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SYSK Selects: How Lobotomies Work · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Saturday Stuff You Should Know
0:04
Speaker 1: Select edition. Chuck here with my pick of the week,
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Speaker 1: all the way back to two thousand nine. Lobotomies. Man,
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Speaker 1: this one is ca crazy. This is one of us
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Speaker 1: is so good. I wish we could go back and
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Speaker 1: do it again for the first time. So much fun
0:18
Speaker 1: to research, really interesting and grizzly history, medical history. Some
0:22
Speaker 1: of my favorite stuff lies in those topics. And this
0:25
Speaker 1: one is all about lobotomyes, man, oh man, just get
0:28
Speaker 1: ready to learn about the frontal lobe ice pick lobotomy.
0:31
Speaker 1: Actually used to do that. Welcome to Stuff you Should
0:36
Speaker 1: Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome
0:43
Speaker 1: to the podcast. It's called Stuff you Should Know. Uh,
0:46
Speaker 1: it's Josh and Chuck comes in Long Beach together. Now
0:50
Speaker 1: you know you're in trouble. What's Chuck think? How long
0:53
Speaker 1: you even sitting on that one week? That's good? Thanks?
0:55
Speaker 1: Thank you, Chuck. How you doing well, sir? Are you
0:59
Speaker 1: pretty good? Don't feel great? Actually, Chuck? I mean glad
1:02
Speaker 1: to be alive? Yes, so, Chuck. Yes, I think this
1:07
Speaker 1: could arguably pan out to be our greatest podcast ever. No,
1:12
Speaker 1: I really don't think so, Chuck did the cheek thing
1:15
Speaker 1: twice before this one was kind enough to do it
1:17
Speaker 1: a second time. And I don't think we've ever had
1:20
Speaker 1: a topic that Chuck and I were more intensely interested
1:23
Speaker 1: in than this one. I know. It kind of just
1:25
Speaker 1: came out of nowhere, and it's really well, not out
1:27
Speaker 1: of nowhere, because it's historical, but um, in our eyes,
1:31
Speaker 1: out of nowhere, which if funny, I say, in our eyes. Yeah,
1:34
Speaker 1: a little foreshadowing from Charles Bryant. Nice one, Chuck. If
1:38
Speaker 1: you will get off of L O L Cats for
1:41
Speaker 1: a second and go check your iTunes, you'll find that
1:43
Speaker 1: the title of this one is how lobotomies work, and
1:46
Speaker 1: that's what we're gonna be talking about. Our lobotomy is
1:48
Speaker 1: so fascinating, it really is. Lobotomy is kind of exist
1:51
Speaker 1: in this little um segment of twentieth century culture medical madness.
2:00
Speaker 1: So I guess you could say right right, and pop culture,
2:02
Speaker 1: because you still hear it being thrown around like boys
2:05
Speaker 1: might lobotomize me, scramble my brain. But it's kind of
2:08
Speaker 1: exactly the way it happened. Yeah, yeah, So, Chuck, you're
2:10
Speaker 1: a lover of great cinema, right, of course, of course,
2:14
Speaker 1: you've seen one flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, right, I
2:16
Speaker 1: have a poster you do. Yeah, A good one. Yeah,
2:18
Speaker 1: the one in Jack Nicholson laughing with the watch cap on. Yeah,
2:21
Speaker 1: it's a good one. Um. So, of course you remember
2:24
Speaker 1: the pivotal scene of the movie where McMurphy is um
2:29
Speaker 1: lobotomized for being unruly, tries to kill Nurse Hatchet because
2:33
Speaker 1: nurse Ratchet. Nurse Ratchet, Hatchet. That was a Freudian slip
2:36
Speaker 1: right there. It was she was a hatchet. Yeah. Um so,
2:40
Speaker 1: uh she was mean and I'm totally with you. It
2:43
Speaker 1: was a Freudian slip. Part that got me. I had
2:45
Speaker 1: like eight chokes going in my head at once, and
2:46
Speaker 1: I was like, I can't say that. I can't say that.
2:48
Speaker 1: I can't say that. It's like the Terminator exactly right. Yeah.
2:52
Speaker 1: Um so yeah. So he tries to kill Nurse Ratchet
2:57
Speaker 1: because she was a terrible nurse and kind of evil,
3:00
Speaker 1: very evil, And so he gets lobotomized and they don't
3:02
Speaker 1: show the procedure. Don't worry if you ever want to
3:06
Speaker 1: know what one was like, we're going to go into
3:08
Speaker 1: grizzly detail a minute. Um. And he comes out just
3:12
Speaker 1: kind of this drooling imbecile, which I have to remind
3:16
Speaker 1: everybody was actually a medical term before it was imbecile,
3:21
Speaker 1: moron an idiot? Were all degrees of mental retardation? Aren't
3:27
Speaker 1: that weird? Yeah? Of course this is at the same
3:30
Speaker 1: time that people were performing lobotomy, so it seems like
3:33
Speaker 1: very archaic, even though it wasn't that long ago. Yeah, well,
3:35
Speaker 1: let's set the scene. Okay, all right, so we're talking
3:38
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties, and the nineteen thirties were a
3:41
Speaker 1: terrible time to be nuts. Basically, you got locked up
3:46
Speaker 1: in a straight jacket to keep you from eating your
3:49
Speaker 1: own feces um or throwing it at orderlies or doing
3:53
Speaker 1: anything really crazy. And that was about it. Um. They
3:57
Speaker 1: had certain um, certain techniques like shock therapy. Right, what
4:02
Speaker 1: do they use? Uh they still use shock therapy here
4:05
Speaker 1: and there actually so well you have like electro convulsive therapy,
4:09
Speaker 1: and you had apparently they also used to use insulin. Okay, insulin, right,
4:15
Speaker 1: we know how bad that is from I can't remember
4:18
Speaker 1: one of our aging podcasts, right, Um. And they would
4:22
Speaker 1: basically inject a hefty dose of insulin into a patient.
