Dr. Walter Freeman, (1895 - 1972), was a physician, advocate and very prolific practitioner of psychosurgery, specifically lobotomy. He performed 3,439 such procedures, but his biggest "contribution" was to popularize the lobotomy as a legitimate form of psychosurgery. A neurologist without surgical training, he initially worked with several surgeons, including James Watts. He and Watts performed the first procedure in 1936, and Freeman continued to work with other surgeons and subsequently alone until 1967, when a patient died and ended his career.

Frustrated by his lack of surgical training and seeking a faster and less invasive way to perform the procedure, Freeman invented the "icepick" or transorbital lobotomy, which quite literally used an icepick hammered through the back of the eye socket into the brain; Freeman was able to perform these alone, often in a few minutes. Though Freeman did initially use an icepick for these operations, he later utilized an instrument created specifically for the operation called a leucotome. In 1948 Freeman developed a new technique which involved wrenching the leucotome in an upstroke after the initial insertion. This procedure placed great strain on the insturment and often resulted in the leucotome breaking off in the patients skull. As a result, Freeman designed a new, stronger insturment, the orbitoclast .

Freeman embarked on a national campaign to educate and train surgeons at state run institutions in the procedure. At that time, institutional care was hampered by lack of effective treatments and horrible overcrowding, and Freeman saw the transorbital lobotomy as an expedient tool to get large populations out of treatment and back into private life.

Freeman's most notorious operation was on the ill-fated Rosemary Kennedy. The urban legend that Freeman operated on actress Frances Farmer has been conclusively disproven: the author who intially alleged this admitted in a court proceeding that he had made it up, medical records of Farmer's show she was never operated on while institutionalized, and Freeman biographer Jack El-Hai (The Lobotomist), who had access to Freeman's patient records, found no reference to Farmer whatsoever.

Though Freeman has been pilloried for his tendency toward self-aggrandizement and the fact that he lobotomized so many people, in truth many of his patients remained life-long friends and thanked him profusely for allowing them to return to relatively productive and peaceful lives. However, the procedure was highly controversial at the time and has only become more so in intervening years.

With the advent of psychotropic drugs, notably Thorazine, in the mid-1950s, lobotomy fell out of favor as a treatment, and Freeman saw his reputation crumble quickly. He continued to drive cross country to visit his former patients until he died.

References

• The Lobotomist, authoritative biography of Freeman by Jack El-Hai
• "Shedding Light on Shadowland"--in-depth essay debunking myths about Frances Farmer, including a wealth of information from Freeman's own private correspondence
• Article referencing Jack El-Hai's initial Washington Post feature on Freeman
• Brain Mutilation for Fun and Profit--a response to Jack El-Hai's Washington Post piece on Freeman
• A Brief History of Lobotomy
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