What form of lobotomy did Dr. Walter Freeman invent?
The idea of brain surgery as a means of improving mental health got started around 1890, when Friederich Golz, a German researcher, removed portions of his dogs’ temporal lobes, and found them to be calmer, less aggressive. It was swiftly followed by Gottlieb Burkhardt, the head of a Swiss mental institution, who attempted similar surgeries on six of his schizophrenic patients. Some were indeed calmer. Two died. One would think that that would be the end of the idea. But in 1935, Carlyle Jacobsen of Yale University tried frontal and prefrontal lobotomies on chimps, and found them to be calmer afterwards. His colleague at Yale, John Fulton, attempted to induce “experimental neurosis” in his lobotomized chimps by presenting them with contradictory signals. He found that they were pretty much immune to the process. It took a certain Antonio Egaz Moniz of the University of Lisbon Medical School to really put lobotomy on the map. A very productive medical researcher, he invented several sig
Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman II (November 14, 1895 – May 31, 1972) was an American physician. He is mainly remembered as a prolific lobotomist and an advocate of psychosurgery. Freeman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania into an affluent and distinguished family. His father was a successful doctor and his grandfather, William Keen, was President of the American Medical Association. He graduated from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Freeman performed nearly 3500 lobotomies in 23 states, mostly based on scanty and flimsy evidence for its scientific basis, but more significantly he popularized the lobotomy as a legitimate form of psychosurgery. A neurologist without surgical training, he initially worked with several surgeons, including James W. Watts. In 1936, he and Watts became the first American doctors to perform prefrontal lobotomy (by craniotomy in an operating room). Seeking a faster and less invasive way to perform the procedure, Freeman adopted Amarro Fia