4:26
Speaker 1: Um too, the okay, chuck my paper wrestling was going
4:30
Speaker 1: to get the wrath. They they know we used crib sheets,
4:35
Speaker 1: buddy um. So they inject a patient with the hefty
4:38
Speaker 1: dose of insulin and um would basically shock their system,
4:43
Speaker 1: possibly causing convulsions. There was another drug was just to
4:47
Speaker 1: subdue them. Hold on, I'm getting to that. This is
4:49
Speaker 1: the craziest part. This is this was the grasp that
4:52
Speaker 1: medical science had on mental illness at the time. There's
4:55
Speaker 1: another drug called metrozol which was a respiratory and um
5:01
Speaker 1: circulatory stimulant, and the hefty doses it to produce shock
5:05
Speaker 1: and convulsions. So if you'll notice, all three of these
5:08
Speaker 1: produced convulsions shock therapy. And the reason that they did
5:12
Speaker 1: that was because there was a suspicion that there is
5:14
Speaker 1: a link between epilepsy, convulsions, and mental illness and that
5:19
Speaker 1: if you had one, you couldn't have the other. So
5:22
Speaker 1: by producing convulsions, they thought that they were treating mental illness. Unbelievable. Yeah,
5:28
Speaker 1: so you could have just had epilepsy and that that
5:30
Speaker 1: they would set you in the electro convulsive shock therapy
5:33
Speaker 1: chair and to treat you. Yeah, they'd stick a little
5:36
Speaker 1: paddle in your mouth and turn on the juice. Tell
5:38
Speaker 1: you what, man, I like. I sometimes look back and say,
5:41
Speaker 1: by the nineteen fifties, that would have been cool to
5:42
Speaker 1: lift back then. But then you hear stories like this
5:45
Speaker 1: and you kind of forget about the downside. Yeah, ect
5:48
Speaker 1: is definitely one of the downside idea of this era,
5:51
Speaker 1: right alright. So um, another problem with this was that
5:55
Speaker 1: the mental um mental care. Wow, have you had lobotomy?
6:00
Speaker 1: I had a little bit of and yeah, um no,
6:03
Speaker 1: I had some metro's all earlier. I'm all jacked up. Um.
6:06
Speaker 1: The the the state of mental hospitals in the US
6:11
Speaker 1: in the in the thirties and forties was that they
6:13
Speaker 1: were overcrowded, right, because I mean, if you can't treat anybody, really,
6:18
Speaker 1: you can't treat their mental illness, which they come in
6:20
Speaker 1: there in yeah, right. They wanted docile patients, they wanted
6:25
Speaker 1: people that didn't cause trouble and really anyway that they
6:28
Speaker 1: could get there was kind of okay at the time.
6:30
Speaker 1: And this right, and this was also before drug therapy
6:33
Speaker 1: was created. So in the thirties, nineteen thirty six, this
6:38
Speaker 1: new procedure comes about, right, Well, it was the thirty
6:43
Speaker 1: in Portugal you're right. Yeah, sorry about that. Yeah, that
6:47
Speaker 1: was doctor Antonio IGAs Monies and Dr Almida Lima in Portugal.
6:52
Speaker 1: H performed the first lobotomies by drilling holes into the
6:56
Speaker 1: skull on either side of the preforntal cortex and injecting
7:00
Speaker 1: alcohol in there to destroy the fibers connected it. And
7:04
Speaker 1: this was actually based on UM an earlier study from
7:07
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty three by a couple of Yale researchers who
7:12
Speaker 1: removed the prefrontal cortex is from a pair of monkeys
7:16
Speaker 1: and the other one Binky will say yeah. Um, these
7:21
Speaker 1: two monkeys had their prefrontal cortex core texas removed and um.
7:26
Speaker 1: The researchers found that they could still They still had intellect,
7:29
Speaker 1: but they were lacking the emotion that led to violent
7:32
Speaker 1: outbursts when they didn't get their way. Zecky, by the way,
7:36
Speaker 1: I like Binky better. Um can we stay with Binky? Okay?
7:40
Speaker 1: So the the doctor um, oh, the Portugue Fulton and Carlisle.
