Steve Canavan takes a little light reading home, and discovers the grim tale of Walter Freeman, the ice pick and the brain op

“Interesting,” said the librarian, a middle-aged woman dressed in white linen trousers and a floral blouse, who smelt like she’d accidentally spilled a full bottle of perfume over herself. The scent was so strong my eyes started to water and I had to smother my face with a handkerchief (that’s a lie – I’m not posh enough to own a handkerchief; it was a torn-off sheet of kitchen roll).

“Are you studying the topic?” she enquired as she scanned the book cover.

“Erm, no,” I replied, “I’m just after some bedtime reading.”

She looked up at me sharply. “About lobotomies? Really?” she asked, suddenly concerned, as if she recognised my face from a Crimewatch reconstruction and was now working out the best way to contact police without arousing suspicion.

“Erm, yes, really,” I said, stifling a cough as a waft of her fragrance caught the back of my throat.

“Each to their own,” she muttered – presumably she’d been off work the day they did the Diplomacy and Tact course.

I bid her farewell, walked away with my book, and – when I’d had a short lie down to rid myself of the migraine bought on by her aroma – began reading.

I’m pleased to say it is an absolutely fascinating book.

Broadly speaking, I knew what a lobotomy was: an operation that back in the day was used to treat people with a mental illness (by severing the connections to the brain’s prefrontal lobe; ooh, get me).

But what I didn’t know was how horrific the actual procedure was and how popular it became in such a short space of time, despite the fact it was barbaric, downright dangerous and its long-term effects not properly studied.

The most notorious lobotomist was a US psychiatrist called Walter Freeman, who decided it was too much of a faff doing them with proper medical equipment in a proper operating theatre.

So what he did was devise a new method which involved lifting the upper eyelid of his patient and – put down your sandwich if you’re eating one – inserting an ice pick into the top of the eye socket. (Unbelievably, Freeman used an ice pick he’d bought in from his own kitchen and tested the procedure on – and words fail me here – a grapefruit).

Once inserted into the eye socket, Freeman used a mallet to hammer the pick through a thin layer of bone and into the brain, then – from what I can gather – simply wiggled it about a bit.

Now I don’t know about you but if someone asked if they could insert an ice pick into my eye then hammer it further in with a mallet, I think I’d politely decline. Alas, tragically, the vast majority of patients who underwent the procedure didn’t have the option of declining, as they were suffering mental illnesses and didn’t have the wherewithal to make rational decisions.

The best (and by best I mean worst) part about this was that Freeman had no formal medical training, yet drove around America in a van performing his ice pick lobotomies.

For two decades in the 1940s and 50s, Freeman and his fellow lobotomy surgeons across the world became famous and the numbers of people having the op soared (in 1944, 684 lobotomies had been performed in the US; by 1951 the figure was 19,000).

This is because it achieved what the authorities wanted – mentally ill patients with violent tendencies (the ones mainly operated on) became, surprise surprise, a lot calmer. Unfortunately, and what was kind of glossed over, they also lost nearly all their personality and were often left listless and non-entities.

Freeman, unbelievably, seemed content with this. He called the procedure ‘surgically induced childhood’ and told, with no shame, how one 29-year-old woman, following her lobotomy, was “smiling and lazy with the personality of an oyster”. This was considered a mark of success. Bonkers.

Things went wrong. For example, after he inserted an ice pick into the eye socket of Rosemary Kennedy (younger sister of John F Kennedy), who suffered from seizures and violent mood swings, she was left permanently incapacitated.

Yet people continued to flock to him, wanting him to perform the operation.

Crazier still, the procedure started to become a lifestyle choice, people with no mental illness deciding to have a lobotomy because they thought it would make them think clearer and be calmer. The New York Times described it as “surgery for the soul”.

Between 1940 and 1950, an estimated 70,000 lobotomies were carried out worldwide (including 17,000 in the UK), but all the while, thankfully, more and more medics were becoming increasingly vocal in their criticism of the procedure and its effects.

The Russians, to their credit, were the first to do something about it – banning lobotomies in 1950 on the grounds that it was “contrary to the principles of humanity”, which is admirable, though a little ironic given mass-murderer Josef Stalin was still in power.

Not until seven years later did the US follow suit. After Freedman gave a long-time patient a third lobotomy, she developed a brain haemorrhage and died – which prompted the American authorities to ban it too

So there you go – shocking stuff – and in a nutshell the moral is if anyone approaches you carrying an ice pick and a mallet and asks to lift your eyelid up, run in the opposite direction.