Society for the Prevention of Useless Girls, Spugs for short.
Disdaining the company of other children, they set up another exclusive secret society, just two members strong, which they called the Walrus Club.
Yeah, that's like the fucking Calvin and Hobbes strip.
100%.
Yeah.
And they got a transmorgifier.
Wasn't that one of the things?
Yeah, they traveled through time.
Yeah, so did I.
It's kind of a bummer if you imagine this is what happened to Calvin when he grew up.
No, I'm not doing that.
No, don't do that.
Don't do that.
Maybe more Hobbes.
I could see Hobbes getting into this line of work, but definitely not.
Scrambling brains.
Now, Walter was a good student.
He excelled in Latin and Greek, and he won prizes for his scholastics.
He was never any good at sports, nor did he grow any more adept with the opposite sex as he blossomed into a teenager.
He found girls bothersome and later wrote, I think I actively disliked girls until I went to college.
This is all going to make so much sense later.
This is all going to make so much sense immediately.
Okay.
Walter Freeman was the oldest of six siblings, all but two of whom were boys.
He did not get along well with them, nor did he particularly care for his parents.
Walter would later note repeatedly that he never loved his mother.
He was only a little closer to his father, who took him and his brothers on regular hiking, fishing, and camping trips.
The elder Walter hated his medical practice and considered the outdoors his only refuge.
He was a weird dude.
Once when Walter II was caught skipping school, his father punished him by whipping himself in front of the truant officer.
Wait, whoa.
Yeah.
The dad whipped himself or he had Walter II.
No, he whipped him.
The dad whipped himself in front of the truant officer.
You made the truant officer to myself by skipping school.
Yeah, and he did it in front of the cop.
Whoa.
Like, that's so fucked up.
It takes like, you really have to process that shit.
Like the labels fucking up the kid's head.
Yeah.
You know that like I'm not.
I'm the truant officer.
Imagine that guy.
He's like, look, hey, whoa, buddy.
I just want kids to go to school.
Why are we doing this?
You got to do is sign the sheet, man.
All you got to do is sign the sheet that I told you he wasn't at school.
Put the whip down.
Why did you bring a whip to this meeting?
You don't need to do this.
No one's asking you to do this.
Sir, I just want you to know I'm also going to have to write you up for whipping yourself because I have to document that I witnessed this.
He missed a day of school.
This isn't really a whipping situation.
I wondered what you meant when you were like, cool, I'll bring my whip.
Yeah, I have trouble getting my head around what kind of man does that.
Oh, I know.
And then I'm sure the Truan Officer was like, wanted the kid to leave.
And then, just like in Will Farrell and Espondin Down, the dad was like, let the boy watch.
Oh, that's horrible.
I feel that's horrific.
That's a mind fuck.
Yeah.
That's a galaxy-level mind fuck.
Oh, boy.
I bet that Truan officer felt bad for that.
I bet in the future he was like, you know what?
You need to stop skipping school, but we're not going to tell your dad.
Anybody.
That truant officer let everyone skip.
He was like, I'm not going through that again.
I am not doing that again.
So, as is probably not a surprise hearing that, Walter's father was no less awkward when it came to talking to his young adult son about sex.
Years later, Walter recalled, I had been showing interest in the external anatomy of my young girl cousins.
With the aid of his ancient textbooks on anatomy and gynecology illustrated with woodcuts, he dilated upon internal anatomy, reproduction, and especially venereal disease, threatening to have me followed or even tempted by operatives who would report to him.
I was thoroughly uncomfortable, but remained a virgin.
He never alluded to it again.
What?
So if you're a young parent out there looking to stop your kid from fucking too early, this is one way to keep them a virgin for a very long time.
Yeah, or watch a racerhead.
Yeah, or watch a racerhead.
Yeah.
But okay, so he got way into his own.
He said straight up, I was really into my female cousin's anatomy.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know, you know, that's fucked up.
I think in an earlier age in which boys and girls did not socialize, like, you run into stories like that a lot in the early 1900s just because like you weren't hanging out with any other girls.
So like that's when people would have that real, it's it's messed up and a symptom of some unhealthy things in the culture.
But I'm not going to say that that right there is evidence that Walter was weird from the beginning.
Maybe they were the only girls he spent any time around.
I guess so when you say anatomy, to me, it's like he makes me feel like, I guess I intone that he's more preoccupied.
Like it's okay to wonder what's under their clothes, but don't start wondering what's under their skin.
I think that was just sort of a euphemism they used because again, nobody had good vocabulary to talk about like bodies back then.
Right.
Because everyone was fucked up and it was an even less healthy time.
Right.
There was no hot girl summer or Midwestern boy autumn, which I am currently a part of.
Oh, yeah.
That's yeah.
Midwestern boy autumn is good.
Southeastern boy late summer/slash early fall, which really doesn't get going until November.
We get a lot of them.
I like slutty people, April showers.
That's my favorite time of year.
Slutty people, April showers.
There has to be a porn star named April Showers, right?
Of course.
Oh, yeah.
No, there's like 100%.
Okay.
I hope so.
And we're putting it in the universe if there isn't.
Yeah.
Or else we call dibs if any of us get into porn.
I mean, that's going to be the sequel podcast to this one.
Okay.
Robert Evans makes a porno.
It is not going to be popular.
Back to Walter Freeman.
