Another Icepick To The Brain

Ich heiße Shannon Maldonado und bin die Gründerin von Yaoi, einem Geschenkeladen, der auf Kunstwerke und handgefertigte Objekte spezialisiert ist. Meine Wahl fiel auf Shopify, weil Shopify im Vergleich zu den anderen Plattformen, die ich getestet habe, mit am benutzerfreundlichsten war. Ich habe vor allem an die Zukunft gedacht.

Alle Tools, die für die Auswertung von Verkaufszahlen wichtig sind, zum Beispiel von Lagerbeständen, findet man direkt im Dashboard. Starte jetzt deinen kostenlosen Test auf Shopify.com. Hey, true weirdos, wir wollten nur einen Moment haben und vielen Dank für euer Unterstützung. True Weird Stuff hat den Best History Podcast gewonnen, den Women in Podcasting Awards, und wir haben auch ein Signal Award in der Paranormal-Kategorie gewonnen.

Und das ist nur passiert, weil von euch, unseren fremden, seltsamen Leuten. Danke! Bleibt dran, wenn ihr wollt, nach dem Episode, für ein kleines Bonus-Content und eine Konversation. Es war eine Familie-Reise. Ein bisschen. Eine Arbeitsreise für den Vater. Darum blieb die Mutter hinter sich. Aber der Vater dachte, die Erfahrung wäre gut für die Kinder.

Sie würden in Amerika, diesem wunderschönen Land, etwas sehen. Der Vater war ein sehr wichtiger Mann. Ein Doktor. Als der Familienwagen in den Wegen der späten 40er und 50er Jahre in Amerika springte, sangen die Kinder Lieder und spielten Spiele wie I Spy. Der Vater rief sich an, als er von einem Papier-Map aus dem Vordergrund herausfuhr.

An der Treppe neben ihm war ein kleiner Leather Case. In dem waren die Werkzeuge seines Handelns. Ein Paar... ... von Eisbären. Und sie haben wieder ein kleines Spiel von Licht. Echt... ... Zeug. Echt... ... seltsam... ... Zeug. Es gab einen Redakteur an dieser Nacht. Einen sehr bekannten Neurologen. Und einen Konsultanten für die VA und Walter Reed Hospital.

Sein Name war Dr. Walter Freeman. Er war deutlich kritisch gegenüber der VA-Politik, dass ein Patient, der von einem mentalen Krankheitsverschleiß leidet, zwei Jahre unter Beobachtung war, bevor eine Surgerie als Tätigungsoption wahrgenommen werden könnte. Dr. Freeman glaubte begeistert, dass es eine einfache surgische Prozedur gäbe, die in den ersten Phasen einer mentalen Krankheitskrise verfolgt werden konnte, bevor, was er genannt hatte, eine Zerstörung des Gehirns stattfand.

Eine Prozedur, die das Potenzial hatte, den Patienten für immer aus ihrer mentalen Zerstörung zu befreien. Nicht jeder an diesem Treffen hat sich mit Dr. Freeman geeinigt. Es gab einige Stimme-Skeptiker in der Sache, was Freeman nicht aufhörte, mit großem Enthusiasmus über seine Methode psychischer Surgerie zu sprechen.

Er beschrieb die Prozedur als etwas, das man leicht lernt, das vielleicht alle zehn Minuten dauern würde, um zu verfolgen. Dann hat er ein Paar seiner Surgical Tools für seine Kollegen umgesetzt, um sie zu behandeln und zu überprüfen. Die Tools waren Eisböcke. Und Freemans psychische Surgerie hatte einen anderen Namen.

Lobotomie. Dr. Walter Freeman hat die Lobotomie nicht erfunden. Diese Distinktion und den Nobelpreis gehören dem portugiesischen Physiotherapeuten Dr. Antonio Igas Moniz. Moniz hat die erste Lobotomie 1935 gemacht. Der Patient war eine 63-jährige Frau, die von Angst, Depression, Insomnia, Paranoia und Halluzinationen leidet.

Moniz hat keine Eisböcke benutzt. Das war Freemans Innovation. Moniz begann mit absolutem Alkohol, welches auch Ethanol genannt wird, um die vorderen Loben zu zerstören. Endlich schloss er eine Nadelartige Tool, mit einer rechtschleifenden Schraube, die die weißen Fibern des Gehirns durchschneidet, als sie in den Kopf des Patienten eingeschüttet wurden.

Wenn ihr denkt, was? Was habe ich gerade gehört? Das ist so kräftig und chaotisch. Ding, ding, ding! Ihr seid absolut korrekt. Dr. Moniz nannte die Prozedur eine Leukotomie. Sein erster Patient bekam das Ethanol-Treatment, welches nicht weniger kräftig oder chaotisch ist, wenn man darüber nachdenkt. Ich meine, nach allem, würdest du wahrscheinlich lieber, dass wir nicht einen Hohl in deinem Gehirn getrennt haben, und ein bisschen Ethanol getrennt haben.

Jetzt, um es ehrlich zu sein, dieses Frankenstein-gerührte Treatment verursachte sehr viel Angst und Depression für den Patienten. Obwohl, wegen seiner Persönlichkeit und ihrer Funktionsfähigkeit, trotzdem, was ist das alte Sagen? Du kannst kein Omelette machen, ohne ein paar Eier zu zerbrechen. Ich denke, sie konnte den 1949 Nobelpreis in Medizin nicht gewinnen, ohne ein paar Gehirn zu zerbrechen.

Als barbarisch, wie es klingt, war es tatsächlich, naja, es war barbarisch. Das ist das richtige Wort. Das ist Howard Dully, der in dem Dokumentarfilm Howard's Story spricht. Er war einer der jüngsten Patienten von Freeman, mit 12 Jahren, und er ist einer der letzten Überlebenden der Transorbital Lobotomie. Seine Erwachsenenlebenszeit wurde von Struggle, Pflege, Kriminalität markiert.

Die Erwachsenenlebenszeit wurde von Struggle, Kriminalität markiert. Der menschliche Gehirn war immer ein Geheimnis für uns. Auch jetzt, mit all den Ängsten, mit all den außergewöhnlichen Bildungstechnologien, die wir haben, können wir den Gehirn mappen, aber es gibt so viele Unbekannte. Die ganze Geheimnisse der menschlichen Bewusstsein und wir wissen wirklich nicht, wie das funktioniert, das physische Gehirn selbst hält Geheimnisse, die wir noch nicht beschlossen haben.

Selbst die Ältesten glaubenten, oder zumindest fanden, dass die Essenz eines Menschen in den relativ geschlossenen Grenzen des menschlichen Gehirns lebt. Wir wissen das, weil wir archäologische Beweise der primitiven Gehirnsurgery gefunden haben, die über Tausende Jahre hervorheben. Etwa 7.000 Jahre, in mindestens einem Fall.

Der menschliche Gehirnskelett ist auf der Erde geblieben, mit den Schuhen, die klare Schmerzen der Knochen auf dem Gehirn zeigen, sowie Höhlen, die von einem lange verletzten chirurgischen Pionier gegrillt wurden. Die Prozedur heißt Trepanation und egal, ob es ein erster Versuch war, Schmerzen zu befreien oder eine Verletzung zu behandeln, oder vielleicht etwas, was man für einen Dämonen bedeutet Trepanation, oder das Entfernen von einer Portion Knochen aus dem Gehirn.

Hier ist ein Beispiel. Die Knochen von zwei Brüdern wurden in einem 3.500 Jahre alten Tumor in Israel gefunden. Ihr Skelett zeigte signifikante entwicklungsfähige Anomalies, sowie Lesionen auf den Knochen, die Leprosy bezeichnen. Einer der Brüder hatte die Knochen nicht richtig zusammengefasst nach der Kindheit und zeigte auch eine missende Sektion des frontalen Knochens.

Diese missende Knoche wurde in dem Tumor neben dem Körper gefunden. Der Tumor war auch mit den Artifakten gefüllt, die uns sagen, dass diese beiden Brüder aus einer Familie von Mittel kamen, was wahrscheinlich erklärt, warum sie so viel medizinische Intervention und so lange lebten, wie sie es tun. Der Reiche, der bessere Medizin ist offensichtlich kein modernes Phänomen.

Noch eine Sache, bevor wir aus diesem schmutzigen, alten Tumor und zu unserer eigenen Zeit zurückkehren. Trepanierung ist heute noch eine vertreuende medizinische Prozedur. Die Entfernung eines Knochen-Teils oder das Drillen eines kleinen Hohls in den Knochen eines Patienten, der eine Kopfschmerzen hatte, ist jetzt getan, um die Schmerzen oder ein Hematoma Natürlich, tun wir das heute den Menschen in sterilen Betriebsräumen, mithilfe einer Art Anesthesie.

Wir haben keine Ahnung, was Trepanierung für die Ältesten Waren sie aufgewacht? Waren sie verkleidet? Waren sie geboten eine Art pflanzliche Sedative? Und, vor allem, wie viele überlebten die Operation? Nicht zu vergessen, das Risiko einer Infektion oder permanenten Schaden Deine erste Herausforderung war, den wirklichen Risiko einer Blutung auszudrücken, weshalb, selbst in der alten Welt, eine Kopfschmerzen-Operation nicht die erste Option war, sondern ein Letzter Resort.

Und, es wurde immer noch als Letzter Resort für psychiatrische Patienten im 20. Jahrhundert Etwas, das nur nach allen anderen Treatmenten verfehlt wurde. Aber Dr. Walter Freeman dachte, dass Lobotomie nicht nur missverstanden war, sondern sehr unterdrückt war. Freeman sah Lobotomie als potenzielle Heilung nicht nur für mentale Krankheiten, sondern auch für eine ganze Liste anderer Krankheiten.

Insomnia, Postpartum-Depression, ein nervöser Körper, chronische Schmerzen, sogar verzerrte Behauptung konnten alle mit dem minimale invasiven Klopfen, Klopfen, Klopfen eines Eisböckes in einen Eissocket Okay, okay, das war nicht respektvoll. Bitte lasst mich korrigieren und die richtige medizinische Terminologie benutzen.

Transorbital anstatt Eissocket Orbitoklast anstatt Eisböcke Surgical Mallet anstatt Hammer Aber ich stehe vor der ganzen minimale invasiven Technik, weil Dr. Freeman seine Technik nicht faszinierende Dinge wie Betriebsräume oder Anesthesiologen oder sogar eine Formel Surgical Training hat selbst nicht als Ärztin Das ist die Schönheit von Freeman, dass so viel Schmerz durch so einfache Möglichkeiten den Stern sich die Haustür Allis Hood Hammatt Agitated Depression Freeman Persuaded Her To Go Forward They used a tool like the one invented by Dr. Moniz, a metal cylinder that extracted cores of white matter between the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus.

Then, rotating the wire loop at the end of the tool, they scooped out more white matter, starting at a depth of 2 cm, then 3 cm, then 4 cm. There was one oopsie when they accidentally sliced through a blood vessel, but the patient's vital signs remained steady, and so they flushed out the surgical site with saline and stitched her scalp back up.

When Alice Hammatt woke up in post-op recovery, she described herself as feeling happy, so much so that she reportedly announced that she didn't even mind that Freeman had broken his promise and shaved her head. Six days later, though, Alice Hammatt began experiencing difficulties with language. She was agitated and disoriented, but the hospital sent her home anyway, and Freeman declared the operation a success.

