My Lobotomy by Howard Dully

    I wonder if US colleges will ever include Lobotomy in the history textbooks. Will it be included among all the other injustices in our history? We teach our students about Segregation, the Japanese Internment, and the Wounded Knee massacre, but what about the people who were lobotomized? Was it any less an injustice to the people whose lives were ruined by it? Perhaps historians dismiss it as part of the medical ash heap, along with other quack treatments – insulin shock therapy, radiation therapy for colds, and patent medicines – that we now agree caused more harm than good. However, I see Lobotomy as something more. It influenced far more people than other questionable medical practices, and it was part of a broad desire for a “quick fix,” or even worse, parents who wanted easier control of their kids. This is where Howard Dully comes in; he was one of the last Americans to have a lobotomy, and the victim of a vengeful stepparent who wanted to turn him into a vegetable.

    The story begins in the USA during the Baby Boom era, a time of calm prosperity and scientific accomplishment. Howard Dully’s mother is dead, his father has remarried, and the 12 year old doesn’t get along with his stepmother or her kids. We’re not talking about shoplifting or truancy here, just a moody adolescent who leaves the lights on in the daytime and doesn’t make his bed or clear the table. The stepmother convinces her husband that his son is a buddy violent criminal, and she hears about Dr. Walter Freeman, whose miracle procedure cures all mental problems. The operation, known as a Trans-Orbital Lobotomy, is simple; knock out the patient, insert a steel spike through the space above the eye, crack through the bone, swish the spike back and forth, severing the frontal lobes, and the patient goes home the same day. It would cure violent rages, depression, or other bad behaviors. If not, at least it would make the patient into a vegetable who wouldn’t make any noise.

    Howard Dully was Lobotomized at age 12, in the early 1960’s, at a time when the operation was already being discredited. It began in the 1940’s, and probably fell out of favor once Thorazine was invented. This book tells two parallel stories, one about the author, and the other about the operation and what it did to people in the USA. When he dredges up his medical records, he sees that his stepmother went to multiple health professionals, all of whom wrote that she was the problem, not the boy. It reminds  me of how today’s parents are tempted to medicate special-needs children, in order to keep them quiet, and avoid the hard work and patience they require. Don’t get me wrong, I know how hard it is to raise a kid with ADHD, OCD, ODD, or IED, but too many parents just want a quick fix. The good news is that the worst a parent can do is dope up the kids with Ritalin, Dexedrine, Aderall, and Risperdal, not mangle their brains with an ice pick and turn them into drooling zombies

    After the Lobotomy, Dully spends his teen years in reformatories, jails in his 20’s, and alcoholism in his 30’s. He writes how the Lobotomy left him with a part of his emotion missing and he couldn’t quite grasp what it was. During his time in the state homes for boys, he encounters an orderly named Napoleon Murphy Brock – yes, the same one from the Frank Zappa band – who was studying psychology at a local college. He recalls Brock wondering openly why a seemingly normal kid was in a reformatory that was meant for juvenile delinquents.

    What shocks me the most about this story is that few medical professionals spoke up against Dr. Freeman. The book includes examples of how the medical establishment was generally uneasy about Lobotomy, and how they were not impressed by the zombies that resulted from the operation. It wasn’t scientifically proven, so I can’t figure out why the medical establishment green-lighted Freeman to do the operations. In a twist of dramatic irony, the Soviet Union banned Lobotomy. Despite the horrible things that the Soviet dictators did, they thought it was wrong to destroy someone’s ability to think.

    My Lobotomy was published back in 2006, and I read it eagerly, because I was fascinated by how quickly Lobotomy came and went, yet it ruined so many people in its time. It wasn’t just poor orphans who were ruined by the operation, but a woman from a prominent family, who also was the sister of a US president. Howard Dully is now a bus driver and driving instructor and didn’t learn about his Lobotomy until he was 56 years old. In another ironic twist, Dully finds that Dr. Freeman, despite being a sloppy surgeon, kept extreme records of all his patients, now in the George Washington University archive. Freeman’s records show that the stepmother described the boy as savage, defiant, refused to go to bed, wouldn’t listen, and the doctor advised a lobotomy to cure the behavior. When he finally gets his elderly father to speak about it, the old man makes a shocking admission; it as all the stepmother’s idea, and he admits to being too spineless to object. Then he admits that after the operation failed to turn the boy into a vegetable, it was she who insisted on handing the boy over to the state.

    I wonder why Walter Freeman, a neurologist, was allowed to do operations. One possibility is that in the old days, physicians were treated as being beyond criticism, even when they injured patients. We no know that doctors were doing radiation experiments on people in the 1950’s, and most history books mention the Tuskegee Experiment. There’s suspicion that the children at Willowbrook were used for experiments, and there’s proof that prisoners in Pennsylvania were used to test drugs (see the book Sentenced to Science.) Those of you who read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks know how Black Americans were neglected by the doctors, but at the same time the doctors helped themselves to tissue samples to use for their experiments. If you visit Chicago, you should visit the Museum of Surgical Science, for examples of medical quackery. They have a model of an old drugstore, full of medicine bottles, most of which contain cocaine, morphine, or mercury. They even have a foot X-ray machine, which were common in 1950’s shoe stores, and probably gave cancer to countless children.

    Lobotomy, and the reason for its onetime popularity, remind me of an argument I read in the recent book Rethinking Incarceration. Too many Americans, whether in the medical profession, education, or simply in the role of parent, want to avoid the hard work and sacrifice needed to raise a child. The “quick fix” problem starts at home and goes all the way up to court and prison. Even the prison system wants to pawn things off on other people, which is why the private prison industry is so profitable. As for Mrs. Dully, she didn’t want to have to accept that her 12-year-old stepson was moody, sulky, and would never be obedient. The rest is history.

    I once had a Black student ask me why White parents go to great lengths to discipline their kids. He asked “Why do they do all those time-outs, reward charts, talking to their kids, when Black people just smack the kid and he straightens up?” I answered that smacking the kid doesn’t work in the long run, it just establishes dominance, it teaches the kid that might makes right. Now I have to wonder, now that upper middle class families are fazing out corporal punishment, will the lower classes do the same? Will spanking, slapping, paddling, and butt-belting go the way of the rotary phone? Will people see its danger and futility the way they did with Lobotomy?

    Each year, the US history textbooks are not only updated, but past events are added. Will the injustice of Lobotomy be included? Thirty years ago, the Japanese Internment as left out, and information on Native American abuse was limited. Today, these issues are not only taught in college, but also represented in children’s books. The Stonewall Inn Riots, AIDS activism, and Ryan White are all making their way into the textbooks. It remains to be seen if Lobotomy will be included.