So, Walter graduated from high school when he was just 16 years old.
He immediately started attending classes at Yale.
He was academically excellent, but completely miserable.
He was too young and immature to get up to any kind of animal house-type bonding shenanigans with his fellow young men.
And his utter disdain for women made most kinds of socialization impossible.
It turns out it's not great to be in college at age 16.
It's not the best time to do that.
He briefly worked for the Yale Daily News, but was let go after he spilled a bunch of alphabetized subscriber cards in front of his editor.
He joined the swim team at one point, but refused to practice when anyone was around.
He didn't want people to see him with his shirt off.
So he's, you get a feel for the kind of young man Walter Freeman was.
Not a comfortable one.
No.
Now, in fairness, knowing about his dad, how could he possibly have been?
Right.
His initial degree program was engineering, but this track was disrupted at the end of his junior year when he ate a bad batch of raw clams and caught typhoid fever.
He spent months laid up with this and an assortment of other ailments that took up the entirety of his first semester senior year at Yale.
The long months he spent at hospitals and sickbeds helped Walter realize that he wanted something different out of life, a career in medicine.
Now, he'd initially not wanted to go down that road due largely to the fact that his father had told him it was a terrible life.
Don't be a fucking doctor as he whips himself.
Right.
So instead, this isn't about you.
I'm whipping myself because someone else left a muffin out on the counter.
This is their whipping, but I needed to talk to you.
Also, he's third generation, so his dad probably was forced into it by his dad.
Yeah.
And so he, maybe this was his one thing where he was trying to be like, you don't, you do what you don't have to, you don't have to do this, and it didn't matter.
I feel like he's saying you don't have to do this while everybody looks at him whipping himself and is like, you really don't have to do this.
Good point.
So Walter, seeing his dad was a miserable, fucked up person, Walter instead looked towards his grandfather as a role model and enrolled in summer classes at the University of Chicago to catch up on medical school before, or to catch up on like medicine and science-related classes before starting medical school the next year.
He excelled in this as well and attempted to rebuild his health by walking 30 minutes to and from campus every day carrying a heavy box of bones.
I don't know where you could just get bones back then.
Yeah, he just decided he needed he wanted to like get healthy and the way to do it was to carry around a lot of bones.
Right.
And because he's a fucked up person, a rock isn't good enough.
Yeah, there were more bones than rocks back then.
There were just people dying left and right.
So he stopped by HH Holmes' place and picked up some.
Yeah.
Wait, what year is this?
That doesn't check out.
Yeah, actually, I think it might check out.
It's late 1890s.
I don't remember exactly when H.H. Holmes was.
H.H. Holmes is like World Expert.
This is like 1892.
No, he would have been, he would have been, he was born in 95.
So but there would have been, there would have been a lot of bones lying around in the early 1900s.
For sure.
Bone-heavy period.
World War I was on.
A lot of bones.
Shitloads of bones.
Now, yeah, so he excelled in his classes and he was getting better, you know, healthier thanks to his bone box.
But in spite of all this, he got sick again very quickly and was soon bedridden.
He later recalled, I wrote home saying I guessed God didn't want me to study medicine.
In reply, I received a stern admonition not to think that way, much less to mention it.
Wait, Robert, he got sick again?
Yeah, he kept, he was very sick.
He was a sick, sick young man.
Oh, man.
This is.
You're right.
Mother Nature was trying to kill him.
God was definitely trying to stop him from being kicked.
But he's a fighter.
You got to keep him.
He's a fighter.
He is a persistent son of a bitch.
He shouldn't have been.
Let it go.
He should not have been.
Somebody should have walked in whipping themselves and been like, this is so that you can let it go.
Just go.
Yeah, that's, I think that we have to land on the conclusion that if only there'd been more whipping in his childhood, he would have turned out better.
The Persistent Fighter's Luck00:07:17
Can I ask you a foreshadowing question that I didn't?
I don't expect you to answer yet because I don't know that we should, even if you can.
But much like we all wonder, like, what purpose does mosquitoes provide?
Like, what do they give us in the long run or whatever, other than just bad stuff?
I would love to know by the end of this episode, I already hate him, if at some point you're going to be like, well, actually, because of the lobotomy, we now have this positive thing in our world.
And I'm anxious to see if that comes about at all.
Yes, he was actually.
This is getting ahead a little bit.
Yeah, I didn't want to do that to you.
I'm just, that's what's already in my head.
I'm like, I hope there's some benefit to this fucker.
Yeah.
The spoiler I'll give you is that it turned out he was right for the wrong reasons, or at least he was right, but it led him to do the wrong things.
Oh, like the little kid in a Bronx tail.
I've not seen in a book.
Oh, he covers for a mob guy, and he asks his dad, Robert De Niro.
He goes, I did a good thing, right, Dad?
And he goes, yeah, you did a good thing for a bad man.
Like, it was the right thing, but you did it for the wrong person.
Yeah.
Well, it's a little different than that.
We'll get there.
Okay.
So after a second tonsillectomy, Freeman's health improved, and soon he was off to medical school in hand.
Bones in hand.
During the First World War, he was drafted into the Army Medical Corps and he became a sergeant while he continued his education.
He was demoted once for threatening his company commander with a shoe, but otherwise had a solid service.
We can't skip this.
With a shoe, just a little shoe fight.
You've had a couple.
I've never had a shoe fight.