He also abandoned Dr. Moniz's term for the procedure, leucotomy, and instead dubbed it lobotomy. That accomplished two things. One, it set what Freeman and Watts were doing apart from the work of the Nobel winner, and two, it made it very clear that their process focused on the frontal lobes and involved both white and gray matter.

Over the next six years, the pair performed more than 200 frontal lobotomies. The data they shared indicated that 63% of patients showed improvement, 23% showed no change whatsoever, and 14% experienced significant negative outcomes post-op and or death. 14% seems like a lot when we're talking about catastrophic damage to the brain and or death, but Dr. Freeman had an extremely powerful ally when it came to glossing over the bad news and highlighting the good, the media.

In May 1941, the Saturday Evening Post published a rapturous profile of Freeman and Watts, and Freeman was a natural when it came to the media. He had a big theatrical personality. He adopted a kind of eccentric costume, a long goatee, round-rimmed spectacles, a dramatic wide-brimmed hat, a fancy walking stick, and around his neck, always, an engraved gold ring threaded onto a chain.

Fun story about that ring. Early in his medical career, Freeman treated a young male patient who'd managed to get a metal ring stuck on his penis. Surprise! In case you thought dudes getting their junk trapped in whatever happens to be handy is some kind of new behavior. Anyway, Freeman managed to tug the ring off using a pair of forceps.

When the patient asked for the ring back, Freeman lied and said that it was a medical artifact now and could not be returned. Freeman then had the ring repaired by a jeweler, engraved with his own family crest, and strung it on a chain, which he then wore pretty much every day. Weird, weird, weird. But then, Freeman was known to keep a little souvenir from each of his lobotomy patients.

The media was Freeman's accomplice in spreading that good news about this near-miraculous way of restoring peace and productivity to the troubled mind. The Saturday Evening Post hailed what Freeman and Watts were doing as nothing short of transforming a world full of hatred into one radiant with sunshine and kindness.

A science reporter for the Washington Evening Star named Tom Henry wrote, quote, It seems unbelievable that uncontrollable sorrow could be changed into normal resignation with an auger and a knife. In May 1946, a newspaper in Pittsburgh reported that Freeman and Watts had discovered a way to painlessly cure insanity. The story described one patient as a timid bookkeeper who, post-lobotomy, went on to become a successful gregarious salesman and ultimately the president of his company.

An article in the San Francisco Examiner in September 1948 told of a young woman who suddenly began experiencing bouts of muteness and despair. These episodes began when the woman became engaged to be married. Therapy had been ineffective. Electroshock treatment failed to deliver results. A 10-minute lobotomy? That did the trick.

The woman's mother wrote her thanks to the surgeon, saying, quote, Thank God my daughter is about to be married. I am the happiest mother in the world. End quote. I'm just going to pop in here and say that, listen, if you are engaged and having doubts as to cause despair and muteness, perhaps what you need is not a lobotomy, but to call off the wedding.

Sweet baby Jesus with an ice pick. What were people thinking back then? So the media loved Dr. Freeman. Dr. Freeman loved the media. In fact, historians credit Freeman's media savvy for taking the lobotomy from an experimental option to something you might consider a quick and easy standard fix. Freeman arranged to have his lobotomy procedures photographed.

He purchased the length of green felt, you know, like the kind you see on pool tables for use as a photographic backdrop. When you see those images all in stark black and white, the light from the camera's flash creating foreboding shadows. It's some mad scientist looking stuff for real. But Freeman wasn't content with his first successes.

He wanted to make the lobotomy procedure even more streamlined. Inspired by the work of Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti, who performed the very first transorbital lobotomy in 1937, Freeman began developing his own techniques and his own tools. This is his son, Franklin, appearing in a 2013 PBS documentary called Lobotomy.

We didn't have a refrigerator. We had an icebox. The first ice fix came right out of our kitchen drawer. And it worked like a charm. I guess we can be thankful he didn't reach for a whisk too. Freeman's method, which called for penetrating the frontal lobes via the eye socket, followed by a lateral sweeping motion, essentially obliterated the frontal lobes of the brain.

Freeman also dispensed with surgical anesthesia using a portable electroshock machine instead. Gone too was any need for a surgical operating suite, as Freeman could now perform transorbital lobotomy as an outpatient procedure in an office setting. His partner, neurosurgeon Dr. James Watt, strongly objected to all of this.

He was troubled by Freeman's disregard for the established standards of sterile medical protocols. Freeman often didn't even wash his hands before performing a lobotomy, rolling his eyes at all that germ crap, as he called it. Watts also acknowledged that the hospital at George Washington University had reprimanded Freeman for, you know, performing surgery without being an actual surgeon.

Even back then, hospitals were picky about that sort of thing. The conflict between Freeman and Watts came to a head in one utterly ghastly moment. Watts had informed Freeman that he would quit if Freeman did not cease performing lobotomy procedures in the office of their shared practice. And then came the day when Watts walked into the room to see a patient lying on the table, unconscious, with an orbitoclast lodged in his eye socket.

Freeman glanced up and said, oh, good, you're here. Can you lend me a hand while I take a photograph? That was it for Dr. Watts. He flatly refused. He told Freeman that he would lobby the hospital to block transorbital lobotomies from being performed and would not even entertain the idea of psychiatrists being trained to deliver the procedure.

The partnership between the two men was over. And Freeman was now free to take his one-man portable lobotomy show on the road. And he did. The road trip that kicked off this episode? Just one of many summers he spent traveling America, his children in tow, tools and electroshock machine packed and ready. And Freeman wasn't just delivering the procedure to patients.

