Doctor Ice Pick

by Claire Prentice

Tennessee Williams’s play Suddenly, Last Summer, inspired by his sister’s lobotomy, debuted on Broadway in 1958. It showed a wealthy, manipulative woman maneuvering to have her young niece subjected to lobotomy against her will. The film of the same name, starring Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Montgomery Clift, came out the following year. In 1962, Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published. A damning indictment of psychiatric hospitals and the effects of lobotomy, it became a bestseller, was adapted for Broadway, and later was turned into a film starring Jack Nicholson. It fixed in the popular imagination the idea of lobotomy as barbaric and cruel and of lobotomists as sadists in white coats. 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.”