We all have the odd shoe fight.
Icantina Turner.
That's the most popular shoe fight of all time.
Yeah, it was just like an argument, and he like picked up his shoe and yelled at somebody and didn't realize they were his commanding officer.
It's less interesting than you'd think.
It's funnier when you just summarize it that way.
True.
True.
Now, Walter graduated as a doctor in 1920, the second in his class.
By this point, he had become so enamored with medicine that every other aspect of his past had followed by the wayside.
Medicine, he wrote, held my interest to the point where I excluded many other things.
In fact, I was barely aware of my family.
Do not recall what they were doing or where they were during this period.
So, Walter has fallen fully into medicine.
And speaking of falling fully into something, Daniel Van Kirk, it's time for us and our audience to fall fully into the products and services that support this program.
Let's do it.
Yeah, let's do it.
Let's whip ourselves in front of the audience to convince them to buy these products that support the show.
Imagine me wailing on myself with a cat of nine tails.
It makes me sad, but I didn't come to school, and so now you have to hurt yourself.
And yeah, now I have to hurt myself.
Products: There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
1920s Cock Rings and Secrets00:04:55
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So when we left off, Walter Freeman had fallen in love with medicine and had forgotten what his family was even doing.
Was so enthralled with his new career.
And in his father's case, what he was doing was dying of liver cancer.
Now, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Walter could not really have cared less about this.
The only thing he did to help his father during this period, because he was living at home still, was periodically shave him with a straight razor.
He refused to soften his dad's stubble in warm water before shaving him because, quote, the task was distasteful and I finished it as quickly as possible.
I'm sure my mother would have been more gentle, but she considered shaving a man's job, and I was the only one at home.
So, like, I'm gonna, I'll shave you, dad, but I'm not gonna like make it pleasant for you because I want to get done with this shit quick.
Great, great kid.
Now, although his dad was kind of fucked him up, so fair, I guess.
You have to whip me.
I can't do it myself.
I can't get shaved without a whipping.
As a medical intern, Walter was somewhat uneven.
He excelled at neurology, but proved less apt at handling what he called scut work, like transporting urine samples for analysis.
Sometimes he would pour samples down the drain just to be rid of them.
He was fascinated by neurosurgery, but too bored of the details of it to actually learn to perform surgery.
He was fascinated by illness, but almost bored by the actual human beings he had to treat.
He was, in short, a very strange dude, as this passage from The Lobotomist makes clear.
Soon another patient commanded Freeman's curiosity.
A young man who arrived at the hospital with his penis in dire shape, inflamed and dark, the organ was encircled by a ring that the patient's girlfriend had thrust over it, but was unable to remove.
Wait, Freeman ended.
Yep.
We're talking like 1920s cock rings.
I think we're talking a normal ring that she put on his cock, and it became a problem when he got hard.
No.
Yeah, that's why you use the like the bendy rubber ones and not like a normal metal ring.
That's one of our sponsors today.
Yes.
Josiah and Sons, old-fashioned Amish cockrings, the only cockrings that are made entirely out of wood.
If you want the most pain a cockring can put you in, you want a Josiah and Sons cock ring.
That was too perfect.
Now in Redwood.
So a guy walks in and says, hey, I got a.
And you know that that conversation was awkward because much like you just talked about, no one was using good, like healthy jargon for each other to talk about themselves or their names.
Anyone uses the word penis in that entire conversation?
It takes 20 minutes.
He's like, I've gone problematic in my nethers.
Yes.
So, Freeman ended the patient's agony by filing through the ring and twisting it free with forceps.
The boy asked for the ring, but I told him it was a specimen and that I would have to keep it, Freeman wrote.
I had the ring repaired and the Freeman Man crest engraved on it.
For years afterward, Freeman wore the specimen on a gold chain later in his career.
If we were in an episode of Mindhunters, this is what we would call a trophy.
Yeah, that's fucked up.
Yes.
What a conversation starter, though.
I like that ring.
Oh, you do?
Tell you a little bit.
Take it from a dick.
That crest?
After market.
Because this used to be a...
This used to be a broken ring.
How so?
Well, a gentleman came in, had it in his nethers.
I took it off, and now I proudly present it.
Wow.
Oh, man.
Wow.
Yeah.
Real quick, think about this.
There's a chance, unless he was buried with it, that ring is out there somewhere.
God, I hope so.
If you have Walter Freeman's cockring necklace, I would pay good money to have it.
Me too.
What I would do with it.
We'll find a use for it.
If you could start collecting things from your episodes, and you'd be like the collector in Guardians of the Galaxy in the Marvel Universe.
You're like, oh, that's actually from the episode where we talk about, because that ring has got to be.
I bet somebody doesn't even know what they have.
Or necklace.
If I get a TV show, that would be the premise, is me hunting down artifacts of terrible people.
We'll start with like an original copy of one of Hitler's favorite fantasy novels.
Yes.
But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Saddam Hussein's typewriter, you know, all the great, all the hits.
L. Ron Hubbard's, I don't know, boat.
Chemical Problems and Brain Surgery00:15:26
Yeah.
Or like that first episode I did where we talked about the Nazis in Hollywood, like even an old like Lemley's like movie card.
Oh, hell yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The city of Pittsburgh.
Oh, man.
There's a lot of things to collect.
Okay.
Sorry, I have derailed us.
