The Body: A Guide for Occupants

by Bill Bryson

In the United States, a doctor named Walter Jackson Freeman heard of Moniz’s procedure and became his most enthusiastic acolyte. Over a period of almost forty years, Freeman traveled the country performing lobotomies on almost anyone brought before him. On one tour, he lobotomized 225 people in twelve days. Some of his patients were as young as four years old. He operated on people with phobias, on drunks picked up off the street, on people convicted of homosexual acts—on anyone, in short, with almost any kind of perceived mental or social aberration. Freeman’s method was so swift and brutal that it made other doctors recoil. He inserted a standard household ice pick into the brain through the eye socket, tapping it through the skull bone with a hammer, then wriggled it vigorously to sever neural connections. Here is his breezy description of the procedure in a letter to his son: