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“Seldom in the history of medicine has an experimental procedure been so promptly adapted to the treatment of sick patients everywhere.”
They reported: “In all our patients there was a . . . common denominator of worry, apprehension, anxiety, insomnia and nervous tension, and in all of them these particular symptoms
and described in the pages of the New York Times as “history making . . . a shining example of therapeutic courage”21 that “cuts away sick parts of the human personality.”
He went on to explain that another advantage, particularly at mental hospitals, “which have too little of everything except patients,”
Considering the results from an economic point of view and bearing in mind that more than one-half of all hospital beds in the U.S. are occupied by mental patients, the savings to be realized by taxpayers are enormous.”74
procedure was being carried out disproportionately on the poor, who made up the majority of state hospital patients, and on women, not just by Freeman but by doctors across the country.
Though he did not keep a statistical record of the ethnicity of those he operated on, race and racist stereotypes were factors in patient selection. Freeman expressed the view that Black psychiatric patients—especially women—made ideal candidates for lobotomy due to his belief that Black families provided a high level of aftercare for lobotomized relatives—or, in his words, because of “the greater family solidarity manifested by these people.”
the male patients he operated
on as “20 very dangerous negroes”79 who, after being lobotomized, were rendered peaceful and free of aggression.
Powell,
The following year, Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, was published. Plath’s central character, hospitalized with depression, meets a young woman subjected to a lobotomy whose face has the eerie expression of “perpetual marble calm.”