But that, I mean, how could I not?
We just went.
We just went full on top of the wild tale.
Yeah.
So Walter spent a year in Europe doing medical residences in France and performing medical testing on animals.
The highlight of his trip was watching the autopsy of an elephant.
He was fascinated by the four-hour task of opening the creature's skull to remove its brain.
Walter's first thought was that a jackhammer would have been the ideal tool to remove it.
This thought process spawned a lifelong fascination in finding unique ways to break into skulls and access brains.
He is into that.
Hey, do what you love.
You'll never want to do that.
Do what you love, and the money will follow.
His first major job came courtesy of his grandfather, Keene, who used his connections to get his grandson a gig as the senior medical officer in charge of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C.
This was a psychiatric hospital, and working there gave Walter a direct look into the horrific ways 1920s America treated the mentally unwell.
St. Elizabeth was essentially a giant box-filled warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but filled with sick people instead of antiquities.
There were very few real treatments for psychiatric disorders, so patients were just locked in there together until they either died or lied well enough to claim that they had had a spontaneous remission.
So that was healthcare back then.
Oh, your head's sick, huh?
Well, we're going to put you in a miserable box until you decide you're healthy.
Wow.
Yeah.
Walter Freeman found this new charge horrifying.
He was sickened by the 4,300 inmates of his asylum, and he wrote, The slouching figures, the vacant stare or averted eyes, the shabby clothing and footwear, the general untidiness all aroused rejection rather than sympathy or interest.
So he's horrified and not sympathetic with these people.
Yeah, there's all.
Yeah, yeah.
They're just he's just disgusted by them.
Now, since the inmates of this asylum were too pitiful to deserve Walter's sympathy, he instead focused on learning about the brain of the psychotic, as he called it, which is, again, was like the general, it's a specific term now.
It was just the general term for anyone that was like not fitting into society back then.
Yeah, you couldn't conform.
Yeah, Walter's goal was less to alleviate discomfort and more to help these people return to life as productive members of capitalist society.
Quote, I looked around me at the hundreds of patients and thought, what a waste of manpower and woman power.
So again, not particularly sympathetic to their suffering.
No, but I like the gender inclusiveness.
He is very gender inclusive.
Yeah, yeah.
Towards this end, he experimented with differing oxygen levels and their impacts on the brain of manic people.
He also pioneered a new, easier method of collecting spinal taps from the lobotomist.
Instead of recruiting help to secure patients in a deep bend while sitting, then inserting the needle of a collection syringe between the vertebra, Freeman employed what he was fond of calling the jiffy spinal tap.
Without assistance from other staff members, Freeman directed patients to sit backward on a chair and deeply bend their neck over the chair back.
Carefully navigating the opening at the base of the skull, he then pushed a needle into a reservoir of spinal fluid located just inside, but perilously close to the base of the brain.
Even a slight error in the insertion of the needle could permanently injure the patient.
He's just showing off.
He's just showing off.
And this risk was worth it because it allowed him to work alone without close collaboration with colleagues.
Now a mature adult, Walter was still very much a loner, and he preferred his own professional company to acting as part of a team, even when that meant a greater risk to the patient.
Walter opened a private practice while working at St. Elizabeth's to further his research and also took a job as a professor of neurology at George Washington University.
By the early 1930s, he had a well-earned reputation as a psychiatric pioneer.
Now, Walter was largely responsible for the introduction of several exciting new treatments: insulin shock therapy, which plunged patients into insulin shock to try and correct schizophrenic symptoms.
He also experimented with metrazole shock therapy and electroconvulsive therapy.
The essential goal of all these treatments was the same: to slap sick people out of their issues by horribly traumatizing their system.
So he's that kind of doctor.
He's like, ah, these people have a problem.
We just need to fuck them up enough that they get their shit together.
The only time I know of something like this working is in heat stroke because you instantly need to be put into an ice tub right away.
Like, we need to shock you out of the thing you're in.
But the idea that we could take anything psychologically and essentially smack you out of it through one form of mild torture or another is insane.
Who did this ever work enough that somebody was like, I think this is the way to do it?
You know, so one, there's a couple of things going on here.
One of them is that electroconvulsive therapy is still in a very small scale use today.
There are certain people with certain fairly rare problems that it can help.
So I'm sure there were some people who had very severe psychiatric distress who were helped by the electroconvulsive therapy, a tiny fraction of the total.
And I'm sure there was a larger number who were, while they had issues, were also able to realize, like, oh my God, they're going to keep torturing me if I don't pretend to be better.
And so they would just like, okay, I'll be better.
I won't, I won't kind of let you know I'm suffering.
Isn't that kind of like the mouse in the maze?
Yeah.
Oh, I just got to stop this so that that doesn't happen to me anymore.
Yeah.
Like you're learning through like not you're learning through just like Havlovian dog type shit of like this just happens to you every time.
So you just learn to like stop being loud, but nothing's changed.
Yeah, that's kind of, I think, what goes on with a lot of these people.
It's a mix of the tiny amount who like legitimately do benefit from it because electroconvulsive therapy can be helpful.
Right.
And a larger number who are like, oh, this is awful.
I'll just stop complaining.
Yeah.
Because I don't want to go through this anymore.
Right.
Now, it was 1935 when Walter Freeman first ran into the treatment that would come to define his practice and the great bulk of his adult life.
