On December 16, 1960, Dr. Walter Freeman performed a transorbital lobotomy on Howard Dully. He sedated the patient with electroshock, then inserted a pair of heavy steel needles into the patient’s eye sockets, bypassing the eyeballs, and plunged the needles into the patient’s frontal lobe. He then moved the needles in a slow stirring motion, rupturing brain tissue, pausing only once in the procedure to be photographed. The needles were called leucotomes, but Dr. Freeman kept the icepick he used to use for this procedure in his bag.

The patient, Howard Dully, was 12 years old, the youngest recipient ever of the technique popularly known as the “icepick lobotomy,” a procedure that had been largely discredited by 1960 and has since been universally called “the worst psychiatric procedure ever” by the medical establishment at large. Freeman had been asked to leave several hospitals because of his insistence on performing the procedure and had become a journeyman, traveling like some snake-oil salesman in a van he called “the Lobotomobile,” with a portable electroshock machine and a bagful of icepicks in the back. Setting up shop at a clinic in San Jose, California, he plied his trade with evangelical zeal, and when Howard Dully was brought to him, Freeman saw no problem whatsoever whipping out his tools to scramble the brains of a child like so many eggs for breakfast.

The patient didn’t die, like many of Freeman’s patients did, or become a vegetable, like so many others, but Dully’s childhood was stripped from him at one fell stroke and he spent the next 40 years attempting to make his way in the world wondering why this happened. Was he psychotic? Schizophrenic? Dangerous? From all accounts it appears that Dully was none of these, just a regular kid growing up in the ’50s, an average student whiling away his time with the pursuits of young boys - television, sports, a little petty larceny here and there, the growing realization that girls might not be so bad after all. Unfortunately Dully had three serious strikes against him: he was big for his age, he had a father so distant he might as well have been on Mars, and he had the world’s worst case of the Cinderella Blues.

Making Sense

In his touching and disturbing memoir My Lobotomy (written with Charles Fleming, Random House, 2007), Dully tells of his quest to make sense of what was done to him. By a sheer stroke of fortune, in 2003 a pair of documentarians seeking to profile Freeman for a story on NPR found Dully and hooked him up with Freeman’s personal files. Their story became his as he finally began to piece together the tale of his own life.

Dully describes growing up in the household his father created after Dully’s mother died of pancreatic cancer. Dully’s father, who taught school and worked three other jobs besides, had no time to raise Howard and his younger brother, and married the woman he’d hired to help around the house, a woman named Lou coming off a nasty divorce with two sons of her own. Whatever Lou’s issues were, they were clearly at odds with the demands of caring for four growing boys, especially Howard. Strict and strident to a fault, Lou was a martinet who brooked none of the horseplay and mischief that are the province of young boys and appeared to have felt somehow threatened by Howard. Perhaps it was Howard’s size that she perceived as a threat, or resentment over having to raise another woman’s children - she never said - but time and again she selected Howard for punishments she didn’t give to the other boys, a fact Howard confirmed through later conversations with his siblings. Howard’s father was barely ever home and when he was home chose not to intervene.

And then Lou began to speak to psychiatrists: what can be done about Howard? A look at Lou’s personal papers indicates that the six doctors she went to found Howard to be a normal kid, and four of them suggested that Lou was in fact the problem. Undeterred, Lou kept looking for someone who would take her problem off her hands. She found Walter Freeman. Freeman’s notes, which were thorough and well-maintained, relate the various complaints Lou had about Howard. Some are typical of boys - indifference toward school, a love of roughhousing, insolence, scowling - and some are outrageous - attempts to harm the family pets, attacking the other children - but although Freeman interviewed Howard and found nothing untoward in his behavior (Dully recalls enjoying his sessions with Freeman), Freeman’s enthusiasm for his icepicks won out and he promised Lou that an afternoon of cranial Roto-Rooting would fix the boy right up. Howard’s father was quickly talked on board, apparently by Lou wielding the divorce stick, and Howard was quietly and casually lobotomized.

A Manner of Caution

Whatever the procedure was meant to do, it obviously didn’t, because Lou’s problems with Howard continued. Maintaining her “he goes or I go” position, Lou convinced Howard’s father to send him away, but as the family couldn’t afford private school and objected to foster care, Howard Dully became a ward of the state at 14 and was sent to the only available facility for him - a mental institution. Dully spent the rest of his formative years in asylums, reform schools and halfway houses because his stepmother wouldn’t let him go home. Upon his release as an adult, Dully found himself unprepared for the real world, untrained in even the most basic skills. He had never held a job, never learned a trade, and had never even cooked for himself. Transformed by his lobotomy and institutionalization into an utterly dysfunctional human being, Dully turned to drugs and crime and bad love just to get by. It took him decades, a failed marriage, numerous arrests, and a heart attack before he finally found his place in the world and began to piece his freakish life together.

My Lobotomy is not a sensational or lurid memoir. It doesn’t have to be. Dully’s narrative voice is as plain and honest as the man himself and comes across like a long conversation at table. The man has no problem confessing his own sins - he knows where he’s made mistakes and confesses unflinchingly - nor does he bear malice toward the living or the dead. His story is about bewilderment, about a lifetime of wondering what he did wrong and being surrounded by adults so wrapped up in their own agendas they refused to tell him. By the time Dully was in a position to discover any of it, Freeman was dead, Lou was dead, and Howard’s father had so distanced himself from the events that his only response to his son was to assert that everything turned out all right in the end, didn’t it?

I am the parent of two children. My son is 12, the age Dully was when he was given his icepick lobotomy. My daughter is 10 and autistic, the sort of patient Walter Freeman would have run red lights in his Lobotomobile to treat. Howard Dully may have the distance of time to come to terms with what was done to him, but his memoir is harrowing nonetheless. It serves as a reminder of just how little we still know about the human brain and just how willing some doctors are, even to this day, to use our children as guinea pigs, to misdiagnose their means of understanding the world and medicate the kid right out of them. As a memoir, My Lobotomy is an important read. As a cautionary tale, it’s priceless.

John G. Nettles