Doctor Ice Pick

by Claire Prentice

For all those who have experienced the pain of mental illness

Freeman rolled up his shirtsleeves; he didn’t bother to wash his hands or put on a medical coat, a mask, or rubber gloves. In press interviews, he boasted that he didn’t believe “in all that germ crap.”

Damn no wonder..

Without a break, Freeman lobotomized eighteen men, women, and children that afternoon, one after another, photographing them first and then cutting into their brains with breezy efficiency. His youngest patient was thirteen years old.

That summer, in just twelve days, he would lobotomize 228 men, women, and children from West Virginia’s five public hospitals.8 In

Treatments for psychiatric disorders were crude and ineffective. They included hydrotherapy; deep sleep therapy, in which chemicals were used to keep patients unconscious for a period of days or weeks; and insulin shock therapy, whereby patients were repeatedly injected with large doses of insulin to produce daily comas over a period of weeks. Electroconvulsive therapy, in which an electric current was passed through the brain to induce seizures, was also used with mixed results.

Freeman’s transorbital lobotomy procedure would slash the operating time from several hours to just ten minutes, and it didn’t require an anesthetic, an operating theater, or a surgeon. It cost a fraction of the price of its predecessor, which, Freeman believed, made it ideally suited to the state hospitals and to mass-scale operations.

It was even being used to treat drug addiction and was touted as a “cure” for homosexuality.

The Soviet Union banned the procedure in 1950 on the basis that it was “contrary to the principles of humanity.”73 Germany and Japan followed.

Operation Ice Pick, when political power, medical orthodoxy, and an unquestioning press aligned behind a flawed man with a zealous belief in a dangerous and unproven medical procedure, should be remembered as a terrible parable of misplaced certainty and lax oversight.