Doctor Ice Pick

by Claire Prentice

Freeman’s notes on his first patient, Alice Hood Hammatt, reveal his misogynistic attitude toward women: “She was a master at bitching and really led her husband a dog’s life. She worried if he was a few minutes late in coming from the office and raised the roof when things did not suit her. She was a typical insecure, rigid, emotional, claustrophobic individual throughout her mature existence.”75 If a housewife came to him complaining of anxiety or depression, Freeman suggested a lobotomy. In his notes, he recorded outcomes in which a female patient returned home to a life of domesticity and subservience as very successful. Underneath a photograph of a female schizophrenic patient, Freeman wrote: “Entranced by voices, this lady came down to earth and went back to keeping house.”76 He boasted to a reporter of another two women who, as a result of his surgical intervention, “have since married and become mothers of normal children.”77