7:45
Speaker 1: I'll know you're going back to Portugal. Yeah. Dr Moniz
7:48
Speaker 1: saw Fulton present um. One of the Yale researchers saw
7:52
Speaker 1: Fulton present his findings and he thought, huh, my mental
7:56
Speaker 1: patients act like monkeys, you know, violent outbursts when they
8:00
Speaker 1: don't you know, when they see things that aren't really there. Right,
8:04
Speaker 1: So let me get my hands on a cadaver and
8:06
Speaker 1: see what I can see, what I can work out
8:08
Speaker 1: with the brain. So this early, this early, uh, it
8:11
Speaker 1: was called the prefrontal lobotomy. Right, started out, like you said,
8:15
Speaker 1: by drilling holes in the school and adding alcohol. And
8:18
Speaker 1: the whole reason why chuck the prefrontal cortex. Why the
8:21
Speaker 1: frontal lobe? What's so important about that? Well, the pre
8:25
Speaker 1: funnel lobe. But cortex, Josh has a number of complex functions,
8:29
Speaker 1: um called executive functions is what they're known as. We're
8:33
Speaker 1: talking high level decision making, planning, reasoning, understanding. Personality, it's
8:38
Speaker 1: personal expression, that right thing. So basically your personality, the
8:41
Speaker 1: way you create things, the way you see the world
8:45
Speaker 1: and how you react to the world, g emotions, Right,
8:48
Speaker 1: this is all this is all generated here. It's originates
8:51
Speaker 1: in the prefrontal court. And you're stabbing the front of
8:54
Speaker 1: your head right now you speaking, uh. And so that
8:57
Speaker 1: as we all know that the brain is connected, it's
8:59
Speaker 1: all connected together, sending and receiving signals like like mass email.
9:05
Speaker 1: And uh so, what you have here, You've got two
9:07
Speaker 1: types of matter, gray and white matter. Gray matter includes
9:12
Speaker 1: neurons and brain cells and blood vessels and things like that.
9:16
Speaker 1: White matter is axons and nerve fibers, and they connect
9:20
Speaker 1: the gray matter and carry messages with electric impulses. So
9:25
Speaker 1: what the gray matters where these impulses are generated. The
9:28
Speaker 1: white matter translates them or transfers them, transmits, It transmits
9:33
Speaker 1: one of the trans uh so, a lobotomy. What that
9:36
Speaker 1: does is it is intended to sever the white matter
9:39
Speaker 1: between the different areas of gray matter, thus interrupting the
9:43
Speaker 1: transmission essentially, right, And the problem um with dr monies
9:49
Speaker 1: is technique. The early technique using alcohol is like you said,
9:52
Speaker 1: the brains all connected, and alcohol being a liquid, it's
9:56
Speaker 1: kind of hard to keep in one place. So it
9:58
Speaker 1: started to go and destroy other area, is it, right,
10:00
Speaker 1: A very good idea. But he was onto something. He
10:03
Speaker 1: was onto something by destroying the white matter, right, yes,
10:06
Speaker 1: So instead he decided to be a little more precise
10:09
Speaker 1: and he kept with the whole drilling method is actually
10:13
Speaker 1: based on an ancient um ancient method of brain surgery
10:16
Speaker 1: called trepidation, right, which actually what gosh, we could. I'm
10:20
Speaker 1: going to be in trouble here. We had a fan
10:23
Speaker 1: right in and suggest trepidation and that's what got me
10:25
Speaker 1: on the botomies in the first place. And I apologize.
10:28
Speaker 1: So if you're out there listening, oh you don't remember
10:30
Speaker 1: the fan, thank you, nameless fan. We love you, Binky,
10:33
Speaker 1: thanks Binky or Becky uh um. Yeah. And actually in
10:58
Speaker 1: the article how the botomies work, um, there's a cool
11:02
Speaker 1: relief from a horonymous box Um painting of some early
11:07
Speaker 1: physician trepanning a patient and he's got like a little
11:10
Speaker 1: segment of the skull lifted off in the brain's exposed
11:14
Speaker 1: and he's just poking around in there. Um. But okay,
11:17
Speaker 1: so he's still dr Monez is still using the drilling method,
11:21
Speaker 1: but now he's inserting instruments in there. He inserted this
11:25
Speaker 1: one that sounded like, Um, it's a handle with a
11:28
Speaker 1: little loopy wire that comes out. But yes, so when
11:33
Speaker 1: you when you push it, when you push down the
11:35
Speaker 1: back of it, the loop extends out, and then you
11:37
Speaker 1: can pull it in and just basically removed hunks of
11:41
Speaker 1: prefrontal cortex of white matter, right, And that's exactly what
11:45
Speaker 1: hopefully it didn't matter. Yeah, you would sing UM and
11:48
Speaker 1: it was successful. Well yeah, to to again, to varying
11:52
Speaker 1: degrees and maybe not again because I think that's the
11:55
Speaker 1: first time we've said that. But yeah, the the lobotomy
11:58
Speaker 1: was successful to varying degrees, very varying degrees. But there
12:03
Speaker 1: was this guy who went and saw UM dr monies
12:07
Speaker 1: perform one of these. Yeah, this work gets good. And
12:10
Speaker 1: this guy was named Dr Walter Freeman. And for probably
12:13
Speaker 1: about what fifty thousand people uh in the U s Alone,
12:19
Speaker 1: this meeting between these two men was the worst thing
12:23
Speaker 1: that ever happened in the history of humanity, because that's
12:26
Speaker 1: about how many people were lobotomized between for about over
12:29
Speaker 1: about a seven year period in the US. Was it
12:31
Speaker 1: just seven years? Wow? Okay, heavy work, So then there
12:36
Speaker 1: was many many more actually um. But yeah, the Dr
12:40
Speaker 1: Walter Freeman became an immediate UM evangelists. He was called
12:46
Speaker 1: for lobotomies. UM. He he tried monies as technique with
12:53
Speaker 1: a with a partner UM and did it successfully for
12:57
Speaker 1: a while. But the problem is it was still surgery, right,
13:00
Speaker 1: It required a surgeon to do it um operating room. Right.