That year, he attended a presentation in London by a researcher who had experimented with damaging the frontal lobes of chimpanzees just to see what happened.
The results were more or less what you'd expect.
These brain-damaged chimps became quiet, listless, inactive.
Freeman and a Portuguese neurologist, Igas Moniz, were both fascinated by this.
Moniz right away headed back home to Portugal to experiment with severing the frontal lobes of human beings.
The thinking was that if this procedure could calm chimpanzees down, it might have the same effect on people suffering from a mental illness that led to radical swings in personality and mood.
Stuff like a bipolar disorder.
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Seizure disorders and stuff.
A whole bunch of different things.
Because again, a lot of stuff that we now recognize are separate things were all lumped together back in that day.
So if you were like a schizophrenic or if you had a seizure disorder or if you were bipolar, they might just say, lump all those people together as the same thing.
They weren't great at this yet.
In 1936, Antonio Moniz had perfected his treatment, the leucotomy, which involved drilling two small holes in the side of the head in order to sever connective tissue that attached the frontal lobe to the rest of the brain.
Now, at the time, there were two main theories of psychiatric illness.
The first, which was pushed by guys like Freud, was that psychiatric ailments were all basically the result of buried memories, misplaced desires, past traumas, things that you could sit down and work out with a psychotherapist over a small mountain of cocaine and on a comfortable couch.
The other theory was that these illnesses were caused by emotional signals from the brain that were so strong they simply overwhelmed a person.
Now, obviously, neither theory is entirely right.
But the theory that guys like Freeman would adopt, which was that, you know, these it was a bunch of signals from the brain, was closer to right than Freud's theory because it explains stuff like you know, um, uh, seizure disorders or like schizophrenia and stuff, which are not, you can't talk therapy, someone with schizophrenia, out of having issues.
Like, it's a problem with like signals their brain is sending and they need some sorts of medication.
Uh, I think sometimes surgery helps, but like, so Freeman is on the right track.
What he and other scientists who like adopt this school of thought are realizing is that you can't talk your way through all of your mental problems, which is correct.
There are mental problems that have to be dealt with on like more of a chemical, physical level.
So, that's what I say when I say he was right about sort of what the issues were.
Yeah, um, but then we get into what he decided the treatment should be, which was not correct.
But he was on the right track when he like figured out like what was going on with people, where he was closer to right than a lot of mainstream doctors.
So, uh, Moniz's leucotomy seemed to provide relief to a number of patients, and I should note that there are variants of this procedure we use today.
Patients suffering from some types of seizure disorders sometimes have parts of the brain disconnected from one another to stop or reduce the frequency of said seizures.
We still do use brain surgery that's kind of an evolution of the leucotomy to treat people today, and it can be very helpful to, again, a very small number of people who suffer with these disorders.
So, Moniz was experimenting with real medicine, and he was very responsible with the implications of his treatment.
When he received the Nobel Prize for it in 1949, he insisted the leucotomy was only to be used as a treatment of last resort when absolutely nothing else could provide a patient with relief.
So, Moniz, not going to say is a bad guy, he's one of the early experimenters with what would come to be known as a lobotomy, but he's he's doing it because, number one, he recognizes it does help in some cases, and he's he's very clear about like we only do this if there's no other chance of them living a normal life, right?
Or if we want to fuck with a chimpanzee, that was the other guy.
Moniz just watched that and was like, oh shit, this might help people.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now, Walter Freeman paid attention to the work of Antonio Moniz, but he was not convinced that the leucotomy ought to be a last resort for suffering people.
As the manager of an asylum, he was deeply frustrated by how much time and manpower it took to subdue patients dealing with psychotic episodes, schizophrenic breaks, manic phases, etc.
The idea that all this could be calmed by just chopping up their brains was deeply appealing to him.
Yeah, so starting.
Yeah, that'll make it way.
My job's so much fun.
4,300 people, I'm sick of.
Why are we even break them?
Just line them up.
So Freeman developed a modification of Moniz's procedure and renamed it a lobotomy in much the same way as Oreos modified the Hydrox cookie.
And like Oreos, Freeman's procedure was destined to capture the vast majority of the market share for such a product.
Like Oreos, you got to get to that middle good stuff and get that out.
You got to get that out.
Now, I'm going to quote now from Jack L. High, who wrote The Lobotomist and also wrote this piece for The Washington Post.
To him, the intoxicating thing about psychosurgery, Moniz's coined term for psychiatric surgery, was its potential to sever the links between the overexcited emotions of an unhealthy thalamus and the behavioral functions of the prefrontal lobes of the brain.
If it worked, the destruction of these nerve fibers would prevent the thalamus from poisoning patients' thinking.
He absorbed the details of Moniz's work and, with neurosurgeon Watts, became figuring out how to adapt the Portuguese physician's techniques.
Freeman and Watts used brains from the hospital morgue to practice the coring of sections of the prefrontal lobes with a leukotome, which is the device they'd used for that.
By the summer of 1936, they were ready for a live patient, a Miss Hammett from Topeka, Kansas.
Now, Miss Hammett was 63 years old.
She suffered from depression.
She had frequent hysterical fits and difficulty sleeping.
Freeman talked with her and concluded that a lobotomy was the only way for her to avoid spending the rest of her life in a mental hospital.
Much of the impetus behind this seems to have been her husband, who was tired of dealing with a wife who needed help herself rather than just preparing meals for him and staying quiet.
