Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

"On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day, he performed the first-ever transorbital or "ice-pick" lobotomy in his Washington, D.C., office. Freeman believed that mental illness was related to overactive emotions, and that by cutting the brain he cut away these feelings.

Freeman, equal parts physician and showman, became a barnstorming crusader for the procedure. Before his death in 1972, he performed transorbital lobotomies on some 2,500 patients in 23 states.

One of Freeman's youngest patients is today a 56-year-old bus driver living in California. Over the past two years, Howard Dully has embarked on a quest to discover the story behind the procedure he received as a 12-year-old boy."

http://www.npr.org/2005/11/16/5014080/my...ys-journey

Quote:[...]After 2,500 operations, Freeman performed his final ice-pick lobotomy on a housewife named Helen Mortenson in February 1967. She died of a brain hemorrhage, and Freeman's career was finally over. [...]

Circumstances like that make it difficult to say "Too bad his career couldn't have ended sooner."

Reminds me somewhat of what John Money did to David Reimer, including promoting him as a successful example. Though Money can't be blamed entirely for that misconceiving of the evidence, since "Reimer's parents routinely lied to lab staff about the success of the procedure".