13:03
Speaker 1: If Freeman was actually not a neurosurgeon. He was a neurologist,
13:07
Speaker 1: required anesthetic. Yeah, so there there were some some drawbacks
13:11
Speaker 1: to it in Freeman's of pin right, expense being one
13:13
Speaker 1: of them. Time and resources. So he created something that
13:18
Speaker 1: was a lot handier, a lot easier, and a lot quicker,
13:21
Speaker 1: and that is what we call the transorbital or ice
13:24
Speaker 1: pick lobotomy, Right, Can I say what this is? He
13:28
Speaker 1: determined that if you took something which is technically called
13:34
Speaker 1: an orbital class, but it really looks sort of like
13:36
Speaker 1: an ice pick. You said it yesterday on our webcasts.
13:40
Speaker 1: It's a nice pick. Uh, call it a rose by
13:43
Speaker 1: any other name exactly. So you put this ice pick
13:46
Speaker 1: over over the eyeball, but under the bone there what's
13:50
Speaker 1: that called Between the eyeball and the eyelid, The eyeball
13:53
Speaker 1: on the island until the back of the orbital bone. Right,
13:56
Speaker 1: So once you get to the back of the ordable
13:57
Speaker 1: orbital bone, there's a little resist sense there because it's bone,
14:01
Speaker 1: and so enter a little silver hammer and so he
14:05
Speaker 1: just tinks on that thing until it cracks through and
14:07
Speaker 1: then he's got a pretty clean passageway to the frontal cortex.
14:11
Speaker 1: And so you've got an ice pick sticking out of
14:13
Speaker 1: your eye. He uh, he scrambles it up a little
14:17
Speaker 1: bit once it's in there, and then he does the
14:19
Speaker 1: same thing on the other side, and uh, ten minutes
14:23
Speaker 1: later you're lobotomized, literally, so he do both sides right right, Um,
14:28
Speaker 1: he got kind of good at this. Yeah, Dr Freeman
14:32
Speaker 1: got really I guess you could say good at this,
14:34
Speaker 1: or at least very fast. Um. In one two week
14:37
Speaker 1: period in West Virginia, he performed lobotomies on people, and
14:43
Speaker 1: in one day, he performed lobotomies on twenty five patients,
14:48
Speaker 1: right one day and one day. So he's just basically
14:52
Speaker 1: bringing him in and sending him out. He's exactly doing that. Actually,
14:55
Speaker 1: I read an interview with one of his assistants at
14:56
Speaker 1: the time and he said he would literally not take breaks.
15:00
Speaker 1: As the patient left, another one would be brought in
15:02
Speaker 1: ten minutes later boom. And I don't think we mentioned yet.
15:06
Speaker 1: He he before he does this, he doesn't use anesthetic.
15:09
Speaker 1: He knocks them out with electro shock, right. So it's
15:12
Speaker 1: making use of two extremely primitive and violent techniques right time.
15:17
Speaker 1: And the result was, like we said, varied, I mean,
15:22
Speaker 1: it ranged anywhere from people being satisfied, and you know,
15:27
Speaker 1: seemingly successful, like a highly emotional people suicidal all of
15:31
Speaker 1: a sudden, being more docile and not so worried to
15:33
Speaker 1: uh to death and people rendered vegetables literally. So yeah,
15:39
Speaker 1: well doctor the map. Dr Freeman actually referred to lobotomyes
15:43
Speaker 1: um informally as soul surgery. Yeah. I hate that. The
15:46
Speaker 1: reason why is because he was basically removing what kind
15:50
Speaker 1: of what makes us human. People could still function under
15:54
Speaker 1: successful abotomy. People could still function, they could still talk,
15:59
Speaker 1: but they weren't They weren't doing anything, they weren't bringing
16:02
Speaker 1: anything to the table. There was no reason for them
16:04
Speaker 1: to exist so much anymore for the personality surgery exactly right,
16:08
Speaker 1: um and uh he would uh he did it um
16:12
Speaker 1: again so fast, it's so so often. And he had
16:16
Speaker 1: a touch of a showman to him that he basically did.
16:20
Speaker 1: He had a lobotomobile in which he performed demonstrations. Right.
