howard dully's "my lobotomy: a memoir"
 

this isn't a new story but Dully's is a fascinating memoir.

from npr:

On Jan. 17, 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day, he performed the first-ever transorbital or "ice-pick" lobotomy in his Washington, D.C., office. Freeman believed that mental illness was related to overactive emotions, and that by cutting the brain he cut away these feelings.

Freeman, equal parts physician and showman, became a barnstorming crusader for the procedure. Before his death in 1972, he performed transorbital lobotomies on some 2,500 patients in 23 states.

One of Freeman's youngest patients is today a 56-year-old bus driver living in California. Over the past two years, Howard Dully has embarked on a quest to discover the story behind the procedure he received as a 12-year-old boy.

In researching his story, Dully visited Freeman's son; relatives of patients who underwent the procedure; the archive where Freeman's papers are stored; and Dully's own father, to whom he had never spoken about the lobotomy.

read it/listen to the podcast: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=5014080

read his memoir: http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/mylobotomy/

howard dully's blog: http://howarddully.vox.com/

I saw a show on this. Apparently it was done a lot!

When I was in high school I actually wanted a lobotomy so I could be like people wanted me to be. Docile.

Lobotomy's were done as a means to control behavior, like in the case of JFK's sister Rosemary. After her lobotomy, it rendered her totally co-dependent, and as an invalid. Very sad. Joe Kennedy was fooled by the doctor who made childish promises. But that was the "norm" back in those days.

I am sure there are cases where the surgery was/is useful, and solves the medical and or behavioral problems that is/were in question. I think they are pretty much not done any longer.