He was often doing it for an audience. He enjoyed the attention, was described as a natural showman. He apparently liked to elicit a shocked gasp or two from his audience by inserting two ice picks into each socket at a time. One report states that a patient died during one of these demonstrations when a sharp instrument slipped into the brain.

Freeman's reaction? Indifference, mostly. He immediately moved on to the next patient in line. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Dr. Freeman did two lobotomies there in March 1949, witnessed by a group of Twin Cities psychiatrists and neurosurgeons. In 1951, he performed five lobotomies as a training session for staff at Patton State Hospital in California.

In January 1952, he demonstrated the procedure on 20 patients at Eastern State Hospital in Virginia. The clinical director of that institution, Dr. Eleanor Beamer Maxwell, reported that the only negative effects her team had observed were blackened and bruised areas around the eyes, which they described as looking like the patient had been kicked in the face by a mule.

She boasted that of the 26 transorbital lobotomy patients under her care, 20 showed improvement and eight had been able to go home. By this point, Freeman was advising lobotomy for anxiety, depression, grief, phobias, and even the pain of cancer. August 1952 brought a mass operation. Freeman performed lobotomies on 35 female patients at Spencer State Hospital in West Virginia.

Newspaper, The Spokesman Review, reported that Freeman invited 150 relatives of patients there to attend a meeting on how to care for lobotomy patients once they were discharged and sent home. Freeman warned that the readjustment period post-lobotomy could last as long as a year and that side effects might include overindulging in food, alcohol, sex, and spending.

He advised families to offer lots of loving and just enough punishment to add spice. Let's just sit here for a second and take that in. By that point, Dr. Freeman had performed more than 1,100 transorbital lobotomies, many done under circumstances he called a demonstration project. Shockingly, his biggest failure, the one that history would remember best, didn't await him in the future.

It was in his past, in the early days of Freeman's evangelizing for the lobotomy procedure. And, had that early failure been as notorious when it happened as it later became, hundreds of people may have been spared the tragic outcomes of Freeman's quick and easy outpatient brain surgery. Her name was Rosemary Kennedy.

She was born in 1918, the eldest daughter of Rose and Joseph Kennedy, sister to John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy, as in the Kennedy family. Rose Kennedy went into labor at home, and though her doctor was summoned, he was delayed. An outbreak of the Spanish flu epidemic at the time was straining medical resources to the breaking point.

A nurse instructed Rose to keep her legs tightly together until the doctor could arrive, and apparently, the nurse also took the extreme step of forcing the baby's emerging head back up into the birth canal for two hours. When the doctor finally arrived, he pronounced the infant healthy, but those two hours of oxygen deprivation had taken a toll.

Rosemary failed to hit developmental milestones, walking, grasping objects. As time went on, there were clear educational delays. The Kennedy parents, fixated on appearances, tried to conceal Rosemary's condition from family, friends, the public, and even Rosemary herself. They tried boarding school and a convent school, but as Rosemary matured, she became prone to aggression and violent outbursts.

Were these episodes fits? It's unclear, though you should know that Rosemary's letters, written with a childish, slanting penmanship, reveal a young girl trying desperately to fit in, to be good, to win the approval of her mother and father. Heartbreaking stuff. Yet in photographs taken in 1940, you can also see a radiant and beautiful Rosemary Kennedy standing with her siblings, Jean and John, laughing and carefree.

In 1941, when Rosemary was 23 years old, her father, Joseph Kennedy, was weary of the outbursts, weary of Rosemary's repeated attempts to run away. He decided that this new lobotomy procedure might be just the thing to make his daughter more docile and manageable. The surgery at that point in time was considered a legitimate option in cases of mental illness.

But Rosemary Kennedy's diagnosis was mental retardation, something lobotomy had not been used to treat. Still, the family proceeded. Whether or not Rosemary consented or even knew what was about to happen to her is a matter of debate. And so in the autumn of 1941 at George Washington University Hospital, Dr. Freeman and his then partner, Dr. James Watts, performed a prefrontal lobotomy on young Rosemary Kennedy.

She was strapped to the operating table. She was wide awake. An anesthetic was used only in the areas where Freeman and Watts planned to drill two small holes in her skull. As the team worked, Rosemary recited poems and sang. Remember, these were the early days for Freeman and Watts. The days before ice picks and eye sockets.

They inserted a small metal spatula into the holes drilled in Rosemary's skull and began sweeping and slicing the connections between her prefrontal cortex and the rest of her brain. And then abruptly, Rosemary fell silent. Freeman and Watts realized they had gone too far. Whatever Joseph Kennedy's hopes had been for the procedure, the reality was devastating.

Rosemary was no longer able to sing. She was no longer able to talk or walk. It took months of therapy before she could move on her own volition at all. One of her legs was permanently turned inward. She had only partial use of one arm. Her speech, when it finally returned, was garbled and incoherent. Her father had her moved to a psychiatric care clinic and then to a residential facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she remained until her death in 2005.

Your goodbye left me with eyes that cry. How can I go on, dear, without you? Even Rosemary's siblings were kept in the dark about their sister's condition and her whereabouts. Though decades later, her fate inspired their activism. Rosemary Kennedy's biographer, Kate Clifford Larson, said this in a 2015 interview with Boston's GBH News.

Her siblings were deeply shaken by her disappearance from the family. They were not told what happened to her. And once they became cognizant of what did happen to her, they became activists to make the world a better place for people with disabilities. Eunice went on to star at the Special Olympics. Her brother Jack, as president, passed legislation that was important for people with disabilities and to get research and funding for that.