16:24
Speaker 1: He toured the country, went all over the place. I
16:26
Speaker 1: think he ended up doing. Estimates run from two thousand
16:30
Speaker 1: to five thousand. Between nineteen forty six and nineteen sixty seven,
16:34
Speaker 1: transorbital lobotomies UM in twenty three states in the US right,
16:38
Speaker 1: he'd performed with both hands. He would stick the ice
16:40
Speaker 1: picks in with both hands at once to add a
16:42
Speaker 1: little flare, but showmanship. Yeah, so he was basically performing shows,
16:46
Speaker 1: lobotomy shows. Um. And not everybody reacted well to these. Um.
16:51
Speaker 1: There was seasoned surgeons who had seen tons of gore
16:56
Speaker 1: and blood and horrible things in their lifetimes. Um would
17:00
Speaker 1: commit watching these things. Some had to leave. Um. There
17:03
Speaker 1: was a nurse whose account I read of watching a
17:07
Speaker 1: lobotomy said, uh, the when he moved the ice picks
17:11
Speaker 1: back and forth, it made the sound of tearing cloth. Um.
17:15
Speaker 1: Later on in the USSR, which actually banned lobotomies, and
17:20
Speaker 1: I think nineteen which is embarrassing. Yeah, well fourteen years
17:26
Speaker 1: before we did right. Yeah. Um, a physician named Nikolai
17:32
Speaker 1: or serinsky Sky thanks Dudski um he called. He said
17:40
Speaker 1: that lobotomies violate the principles of humanity and change an
17:43
Speaker 1: insane person into an idiot. Again remember a medical tournament
17:47
Speaker 1: at the time. Um. So there I imagine that there
17:52
Speaker 1: was something that affected you. Were you human being, like
17:58
Speaker 1: a real human being? See being? This this rough violent,
18:02
Speaker 1: um misguided or unguided procedure being performed that it would
18:07
Speaker 1: affect you in some way, like some very primal party
18:09
Speaker 1: of you would say, that's not supposed to happen, right, Plus,
18:12
Speaker 1: there was no official scientific basis for this. It was basically, hey,
18:17
Speaker 1: look at the result in some cases, that is what
18:20
Speaker 1: they were kind of basing this whole thing on. And also,
18:23
Speaker 1: as we were saying about Freeman being a showman and
18:26
Speaker 1: doing it so fast, there was one visit to a
18:29
Speaker 1: mental institution in Iowa. I don't remember what year it was, um,
18:33
Speaker 1: but Freeman killed three people in one visit, and one
18:38
Speaker 1: of the people this is so awful, um, he was
18:40
Speaker 1: doing his little show off thing with the two picks
18:42
Speaker 1: at once. Instead of as his own procedure dictated one
18:47
Speaker 1: and then the other side. He he was doing two
18:49
Speaker 1: picks at once. So the patients on the table um
18:52
Speaker 1: with two ice picks sticking out of his eyes, and
18:55
Speaker 1: Freeman says, I'm going to take a photo of this,
18:57
Speaker 1: steps back to take a photo. One of the ice
18:59
Speaker 1: picks slips and kills the patient instantly. So apparently Freeman
19:04
Speaker 1: was said to have basically just packed up right then
19:07
Speaker 1: and moved on to the next place without missing a
19:08
Speaker 1: bead or staying geez, that packed up the lobotomobile. Yeah,
19:12
Speaker 1: hit the you know one person he lobotomized, Josh, I
19:15
Speaker 1: know you do. He lobotomized John F. Kennedy's sister, Rosemary Dr.
19:20
Speaker 1: Freeman did in one. Uh. Rosemary was twenty three years
19:24
Speaker 1: old and uh, early on her childhood she was shy
19:28
Speaker 1: and easy going, they say, but as a teenager, shocker,
19:32
Speaker 1: she became rebellious and moody, which and that's what struck
19:35
Speaker 1: me in a lot of these cases is so many
19:37
Speaker 1: of them, we're just normal human emotions, like anything from
19:40
Speaker 1: postpartum depression to you know, an overactive child. You know,
19:45
Speaker 1: it's just unbelievable. So she was lobotomized and uh afterward
19:50
Speaker 1: was rendered Basically, she couldn't speak, she had the mental
19:54
Speaker 1: capacity of an infant, couldn't control her bodily functions, and
19:58
Speaker 1: the Kennedy family basically from that point on said that
20:00
Speaker 1: she uh was mentally retarded, which they claimed that she
20:05
Speaker 1: may have been before, but who knows. You want to
20:09
Speaker 1: talk about another guy, Howie Chuck and I have a
20:13
Speaker 1: shared hero. He is an indomitable three fifty pounds six
20:17
Speaker 1: ft three bus driver who has this gentle tender personality,
20:24
Speaker 1: and his name is Howard Dully. And at the age
20:27
Speaker 1: of twelve, Howard Dully met Dr Freeman under unfortunate circumstances,
20:32
Speaker 1: meaning Dr Freeman had a couple of ice picks on
20:34
Speaker 1: him when they met, and um, Howard ended up under
20:39
Speaker 1: Freeman's care because of his stepmother, right chuck, Yeah, he
20:43
Speaker 1: It was the kind of the classic story the father
20:45
Speaker 1: gets remarried to a stepmother who is not very patient
20:48
Speaker 1: and understanding with her son. That sounded like, you know,
20:52
Speaker 1: it sounds like he may have been a little ryanbunctious,
20:54
Speaker 1: but what twelve year old boy isn't. And I think
20:56
Speaker 1: you have some good notes, actual notes. Yeah, well in
21:00
Speaker 1: Freeman's notes that Dully turned up later, and we should say,
21:03
Speaker 1: how are Dully created this great radio piece that's an MPR.