Freeman and his new partner, Watts, scheduled Miss Hammett for an appointment on September 14th, 1936.
Now, the first lobotomy did not start off well.
Miss Hammett tried to back out when she learned the procedure would require her to shave her head.
Many of her mental health issues focused around an obsession with her thinning hair, so this was obviously a matter of grave concern for her.
Whoa.
Yeah.
We're doing the one thing she's already upset about.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
So Freeman and Watts assured her they would only have to shave off a few small sections of her scalp.
This was a lie, obviously.
Once they'd forcibly anesthetized her, they shaved her bald.
Freeman recorded that her last words before going under were, Who is that man?
What does he want here?
What is he going to do to me?
Tell him to go away.
Oh, I don't want to see him.
Yeah, well, that's how crazy people talk.
So sit still.
I don't think that.
Oh, yeah, that's him.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
I think she's very reasonable.
100%.
That's my point.
Once you've been labeled, we're going to do this to you, no matter what you say, they're like, well, you would talk like that.
You're crazy.
You need help.
You're a loony loon.
Yeah.
With Freeman watching, Watts drilled six holes atop Miss Hammett's skull and inserted a leukotome, a device that essentially holds the brain into each hole.
Both doctors work together on lesioning the brain, with Watts, the actual surgeon, managing the whole affair.
And as odd as it sounds, the lobotomy seems to have helped Miss Hammett.
At least she and her husband both reported that it helped.
Freeman wrote in his autobiography, she survived five years, according to Mr. Hammett, the happiest years of her life.
As she expressed it, she could go to the theater and really enjoy the play without thinking of what her back hair looked like or whether her shoes pinched.
And it is entirely possible that this is an accurate representation of how Miss Hammett felt.
Many of Dr. Freeman's lobotomy patients experienced relief from some of their symptoms.
That said, even the positive experiences with lobotomies are clouded by deeply disturbing questions of consent and structures of oppression.
Wait, they're saying speaking of sorry, sorry.
I just really'm saying it actually worked.
Yeah, she experienced relief.
That was not wildly uncommon with his patients.
Yeah, but if she's worried about her shoes and stuff, it kind of sounds to me like, and I know we're near a professional, and so please take this with the grain of salt, anyone who hears my voice, that maybe she suffers some sort of like OCD she was like worried about.
Yep.
And so the lobotomy just made her not really care about anything.
So they're like, oh, things are better.
Well, no, you just don't care about anything.
That's not.
Yeah.
I guess you're not doing the thing you did, but I don't know if that falls in the category of better.
But for them at the time, they were saying that is.
For them at the time, this woman was complaining.
Now the woman's not complaining.
We fixed her.
Okay.
Well, it's a different.
Yeah, we're going to get into that a little bit more and how problematic all this was.
But again, it's important you know that at the time, this looked to, again, the men who were the only ones whose opinions mattered in the situation as if they were making people like Mrs. Hammett better.
Gotcha.
Um now, you know what will make you better, Daniel Van Kirk?
The products and services that advertise on this show.
Nice.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Can we go to them?
Can I learn about them?
We can.
Here's a capitalism lobotomy.
Problematic Treatments for Women00:03:32
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancine.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Pat's Lobotomy Release Signed00:15:55
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back now.
As I said before we rolled out, the positive experiences with lobotomies that you read about when you kind of read about these early operations were all clouded by very disturbing questions of consent and also structures of oppression that existed back then and still exist today.
During my research, I came across a story core interview with one of Walter Freeman's patients, Patricia Mowen, and her husband.
Patricia was her husband's name is Glenn, by the way.
Patricia was lobotomized in 1962, and I'm going to read the transcript of this husband and wife talking about her procedure.
And again, this is considered to be like one of the stories of like a success, but I'll read this to you and you tell me if you think there's something fucked up going on here.
I bet I will.
Glenn Mowen.
My name is Glenn Moen.
I am 79 years old.
I signed the release for Pat's lobotomy.
Patricia Mowen, we have not talked about it since I had the lobotomy.
I don't think ever.
My husband is not a great communicator.
Glenn, I don't talk to her any more than I have to.
Patricia, Glenn, be nice.
Both laugh.
We'd been married about 13 years and it just started.
I cried all the time.
I was just mentally no good.
Glenn, one night I came home and she said, Well, I've done it now.
She'd taken a whole bottle of some kind of pills.
Patricia, that's when the doctor decided it was time.
Glenn, he told me this was the last resort.
I didn't know what else to do.
Patricia, Dr. Freeman said you can come out of this vegetable or you can come out dead.
And I guess I was miserable enough that I didn't care.
Glenn, I was kind of worried because of the operation of severing a nerve in the brain.
It sounded kind of wild to me.
Patricia, he was afraid he was going to lose his cook.
Glenn, and I don't like to cook.
Patricia, I remember nothing after I saw Dr. Freeman.
I don't remember going to the hospital or having it done or how long I was there.
That's all gone.
Glenn, we were coming back from San Jose after the operation, and Pat informed me that she couldn't wait to get home because she wanted to file for divorce.
Patricia, hmm, I don't remember that at all.
I don't think I said it.
Glenn, I think I just went on driving and ignored the situation and began to wonder myself how much good did this operation accomplish.
Really, I can see no changes in most areas, except she is much easier to get along with.