And Senator Ted Kennedy, of course, was instrumental in getting the Americans with Disabilities Act passed. So the family carried on that legacy because of her. And the rest, as they say, is history. You know now that as Freeman turned away from Rosemary Kennedy and exited that room, he went on to perform lobotomies on more than 4000 patients.

Some were children, at least one as young as four years old. You also know that Freeman made a show of it. On one particularly busy day, he single handedly completed 20 lobotomies. His influence on psychiatry and on the doctors he trained in the procedure led to a dramatic increase in the use of lobotomy. Thanks in large part to Freeman's traveling brain surgery shows and his tireless courting of the media, more than 50000 lobotomies were performed in the US between 1949 and 1952.

This despite a 14 percent mortality rate and very mixed results in terms of patient outcomes. In 1953, Freeman presented his findings at the 109th annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association held that year in Los Angeles. Freeman declared that in cases of patients who'd been in a mental health institution for less than six months, lobotomy returned two out of three of them to a effective life.

After six months of institutionalization, the odds were 50 50 that lobotomy would prove effective. After more than a year, positive outcomes declined, though Freeman argued that it was really never too late for a lobotomy. And in fact, the sooner the better. Then he got even more specific and declared that 30 percent of lobotomy patients were able to hold down a job.

30 percent were able to be cared for at home and only 20 percent could be characterized as, to use his words, flat failures. Reading from his own prepared paper, Freeman stated, it is undoubtedly true that no person is emotionally or mentally intact after a lobotomy. When one gives up anxiety and depression, one also relinquishes in some measure the emotional charges necessary for the ability to experience exaltation and other joys of living.

You took the part that once was my heart. It is well to remember that no person of creative ability has been restored to normal after lobotomy. All must pay a price for relief from anxiety. Why not take me? Lobotomy was increasingly falling out of favor as the 1950s and 1960s progressed. One state hospital in Virginia stopped allowing the procedure in 1955 and discontinued it altogether in 1962.

Not on the grounds that it was barbaric or inhumane, but because it just hadn't proved all that effective. Dr. Freeman performed his last transorbital lobotomy in 1967. The patient was a woman named Helen Mortensen, and this was to be her third lobotomy from Freeman. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage, joining at least 100 of Freeman's other patients in that fate.

After Mortensen's death, Freeman was banned from ever doing the procedure again. No one associated with this grim and terrible chapter in medicine escaped unscathed. Dr. Moniz may have won the Nobel Prize for his experimental brain procedure, but that award is considered by many to be a stain on the legacy of the Nobel.

Moniz himself suffered a tragic fate when, in 1949, a patient in the grip of a psychotic episode managed to lay hands on a gun. He fired four shots into Moniz, leaving him in a wheelchair until his death in 1955. He was 81. Freeman, ever on the road as a traveling lobotomist, knew his own share of tragedy. His wife, Marjorie, became an alcoholic. Freeman was not only an absent husband, he was also a prolific adulterer.

Then, in 1946, unthinkable tragedy struck when Freeman's 11-year-old son lost his footing and was swept over a waterfall at Yosemite National Park. Devastating as that loss must surely have been, Freeman seldom acknowledged it publicly. But 14 years later, when he first met then 11-year-old Howard Dully, the now grown up lobotomy patient we heard from earlier in this episode, Freeman suggested to the boy that the two of them go hiking.

Freeman died in 1972 of complications from cancer. His surviving children became fierce defenders of their father's legacy. Two, Paul and Walter Jr., followed in his footsteps and chose careers in psychiatry and neurobiology. The third, Frank, retired from a career as a security guard and, as fate would have it, wound up living a short distance from Howard Dully.

He confirmed that the original ice pick Freeman used came from the kitchen drawer of his childhood home, the same ice pick they'd use to punch new holes in their leather belts as they grew. This is exactly the kind of random detail that sticks with a person long after other, more important things are forgotten. With the luxury of hindsight, we can see how reckless and irresponsible so many of Freeman's decisions were.

It seems impossible to us now that anyone ever thought that blindly and crudely poking around in the brain of a human being might yield anything but disaster. We can be appalled by Freeman himself, by his colleagues, by the casual indifference shown to so many of his patients. We can look at Joseph and Rose Kennedy and judge them harshly.

They viewed their daughter, Rosemary, as defective, as a reason for shame, and in their devout Catholic belief system, perhaps even a judgment laid upon them by God. How might history be different if, after Freeman and Watts left 23-year-old Rosemary Kennedy in a vegetative state, the Kennedy parents had protested, made a fuss, you know, blown the whistle on what Freeman and Watts were doing?

Would hundreds, possibly thousands of other patients have been spared the consequences of Freeman's quick and easy outpatient brain surgery? But of course, that kind of thinking doesn't take you anywhere. There's no rewriting the past, no unscrambling the eggs, or in this case, the brains. You just have to hope and believe that the lessons we learn from the stakes of this gravity lead to better, safer, more ethical practices going forward.

That's why we have to tell this story, why we can't let it slip into the past as though it were some freakish anomaly in the history of medicine, because it isn't. Without transparency and accountability, Freeman's patients suffered the loss of themselves for nothing. We owe them more and better than that. More and better than a game of woulda.

You took the best. Or coulda. So why not take the rest? Or even shoulda. Baby, take all of me. Next time on True Weird Stuff, Brian Koberger. He stands accused of brutally murdering four college students at Idaho State University. The trial will be next year, but right now, Koberger is at the center of two baffling cultural phenomenon.

Women in love with murderers and the incel. Next time on True Weird Stuff. And if you listen to us on Apple Podcasts, hit the plus button in the top right corner, and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it if you subscribe, rate, and review True Weird Stuff. Hit our website, trueweirdstuff.com, for show notes and photos and videos when we have it, and bonus content.