21:07
Speaker 1: You can actually find um by typing in my lobotomy
21:10
Speaker 1: and Google. I think it's the first thing that comes up.
21:12
Speaker 1: It's one of the most amazing things you've ever heard,
21:15
Speaker 1: where he just goes and retraces the steps of his
21:17
Speaker 1: lobotomy that he got when he was twelve and tries
21:20
Speaker 1: to get to the bottom of what happened. We typically
21:22
Speaker 1: don't recommend people go listen to other things that it's
21:26
Speaker 1: not us, but that's how good it is, right, yeah, exactly,
21:29
Speaker 1: it is that good. Uh, it's way better than us actually.
21:32
Speaker 1: Um But he finds the Dr. Freeman's notes on his
21:36
Speaker 1: case and apparently a stepmother pled her case to get
21:40
Speaker 1: him lobotomized by pointing out that he daydreams a lot,
21:44
Speaker 1: and when you ask him what he's daydreaming about, he says,
21:46
Speaker 1: I don't know. Uh, he doesn't want to go to bed,
21:50
Speaker 1: and when he does, he sleeps well. In my personal favorite,
21:54
Speaker 1: he turns on the lights in rooms when there's broad
21:58
Speaker 1: daylight streaming in unbelievable. I know that kid deserves the lobotomy.
22:03
Speaker 1: But one of the things that I think one of
22:04
Speaker 1: the reasons why you and I both look up to
22:07
Speaker 1: Howard Dolly, it was because he has wondered his whole
22:12
Speaker 1: life how different would he be Like I lived hard
22:16
Speaker 1: and fast as a younger man, right right, Yeah, actually,
22:22
Speaker 1: way way harder and faster. Um so, But I've I've
22:26
Speaker 1: often wondered, you know, how much sharper would I be
22:29
Speaker 1: had I not lived like that? But this is my
22:32
Speaker 1: own doing, It was my own choosing. Howard Dolly had
22:35
Speaker 1: to think that same thing, like, is there something wrong
22:37
Speaker 1: with me? Is there a part of me missing through
22:39
Speaker 1: no choice or fault of his own? We should also
22:42
Speaker 1: say that, Um, when Howard's stepmother found that he was
22:46
Speaker 1: not a vegetable, she just got him out of the
22:48
Speaker 1: house and he became a ward of the state. So
22:50
Speaker 1: he went all around lady. Yeah, so um again in
22:56
Speaker 1: the end, he finds, you know, there there really isn't
22:58
Speaker 1: something wrong within the he he's a pretty terrific persons
23:01
Speaker 1: as he as it turned out, lobotomy or not right.
23:04
Speaker 1: It took him a long time though. I mean he
23:05
Speaker 1: battled addiction and various forms of mental illness his whole
23:09
Speaker 1: life after this, and uh, I think going this the
23:13
Speaker 1: special that air, and he wrote a book and went
23:15
Speaker 1: and talked to his father. After forty years, he actually
23:17
Speaker 1: finally spoke to his dad about it, and that seems
23:20
Speaker 1: to have been the thing to get him over the
23:22
Speaker 1: edge to not feeling like a freak anymore. As he
23:24
Speaker 1: called it. Yeah, you can actually hear him working it
23:27
Speaker 1: out in my lobotomy. Yeah, a big deep voice. Yeah,
23:31
Speaker 1: he sounds kind of like Sam, not Sam Shepherdson. What's
23:34
Speaker 1: the guy? Uh, the big Lebowski Sam Elliott, Sam Elliott, Yeah,
23:40
Speaker 1: that's what are you reminded me of the dude. Yeah.
23:42
Speaker 1: He also had that big mustache to sort of like
23:44
Speaker 1: Sam Ellie, that handlebar biker mustache. So, uh, chuck. Whatever
24:11
Speaker 1: happened to lobotomies? Why where? Why did they go the
24:13
Speaker 1: way of the dinosaur? Just go? Well? Uh, A couple
24:17
Speaker 1: of reasons. I mean, one, there was a lot of
24:20
Speaker 1: gaining steam with the criticism of it because they found
24:24
Speaker 1: that they were lobotomizing criminals. They were lobotomizing soldiers from
24:29
Speaker 1: World War Two because criminals against their will sometimes right,
24:32
Speaker 1: but they lobotomized soldiers because hospitals were overcrowded veterans unbelievable,
24:38
Speaker 1: and so that that was kind of gaining steam. And
24:41
Speaker 1: then the introduction of uh thorzine basically everything. Um. I
24:49
Speaker 1: believe that somebody said that thorzine was to the treatment
24:53
Speaker 1: of schizophrenia, that insulin I'm sorry, that penicillin was to
24:58
Speaker 1: the treatment of infectious diseases, which is a pretty big comparison.
