Doctor Ice Pick

by Claire Prentice

“Seldom in the history of medicine has an experimental procedure been so promptly adapted to the treatment of sick patients everywhere.”10

With extremely good reason...

The two men spent a week experimenting with the procedure,

Wtf

every patient probably loses something by this operation, some spontaneity, some sparkle, some flavor of the personality.”14 They would later write an even more sober assessment: “prefrontal lobotomy smashes the fantasy life and ruins creative capacity . . . one is justified in speaking of the [lobotomized] individual as good solid cake but no icing.”15 This, they argued, was a small price to pay in the case of a previously hopeless patient.

Freeman and Watts used women as their guinea pigs at a time when docility and compliance—both common outcomes of lobotomy—were upheld as feminine virtues. Of their first twenty patients, seventeen were female. This bias would continue for decades, with doctors across the country and internationally lobotomizing women disproportionately, at a rate estimated variously to be between 60 and 84 percent,16 even though men slightly outnumbered women as patients in America’s psychiatric hospitals.

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.

Many of the questions raised by Freeman’s lobotomy crusade remain unresolved. Why was the lobotomist allowed to proceed unchecked for three decades? Could a dangerous and relatively untested procedure or treatment be used on a mass scale again? Have sufficient safeguards been put in place to prevent this?