Everything True Weird is waiting for you at trueweirdstuff.com. And follow True Weird Stuff on Instagram and Twitter. True Weird Stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser.

Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Karl. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True Weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2023 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.

Special thanks going out to Elizabeth Jordan for singing on this episode. That song, All of Me, was a big hit for Billie Holiday at around the time Rosemary Kennedy received that doomed and terrible lobotomy. Thank you, Elizabeth. So, Sherry, this was an episode that we did before we started doing a little postmortem on the episodes.

And so both of us relistened to it. We had our own self-loathing about what our parts were per normal. However, I really there were so many things that I loved about the episode itself. Elizabeth's singing, which I had remembered, was really good. And it was just astonishing. The girl that sang all of me in this. And that was really pretty neat.

But what I didn't anticipate was as I was listening to this, I was driving. I had a little drive that I had to do. My stomach was so turning at the thought of what they were doing with an ice pick through the orbital socket of someone's face. I did not expect to get nauseous listening to what it was they were doing to these people.

Well, you know, I think what happens is I know this happens for me. By the time we finish working on an episode like we've been immersed in the story and we're it's not that we're numb to it, but there's no shock value left for us. Like the shock value for me, the shock value comes when, you know, I first confront some of these facts and I'm putting them together into the story.

But by the time the episode releases, like you and I are like, oh, yeah, they were just fishing around in people's heads with spatulas. Yeah, but we hadn't listened to that since it was released. And so the numbness wears off, I think. Because if you if you look, I was looking at early episodes of True Weird Stuff before we added the postmortem chat.

And I was like, yeah, that's pretty. Oh, my God, that was horrific. Oh, yeah, that was a that was a rough story. If I went back in and dove back into some of that, I'd probably, you know, be all like nightmarish and weepy again. And I had I had someone a friend actually say to me, well, I mean, do you think it's good to, you know, remind people of these things?

I don't just think it's good. I think it's critically necessary to remind people of these things, because it's our collective social amnesia that takes us down these repeating roads. And that what Freeman, what Dr. Freeman did with the transorbital lobotomy was so profoundly unethical and immoral. I mean, here's a guy that had no surgical training.

Yeah, he was a neurologist. And you have to be real smart and go to school for a real long time. But that doesn't make you a surgeon. That's a completely different skill set. It's a neurosurgeon. Yeah. And what they were doing. So I want you to imagine it. They had they just had you on the table and they would put the ice pick or orbitoclast into your eye socket and they would just kind of swish it around a little bit.

There were you were not hooked up to something where they're watching your brain on a screen like like we have the technology we have now. Right. None of that. It was it was literally fumbling around in the dark and guessing. And I just I think maybe you'd have to be alive at that time to to find a way to make that like, yeah, OK, that's what we're doing.

Right. I mean, didn't that just astonish you that they were just groping around so blindly? And people's heads. Yeah. I mean, here was what was kind of interesting. You said something else in there that surprised me, and that is some people died from cerebral hemorrhage hemorrhages. And you can certainly understand how that could have happened.

You're blindly going in there. Right. How do you know? What was nobody filing in a kind of malpractice back then? Or is that something that came later that we you know, is I mean, did anybody say, yeah, you know, I think that what you're doing is wrong and we're going to put a stop to this legally. The only reason that this stopped. Is because the very last lobotomy patient that Dr. Freeman had died, that was also the very last time the lobotomy procedure was legally performed in the United States.

That was a woman that was having her third her third lobotomy. Yeah. She was Freeman's last patient and she was America's last patient. Now, she was by far not the first to die or to have a really negative set of outcomes. But she was the she was the last straw, I guess, is the way you would say it. And and the thing about lobotomy, this is the thing that really blew my mind.

OK, so it's one thing to go, you know, these people are are so deeply depressed or hallucinating or whatever. Let's let's cut the connections between the frontal lobe and the rest of the brain to see if we can't help them. But there was a case and this was in Oklahoma City. And this would have been, oh, my gosh, like back in the early 1950s.

They decided to see if lobotomy could be a cure for ulcerative colitis, which is a disease of the intestine that causes severe diarrhea. So at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine in like starting in like 1950, going through maybe 1954, I want to say five different patients were given lobotomies to treat their ulcerative colitis.

Three men and two women, both men died within a year after the lobotomy procedure. And they here was the other thing. They didn't follow the patients. So we don't even know what happened to the three women who were given lobotomies for their. Ulcerative colitis. So you have to say to yourself, like we have a tendency in America to romanticize the past and be so nostalgic for the better days that are behind us.

But you really have to ask yourself. Where were the adults in charge? Because even though the brain we didn't know very much about the brain in 1950 when this happened, we did know that the brain and the rectum were separated from each other by quite a good distance. And it's hard for me to believe that you could look at a person suffering with ulcerative colitis and think that poking an ice pick into their eye socket would be in any way helpful.

So I'll ask you the question, Max. Can you can you see a path for your own self to go? You know, these folks have really painful chronic diarrhea, maybe a lobotomy. I think what's sad is you're taking people who are in situations that are desperate, no matter what it was that they were bringing to them. And they were going to try to do this as a last resort.

And he played upon that and he understood that. And he was such a bombastic character. I mean, and he was really more about the show than he was about the helping of people. And I suppose what was thought at the time was, well, perhaps with the case with Rose Kennedy, perhaps what they thought was, well, this is the desperate thing we're going to try.

And, of course, it didn't it just it absolutely incapacitated her. But the thought was, but this was our last resort and, you know, this was our Hail Mary pass. And so we'll accept the fact that it didn't work. You see, I think that a lot of people were in that situation and perhaps that's how he got away with it. I do see that and I think that the Rosemary Kennedy example is one of the more shameful cases of Freeman's lobotomy because Rosemary Kennedy, whatever was going on with her, it in no way called for an intervention that extreme.

