环球英语 — 405：Mister Lobotomy
Voice 1
Hello, I’m Marina Santeee.
Voice 2
And I’m Ruby Jones. Welcome to Spotlight. This programme uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand, no matter where in the world they live.
Voice 1
California, the United States of America. The year is 1960. A young boy lies on a table. He is wearing white hospital clothes. A doctor has given him some electric shocks. These have made the boy unconscious. It is like he is asleep. He cannot hear or feel anything. - The doctor lifts the lid of one of the boy’s eyes. He then pushes a thin, sharp metal instrument above the eyeball. The doctor then hits the instrument gently with a hammer. The instrument is now touching the front part of the boy’s brain. The doctor then moves the instrument from side to side. He is trying to cut something.
Finally, the doctor pulls out the thin piece of metal. He then performs the same process above the boy’s other eye. After some time, the boy will wake up. His eyes will be black and painful. But he will not remember what has happened to him.
Voice 2
The boy’s name was Howard Dully. Howard was only twelve [12] years old when a doctor operated on his brain. The doctor was trying to cure Howard’s behaviour problems. Howard’s mother had died when he was five. And his new mother, Lou, could not relate well to Howard. She could not understand his unfriendly behaviour - it seemed unnatural to her. Finally, Lou took Howard to see a doctor. The doctor’s name was Walter Freeman.
Voice 1
But Freeman was not just any doctor. He was famous across the United States for his method for treating people with mental problems. Doctor Freeman thought that mental problems were caused by over-active emotions. So, to get rid of emotions was to get rid of mental problems. The frontal lobe is the front part of the brain. It processes memories and emotions. Nerves connect the frontal lobe to the thalamus - a small structure deep inside the brain. Freeman believed that the thalamus was the “store-room” of human emotions. He knew that doctors could operate and break the nerves that connected the frontal lobe to the thalamus. So a person would not then be physically able to react in an emotional way.
Voice 2
Freeman got his idea from a doctor in Portugal. Egas Moniz was the first doctor to try this method. Moniz called the operation, a leucotomy. He used a drill to make holes in the patient’s head. At first, Walter Freeman copied Moniz’s method. But using a drill to make holes took a long time. So, Freeman developed a simpler method to cut the nerves in the front lobe. It involved reaching the brain through a person’s eye-hole. He called it, the transorbital lobotomy. Freeman could perform a lobotomy in less than ten minutes! And this was what he did to Howard Dully.
Voice 1
In 2008, Howard Dully published a book about his lobotomy and how it affected his life. Howard says:
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“If you saw me, you would never know I had a lobotomy... But I have always felt different. I wondered if something was missing from my soul.”
Voice 2
Freeman first used his lobotomy method in 1946. The patient’s name was Ellen Ionesco. Her daughter, Angeline Forrester remembers the event well:
Voice 4
“Before the operation, my mother was very violent. She kept trying to kill herself. After the lobotomy, there was nothing - it stopped immediately. There was just peace....so whatever Freeman did, he did something right.”
Voice 1
In the 1940s, many people thought that Walter Freeman had found the answer to mental disorders. And the mental health situation in the U S A needed some kind of answer. It was in crisis. Elliot Valenstein is a doctor of neuroscience. He describes why Freeman’s operation seemed to be the answer:
Voice 5
“Really there was no other way of treating people who had serious mental sickness. There were no medical drugs... And mental hospitals were over-crowded. People were willing to try almost anything! ...Stories about lobotomy spread so quickly... There were a lot of claims about its success...and a lot of people demanded the operation. They had parents or family members who really needed help and were not getting any.”
Voice 2
In 1952, Walter Freeman performed two hundred and fifty [250] lobotomies in one US state. This was over a period of only two weeks. But Freeman wanted more. He began offering lobotomies to people with less serious health problems - like headaches, or depression.
Voice 1
However, some of Freeman’s patients were left in a very bad state after their operations. They were left with brain damage. Some were like vegetables - unable to speak or move. Others had become like children - even though they were adults. But Freeman did not seem to think that he had failed in any way.
Voice 2
By the 1950s, a different treatment for mental sickness appeared - Thorazine. This drug produced the same result as a lobotomy. However it did not involve the same risk of permanent brain damage. Thorazine meant the beginning of the end for Walter Freeman’s lobotomies.
Voice 1
In all, Walter Freeman performed two thousand five hundred [2,500] lobotomies. He operated on his last patient, Ellen Mortensen, in 1967. She died of a bleed in the brain. But Freeman still believed in lobotomy as a cure. He spent the rest of his life travelling across the United States. He visited his old patients to find out how having a lobotomy had helped them. Freeman did this until he died of cancer in 1972.
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And what about Howard Dully - Freeman’s youngest ever patient? He now says:
Voice 3
“I will never know what I lost after those ten minutes with Doctor Freeman’s sharp instrument. It was a miracle that it did not turn me into a brainless creature, or crush my spirit, or kill me. But it did affect me - deeply.”
Voice 2
And how will history judge Walter Freeman? Jack El-Hai has written a book about the doctor’s life. We end this programme with El Hai’s opinion:
Voice 6
I began by thinking that Freeman must have been an evil person... But now I think of Freeman as more of a tragic person. He was blind - not so much to the results of lobotomy. But blind to the results of his own mistakes and failings.”
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