Patricia, you didn't see any change in the way I kept the house or the way I...
Glenn, no.
Patricia, I was more a free person after I'd had it, just not so concerned about things.
I just went home and started living.
I guess is the best way I can say it.
I was able to get back to taking care of things and cooking and shopping and that kind of thing.
Glenn, delighted at the way it's turned out.
It's been a good life.
Whoa.
Yeah, that's.
There's a lot going on there.
My favorite, I hope on Glenn's tombstone, who we know is definitely dead by now, it says, I ignored it and kept driving.
I ignored it and kept driving.
That's probably how he lived a lot of his life with her until he had to deal with her ass because she wouldn't do the things she was supposed to and kept complaining about wanting more pills.
She wasn't happy cooking and shopping, so we drilled a hole in her brain and then it was fine.
You know what?
I'm also going to claim ignorance here, my friend.
I was under the assumption before we started this that if you got a lobotomy, you were just a shell of a person.
That you were a vegetable or you died.
Like, uh, that happened a lot.
But some people just kind of went into like an I don't know if euphoric is the right word, but a like just a laissez-faire feeling towards life after a lobotomy.
Like, they still were very cognitive.
They just didn't really have any argument nerves left.
Yeah, that's it.
Separating the frontal lobe in the way that they did kind of separates you from your concerns in some ways.
It stopped people from feeling or thinking as much.
You're just very agreeable.
Yeah, that was kind of the best case scenario with some of these people.
But some did they detach too much or go too deep?
And that's when you get catatonic.
Yeah, we'll get into that.
I mean, it wasn't an exact science.
It just blew me away.
That just blew me away to hear that exchange because I've been sitting here the whole time thinking every lobotomy ends with just a feeling of like you're gone.
A lot of these show.
A lot of these people went on to live productive lives.
A lot of them were rendered catatonic.
It kind of depended on how the operation went.
Like, the thing is, brains are weird.
I've known people who have been shot through the head with rifles and wound up fine.
We were definitely not getting a rifle in the studio then.
Yeah, well, I mean, they wound up fine.
We could just, it's just, it's kind of a crapshoot with brains.
It's wild the amount of things that they can go through and suffer no noticeable effects, and it's wild the number of things that can happen to them that seem minor and just change the person forever.
Like, it's a fucking crapshoot.
Yeah, look at the NFL.
Look at the NFL.
Exactly.
Now, Mrs. Hammett's lobotomy in 1936 proved to be the beginning of a decades-long career carving into the brains of human beings.
He and Watts were one of medicine's most dynamic duos following that operation.
They established an office at a home in Washington, D.C., and gradually refined their technique, replacing Moniz's leucotome with an object Jack L. High describes as resembling a butter knife.
They also switched around the positioning of the holes from which they cut into the brain.
When patient symptoms persisted, Watts and Freeman would perform multiple lobotomies and make deeper cuts into the brain.
One patient, a lawyer suffering from alcoholism, escaped the hospital after his operation and was found drunk in a downtown bar.
One patient showed up after his surgery and threatened to murder the doctors.
Two pulled guns when Freeman recommended they undergo lobotomies.
So it was not always a smooth process.
From early on, Freeman viewed proper PR as critical to gaining widespread adoption for his new technique.
He and Watts started setting up a lobotomy booth at the annual AMA convention in 1939, crafting displays designed to draw the attention of journalists rather than impressing other doctors.
He later wrote, I found the technique of getting noticed in the papers.
It was to arrive a day or two ahead of the opening of the convention and install the exhibit in the most graphic manner and then be alert for prowling newsmen.
Now, Jack L. High notes that Freeman used handheld clackers to get the attention of reporters with loud noises.
He and Watts even lobotomized a monkey in 1939.
This spectacular event dominated coverage of the convention.
Freeman wrote, That night our monkey died, but Watts and I made the headlines even though we did not get an award.
And so begins all press is good press.
I mean, that's what he's going for here.
That's what he's going for.
Well, the monkey died, but people seem to be interested.
Now, 55% of the first 623 surgeries Watts and Freeman carried out had what they described as good results.
32% were fair and 13% were poor.
3% died during or immediately after the surgery.
And if you take Freeman's word for it, those are good results.
More than half of people had a good result of the operation, particularly considering these tended to be patients who had exhausted conventional treatment options.
However, Freeman never went into detail about what he considered to be a good result, nor did he update his results when patients relapsed, which was extremely common.
But remember, nurses were happy with the result of that monkey dying.
He was.
He was.
Putting it on the press.
Yeah.
Now, nurses reported that patients of the duo often needed to relearn how to eat and handle other basic tasks.
They soiled themselves, flirted bizarrely with orderlies, and would sit staring off into the distance for hours on end.
Walter Freeman considered these positive changes.
The fact that lobotomy patients were dull, quiet, uncoordinated, and lazy was, he felt, an improvement over manic episodes and excessive activity.
Many officials at mental hospitals felt the same way.
Freeman Watts patients were much easier to deal with on a long-term basis since many of them just sat around quietly.
By 1945, Walter had started to experiment with new methods of lobotomy.
He was frustrated by the fact that the procedure required a skilled neurosurgeon.
That meant he could only perform the operation when Watts was around, which dramatically limited the number of people he could properly lobotomize.