She was she was literate. She was going to school. She had friends. She had she had definitely had developmental delays as a direct result of oxygen deprivation of her brain. Remember when her mother was in labor? Keep your legs closed, shoving the baby back into the birth canal. Like sometimes you look back at the people of the past and you go, I know that you don't know some of the things we know now, but did you know nothing?

Did you absolutely have not one lick of sense? Babies need to breathe and shoving an infant back into a woman's vaginal canal seems very much opposed to the idea of let the baby breathe. Okay, granted, people didn't know what they were doing, but the Kennedy parents chose a lobotomy for their daughter when almost anything else would have been a better intervention.

She didn't need that. They destroyed her. They ruined her life. They essentially killed her in with that procedure. And for what? Because her personality, her affect was not in keeping with what Joseph Kennedy envisioned for his dynasty. It's so disgusting. It's so disgusting. And the thing that really pisses me off about the Kennedy parents in this instance is they Rosemary Kennedy was one of Freeman's early lobotomy patients.

And you know what he learned from that? Nothing. There were no consequences to what happened to that beautiful young woman. No consequences. If the Kennedy parents had blown the whistle, we probably would have told a different story in this episode. It's infuriating, isn't it? Because they had enough clout that if they would have said, look, this is not a procedure that should be done, they could have prevented a lot of these.

They could have prevented deaths from people. But it really was how it all looked. That was really the most important thing. And we don't want anybody who is viewed as defective in the family. That is I don't know if it's because I'm so, you know, as the product of a chaotic family that the neighbors were always talking about, you know, that'll happen when daddy's being perp walked on the action news.

I have such a chip on my shoulder in the opposite direction. And it goes like this. Oh, I'm sorry. Do I not meet appearances? Let me let me escalate that for you. So I've never had any patience or respect for people that would rather protect how things look than address how things really are. And in the case of Rosemary Kennedy, the issue was appearances now.

And I and that's why I included her biographer in the episode, because I'm hating the Kennedy's is like, you know, a popular American pastime. But the truth is, and and all we're all flawed, we're all humans and politicians are extra flawed because of the nature of the game. But every one of Rosemary Kennedy's siblings did something to improve circumstances for people with disabilities in this country.

You have to give them that as much as you hate them. Some of y'all hate them. Well, and I don't I'm over here not being any kind of a fan because of what they did to Rosemary, what they allowed. But. Some good did come of that tragedy. And if there is, you know, I mean, that that was the one thing that as you I was listening back to it again.

And I thought to myself, because you had the Americans with Disabilities Act that was passed and then all kinds of other charitable work that was done for people who generally were Marge are marginalized and people who were warehoused in a lot of cases, just kind of all kinds of people warehoused together, because let's just get them out of society.

Let's really deal with what the problem is, because nobody wants nobody wants to talk about things like mental illness. People don't like talking about that sort of thing. It makes them uncomfortable. So let's just act like it's not happening. Even today, that's true. Oh, absolutely. You know, you know, we want to think, oh, well, we've we're better now.

We've made all these strides and we have made many strides. But but we're nowhere near where we where we like to tell ourselves we are. Right. Like we're we tell ourselves, you know, that we're so much more evolved and advanced than than we are. This this chapter in American medical history and really in American history, full stop.

This is a shocking and tragic chapter because the people that were receiving these procedures very often were they had like in the case of the five people in Oklahoma, they had a medical diagnosis. And yes, the body brain connection. But if you have Crohn's disease, a lobotomy is not the way to go. Right. If you have kidney disease, a lobotomy is not the way to go.

And there's something in the American psyche where we just love a miracle cure. And we're so vulnerable to a flim flam man, snake oil. Yeah, we're just there's something about us. And I think the thing that makes us so vulnerable is part of what makes it's part of what makes us good. And that is our open hearted, almost childlike curiosity and optimism.

There's you know, there are dark sides to that sort of childlike thinking that a hero will come or an expert will appear. And because it makes us vulnerable to guys like Walter Freeman, miracle cure, snake oil, you know, the quick fix, the flim flam. There's just something really deeply rooted in us that makes us an easy mark for that.

Because if you look at what Freeman did. He not only had the American public snowed and the press, but also others in in the medical establishment. I mean, he had help, you know, in George Washington University, where a lot of this took place is a very respected university in Washington, D.C. But I thought that was interesting. Dr. Watts, who was his partner.

I think that he got a sense that this was out of control, you know, and the most haunting thing in this episode was that Dr. Freeman. So they had to. So I guess they had agreed that Dr. Freeman wasn't going to do these anymore in that office. In that office. And he comes in one day to see a patient lying on the table with with the with the thing stuck in the eye socket.

And Freeman said to him, I'm so glad you're here. Listen, I need for you to take a picture. What? And that was it for Dr. Watts. So you said where are the adults? Maybe Dr. Watts was was the adult at some point along the line, because I guess he could see this for what it was. Well, he was he was a medical doctor. Not that a neurologist isn't.

But Watts had surgical training and it was just a different. It was a it was a completely different set of ethics, I think, that drove Watts as compared to Freeman. And you're right. George Washington University Hospital. You know, these are acclaimed institutions. And we do. It's unfortunate that sometimes the way that we learn best what is appropriate or effective is by doing the things that are inappropriate and downright unethical, which is what happened here.

They learned the hard way that you can't you can't go into the human brain and mess it about like this. And something that I thought about. Relistening to this episode, in addition to, oh, my God, slow down, stop talking. So I want to I'll come back to that. Remind me to come back to the talk and do best thing, because there's a reason for that.