25:03
Speaker 1: So thorazine was developed in nineteen fifty and as it
25:07
Speaker 1: began to fall into widespread use. Um, lobotomy is kind
25:12
Speaker 1: of fell out of widespread use, and Dr Freeman himself
25:17
Speaker 1: he uh, he had one last one, one last lobotomy
25:20
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty seven, right, Yeah, he killed a woman
25:22
Speaker 1: with the brain hemorrhage after the third try. I think
25:26
Speaker 1: this is her third lobotomy, and uh, she wasn't just
25:29
Speaker 1: you know, some mental patient in Iowa. This is a housewife.
25:34
Speaker 1: And when she died of I believe of hemorrhage after
25:39
Speaker 1: the procedure, that third procedure, that was it. He was
25:42
Speaker 1: banned from surgery performing any kind of surgery from that
25:46
Speaker 1: that point on and actually spent the rest of his
25:48
Speaker 1: days until he died in nineteen seventy two, traveling the
25:52
Speaker 1: country and the camper, which if it was his lobotomobile, yeah,
25:57
Speaker 1: I don't know. He wasn't pitching it. He was actually
25:59
Speaker 1: going around trying to um find. He was visiting old
26:03
Speaker 1: patients to prove that he had done good, and he
26:07
Speaker 1: had done some good in a couple of of cases,
26:10
Speaker 1: in several cases, I imagined. His first one was a
26:14
Speaker 1: woman I can't remember her first name, but it was
26:16
Speaker 1: ian Esco and she uh, she was violently suicidal, is
26:21
Speaker 1: described by her daughter. And afterwards she went on to
26:24
Speaker 1: to live a happy, fulfilled life. Yeah, but you know,
26:28
Speaker 1: every every successful case I read about, they would say
26:31
Speaker 1: things like they weren't violently suicidal anymore and they were just,
26:34
Speaker 1: you know, kind of happy, but it still seemed to
26:37
Speaker 1: be that lights wrong. But no one's home thing like
26:39
Speaker 1: the couple the er, yeah, the married couple was. The
26:45
Speaker 1: husband had his wife lobottom eyes because she was so
26:47
Speaker 1: emotional and she was suicidal as well. Yeah, and she
26:51
Speaker 1: says that she was happy as a clam and he
26:53
Speaker 1: was satisfied. He said that she came home and she
26:56
Speaker 1: never calls any more trouble and she was just happy
26:58
Speaker 1: and she could still back talk. Yeah, she could still cooking,
27:01
Speaker 1: clean and do all the things she could do before.
27:03
Speaker 1: And she agreed, I just haven't been worried about things
27:05
Speaker 1: since then. And she was in her eighties. But you know,
27:08
Speaker 1: you read that, and emotions are normal, mood swings are normal.
27:11
Speaker 1: It's agreed. But I do I do think that there
27:14
Speaker 1: is a certain threshold and if you're violently suicidal, you know,
27:18
Speaker 1: maybe a lobotomy was a better option. Yeah, But I
27:21
Speaker 1: also want to know what the criteria for all this
27:23
Speaker 1: was back then. There wasn't any so yeah, so put
27:26
Speaker 1: that in your pipe. And but one of the most
27:28
Speaker 1: unsettling things, one of the most unsettling things that I
27:33
Speaker 1: found from this article is that lobotomies are still performed
27:37
Speaker 1: today in England, right, the UK is one of a
27:40
Speaker 1: few countries um where it's it's no longer called the
27:43
Speaker 1: botomies because lobotomy is such a horrible stigma attached to it,
27:46
Speaker 1: and for good reason, neurosurgery for a mental disorder and
27:49
Speaker 1: m D and today apparently they use m r s
27:53
Speaker 1: as guides to be more precise. But pretty much this
27:57
Speaker 1: type of surgery, psychosurgery as it's called um is, it's
28:02
Speaker 1: pretty much the same thing. It's destroying white matter connections
28:05
Speaker 1: and you're removing people's emotional selves, right. I mean, there
28:09
Speaker 1: may be something too to that, but certainly it was
28:14
Speaker 1: so non specific and non technical to jam ice picks
28:17
Speaker 1: and and just blindly move them back and forth. Said no,
28:21
Speaker 1: wonder that was all kinds of results. So Chuck, we
28:25
Speaker 1: are both kind of nuts. And I'm really glad it's
28:27
Speaker 1: not like nineteen because yeah, yeah, my wife Emily and
28:32
Speaker 1: I would both be on the the lobotomy table. I
28:35
Speaker 1: think I drive you to the sea Freeman. Thanks, sure,
28:38
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Yeah. Well that's it. That's it for lobotomies, buddy. Yeah.
28:43
Speaker 1: I encourage people to go out and listen to Howard
28:45
Speaker 1: Dully's uh radio show there. It's really great. Hopefully you
28:50
Speaker 1: guys enjoyed this one. You can read all about Lobotomyes
28:53
Speaker 1: on how stuff works dot com. You know what to do.
