The Sleep Room: A Sadistic Psychiatrist and the Women Who Survived Him

by Jon Stock

Freeman and Watts initially operated on twenty patients. The results were disastrous. One patient committed suicide, another attempted to do the same, and two died within three months. Other patients were left with ‘extreme flattening of emotional life’, ‘a sterile intellectual life’ and ‘frequent convulsions and incontinence’. One woman became ‘fat, jolly and unspoken’. Seventeen out of the twenty patients were female, and eleven of them were housewives, a gender imbalance that was to persist in both the US and the UK. Freeman and Watts soon adjusted their technique, believing that they needed to remove more rather than less brain tissue. (‘Double the dose!’ as Sargant liked to say.) Moniz’s leucotome was swapped for a blade that was used like a butter knife to make sweeping cuts across the frontal lobes. Ironically, they called their new approach a ‘precision’ lobotomy.