This was a problem because he'd come to believe that lobotomies worked best for patients in the early stages of their illness.
If people waited too long, he feared, the lobotomy might not really help.
So he's like, we got to get into this shit faster.
This needs to be like the first thing we're doing for you.
Very first.
Yep.
You feeling down today?
Sit in this chair and shave your head.
I'll be right there.
Now, Walter started looking into the research of other doctors, and he found an Italian surgeon named Amaro Fiamberti.
Armano had developed a new procedure for reaching the brain without drilling careful holes in the skull.
Instead, Armano broke into the skull through a soft bone at the rear of the eye socket.
Working on corpses, Freeman developed a method of accessing the frontal lobe of the brain through the eye socket using an ice pick from his kitchen.
Working in secret, so Watts wouldn't find out.
Freeman started performing solo lobotomies in January of 1946.
He operated out of the office he and Watts shared, but during hours when he knew his partner would not be in the building, Freeman ice picked nine human brains in short order, sending his patients home in a taxi cab.
Next, according to the Washington Post, Freeman later wrote that during his 10th transorbital surgery, he called Watts to his office to assess the operation.
Watts later claimed, however, that he entered Freeman's office unsummoned and found Freeman pushing an ice pick in the eye socket of an unconscious man.
Freeman audaciously asked Watts to hold the ice pick so Freeman could take a photograph.
Whichever account is true, no one disputes the result of this encounter.
Watts threatened to break off their partnership if Freeman persisted in performing lobotomies himself and treating them as office procedures done without surgical gloves or sterile draping.
For the remainder of his association with Watts, Freeman did these operations outside the office.
So that's cool.
Now, Watts and Freeman would later fall out professionally over the issue of transorbital lobotomies.
Although Watts retained a deep respect for his partner, he couldn't get over his belief that brain surgery ought to only be carried out by a competent brain surgeon, not random guys with an ice pick.
So controversial.
What a crazy stance.
And Freeman was like, you are far out there.
No, have you seen this ice pick?
Children should be able to fix cars, and non-brain surgeons should be able to put ice picks through people's eyes.
I believe that.
Now, a book the two men authored on the subject of lobotomies includes this paragraph.
The authors regret to announce that they have been unable to reach an agreement on the subject of transorbital lobotomy.
Freeman believes that he has proved the method to be simple, quick, effective, and safe to entrust to the psychiatrist.
Watts believes that any procedure involving cutting of the brain tissue is a major operation and should remain in the hands of a neurological surgeon.
This is when you're in a relationship with somebody and you're like, I don't even know why we're fighting about this.
Yeah.
Why have we been fighting about this?
I'm just ice picking some motherfuckers.
Like, why are you angry?
Right, right.
We shouldn't even be having this fight.
Yeah.
Oh, that's crazy.
This book, Psychosurgery and the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain, made an enormous splash in the world of medicine when it was first published in 1950.
The tome featured language not often used in works of medicine, like the term scrawny frayed cats, used to refer to a group of patients.
This lurid prose, along with the gaush marketing technique used by Freeman to attract the press, alienated many mainstream medical professionals.
But the book was popular and cemented Freeman's status as a radical physician working on the cutting, or perhaps poking, edge of medical science.
On the eve of his 52nd birthday, he wrote, I have a feeling of competence and assurance that is almost grandiose.
Maybe it comes from superb health and maybe from the fruition of dreams that have proved within my grasp.
But anyhow, I'm sitting on top of the world.
So that's good.
He's happy.
Yeah, he's happy.
And what do you want?
In our next episode, we're going to talk about the second phase of Walter Freeman's career.
We're also going to discuss the most famous patient he and Watts ever operated on, the poster victim of lobotomy, and sister to President John F. Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy.
But right now, Daniel Van Kirk, it's time for you to plug some pluggables.
I want to let everybody know I have my first comedy album coming out.
It's on Blonde Medicine.
That's the label.
And it will drop on November 15th, Friday, November 15th.
It's called Thanks Diane.
I recorded it in Los Angeles at the UCB Theater.
And if this is before the 15th, when you're hearing this, you can go to danielvankirk.com and pre-order it or just go to the iTunes Store app on your phone, specifically the iTunes Store app, and you'll be able to pre-order it there.
But on 11:15 or anytime thereafter, you can get it anywhere that you get your music or listen to such things.
I should say music, but it feels like it's also for comedy.
But it's called Thanks Diane.
And go to Daniel Van Kirk for all of my tour dates as well as my own podcast, PenPals or Dumb People Town.
And I'm Robert Evans, and you can find me here on the podcast you're currently listening to.
So please keep listening to this podcast.
You can find our sources on behindthebastards.com.
You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
And you can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK.
You can also find a lobotomy if you show up at my door and pay me $45.
I have an ice pick.
Sophie, you cannot be doing these.
Brain surgeons need to do these.
I feel like anyone can do these if they have an ice pick.
Having this argument.
I feel like, Daniel, I respect your opinion on this, but I disagree with it.
Well, and I respect your expertise, but I think you need to wear gloves.
Oh, gloves?
You mean cowards' hands?
All right, that's the fucking episode.
Buy a t-shirt on TeePublic and go off into the world and perform unlicensed lobotomies.
Or not.
Nope, Sophie.
We're pro-lobotomy now.
Or not.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Ward of my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Stad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Trust Me Babe Advice00:01:17
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Ray Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.