28:57
Speaker 1: Uh you know handy search bar, etcetera. Uh, and Chuck,
29:01
Speaker 1: let's let's talk some audible stuff. So our sponsored audible
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Speaker 1: dot com hit it. Okay, So if everyone goes to www.
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Speaker 1: Dot audible podcast dot com slash stuff and sign up
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29:32
Speaker 1: morning and I found one of my all time favorite
29:34
Speaker 1: books by Charles Mann Good One Great. One man runs
29:39
Speaker 1: around um the America's basically two archaeological sites and gets
29:44
Speaker 1: the scoop on the most recent findings and finds that
29:48
Speaker 1: there were way more people in the America's before Columbus
29:52
Speaker 1: showed up than we realized. Uh and yeah, there's a
29:55
Speaker 1: lag between the arrival of Columbus uh to Hispaniola and
30:00
Speaker 1: the second wave that followed within the next fifty years.
30:04
Speaker 1: The second wave found that this, you know, that was
30:06
Speaker 1: Virgin Territory. There's almost no one there. Turns out it's
30:09
Speaker 1: because about a hundred million people died of smallpox from
30:13
Speaker 1: Columbus's first arrival between then and the second wave. It's fascinating.
30:19
Speaker 1: That's right there. You just did one. Well, maybe we'll
30:22
Speaker 1: do a bigger sewed on it, a bigger said, Yeah,
30:24
Speaker 1: what about you you've been on Yeah, I'm gonna recommend
30:26
Speaker 1: uh just quickly. Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Rapport. Oh,
30:30
Speaker 1: I saw his portraits National Gallery portrait. It was Catonian recently.
30:34
Speaker 1: It was awesome with his familiar scowl. Yeah, I love
30:38
Speaker 1: that guy. So yeah. He has a very popular book
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Speaker 1: that he reads himself called I'm an American and so
30:44
Speaker 1: can You. And that's all I need to say about that.
30:46
Speaker 1: It's hysterical. Nice check. So you can get either one
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Speaker 1: audible podcast dot com slash stuff and signing up and
30:58
Speaker 1: that is Audible right there, baby, let's do a listener.
31:03
Speaker 1: Let's do it, Josh. I'm just gonna call this. We
31:07
Speaker 1: got a lot of great feedback for the high fruit
31:09
Speaker 1: toast corn Syrup. Yeah, so much so that we're gonna
31:12
Speaker 1: have probably like three podcasts in a row. We're gonna
31:15
Speaker 1: be reading soon that mail. I don't know what it is,
31:17
Speaker 1: we should I can bring back Haikus, Okay, all right,
31:22
Speaker 1: So I'm just gonna call it intelligent listener mail because
31:24
Speaker 1: Max is a smart guy, and I like these most
31:26
Speaker 1: of all. I'm a graduating senior in the Business College,
31:29
Speaker 1: but when I'm not in class or listening to podcast,
31:32
Speaker 1: I almost always enjoy listening to philosophy. It's more or
31:36
Speaker 1: less my passion. More specifically, I'm interested in world religion,
31:39
Speaker 1: medical metaphysical theory, and man's relationship to nature in the universe.
31:45
Speaker 1: So this guy is obviously smarter than you to say
31:48
Speaker 1: that fruit dose, corn syrup or any other man made
31:50
Speaker 1: chemical compound does not occur naturally. You're speaking with the
31:53
Speaker 1: basic assumption that man is something different than nature. Unfortunately,
31:57
Speaker 1: for those who can find themselves above nature in a
32:00
Speaker 1: portance or authority, this is not the case. It's our
32:02
Speaker 1: Western culture and religion that strengthens this point of view.
32:06
Speaker 1: Man didn't PLoP into nature is a separate and flawed
32:08
Speaker 1: phenomenon in a stupid natural universe. Man came out of nature.
32:12
Speaker 1: Man is nature, Man is the universe. To borrow a
32:17
Speaker 1: quote from my favorite philosopher Alan Watts, and you're seeing,
32:20
Speaker 1: you're hearing, you're talking, you're thinking, you're moving. You express
32:24
Speaker 1: that which it is which moves the sun and other stars.
32:28
Speaker 1: So to perceive yourself as something different is only an
32:31
Speaker 1: inability to identify yourself with the cosmos. So Josh Man's
32:35
Speaker 1: manipulation of compounds is really the world's manipulation of itself,
32:40
Speaker 1: or perhaps the universe manipulating itself. And that is certainly
32:43
Speaker 1: a natural occurrence boom. And that is what happens when
32:47
Speaker 1: I off handedly say something is man made nice? Well,
32:52
Speaker 1: what's the guy's name? Max? And I think the philosophy too,
32:54
Speaker 1: So I thought, what's gonna call? We dig you Max?
32:56
Speaker 1: And we really dig anybody who sends us something, especially
33:00
Speaker 1: if it's as intelligent as that. Uh. If you want
33:02
Speaker 1: to show off your ginormous brain, send us an email
33:05
Speaker 1: to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com for
33:12
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it
33:15
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com