There's a reason that Max and I have had such a learning curve with this podcast. So we we we go too far. We get an idea and we we're so excited that it could be this breakthrough, this miracle. And we we take it way too far. Had think about how different this story might be if they had drawn the line at certain mental health symptoms or diagnoses might be appropriate for transorbital lobotomy.

Right. Let's let's do a careful, controlled study of those circumstances and let's follow and measure outcomes. That would just be good basic science. But instead, they had a little bit of success here and a little bit of success there. And before you know it, they're treating grief and anxiety and shyness with lobotomy.

So we just go too far. But when you pull back from this whole episode, step back and listen to the whole story and all of the people involved and you will see a righteous, karmic correction for everyone in this. That is true. So the Mooney's, the Nobel Prize winning doctor who basically invented the concept of lobotomy, he called it a leucotomy because he was going after just this white and gray matter versus frontal lobes, lobotomy, lobes, leucotomy, this other thing.

So he did win the Nobel Prize, but it's a shameful Nobel that has been reconsidered. And the guy, the guy was basically he died in agony when a former patient shot him, you know, and he ended up wheelchair bound. He didn't go out in a blaze of glory. But then you could argue that whatever Joseph Kennedy's sins were, they all were paid. The price for them was all paid by his children, you know, unless you get all Shakespearean and go, yes, but a father, a father's grief and he knew that his children were paying for his sins.

I mean, it does get real Shakespearean up in here. If nobody had a happy ending. No, I don't think Joseph Kennedy had a happy ending. If I'm not mistaken, I think he suffered from dementia. Yeah, which in some ways is a blessing, though, because wasn't it better for him to leave this world thinking that the mashed potatoes could talk, then reflecting on the many, many things that he had done in the many choices he had made.

Many, many poor choices, that's for sure. Yeah. Maybe dementia was a blessing. The Howard Dully, the guy who they had performed. That was haunting because we can we can sit here and talk about patients, but when you actually hear one speak and when he goes through talking about the process of what happened and then how it affected him and he's talking to you about it in that sort of flat tone, it's haunting.

I mean, this was a little boy. This was a little boy that they did this to and electroshock therapy and lobotomy. And here's the thing about. About a procedure like the lobotomy and and work, you know, there are not very many of these people who've had this procedure left alive at this point, of course. It when we go into your brain with an ice pick or a little metal spatula or a wire with a loop on it and we begin sweeping, those were the words that the doctors use when we begin sweeping that instrument around inside your head, just willy nilly severing connections.

And and taking tissue out, you know, you don't get better from that. That's a that's permanent. That's forever. And they did this to Howard Dully when he was a child. And and so you just have to go, I'm sorry. When did somebody discover ethics like didn't isn't the Hippocratic Oath from Hippocrates back in ancient Greece first do no harm. Did you folks not read it?

Well, and then Dr. Freeman, he he didn't wash his hands before the procedure because he didn't believe in all that germ crap. Oh, this guy. We knew we knew about all that germ crap. We by that point when he's doing in this 1940s, 1950s, they they they knew what that was. They knew that you needed to scrub up before you did any kind of a surgical procedure. I mean, that alone is so irresponsible, reckless, barbaric.

And you don't want you don't want to be like constantly leaping to the conclusion that these people were sadistic or sociopathic. But let me just ask you, this guy, his favorite thing to do would be a mass demonstration where 40 he might give 40 people a lobotomy in an afternoon. What about that doesn't strike you as kind of sociopathic? Not washing? He's going from one skull to the next with no regard. And in the episode, as you heard, you know, a patient goes down, get them out of the way next. Hello. Come on.

I mean, it took on a circus like atmosphere that this guy and his magic trick is this. And then he has the flamboyant clothes, the flamboyant affect with the walking stick and all of those other things that he had the the ring that was around his neck and how he came about that. I mean, all of those things sort of speak to what kind of person he was. And the fact that he ran amok the way that he did for this long. I mean, however many years. I mean, the last one was used to 67, I think 1967. You said the last one was when you think that he did this for decades and got away with it. It is astonishing. It really is.

A handy thing that that I like to do, because time is hard for humans, like deep time is impossible. When I talk to you about time spans of millions or a hundred, we'll say hundreds of thousands of years, we won't even get into millions like our brains aren't really built to comprehend it. But if you were if you're a person that was born in, like, let's say, 1984, 1954, it's just fuzzy around the edges and black and white for you. Right.

So one one way that when when we're dealing with time, I like to think, OK, who do I know that was alive then? Well, certainly your mom and dad. OK. Right. We're definitely most certainly alive and thriving in the 50s. My grandparents, my my mom would have been in 1950. How old would my mom have been? She would have been a kid still still in school. But she was my mom was alive while this crap was going down.

And so sometimes I think we do have to play little tricks to make ourselves realize, oh, this just happened. It did. I mean, my parents were in there. So this was the 40s. They're probably they were probably 20s, you know, 20s, 30s, 40s. I mean, that's all they were when all of this stuff was going down. So when you think about it in terms of that, it really was not all that long ago. You know, and and by the way, your mom and dad would have read about it in their newspapers. Oh, I'm sure. Magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. This was the the least difficult thing in the world to find are are gushing enthusiastic stories about the magical lobotomy.

They're everywhere. I can remember as a kid growing up, people would say they go, I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. And we'd all laugh. But I had no idea. I had no idea what what it was. I knew that it had something to do with the brain or with some kind of surgical procedure. I had no idea what it was when when I heard about it.

And when you would hear it mentioned from time to time, it was mentioned in a way that was negative, like this is something that shouldn't have been done. But I never had any idea how reckless this guy was and the amount of them that were done. And I also knew in growing up that one of the Kennedy children had something wrong with her and she lived in an institution. I knew that.

But as far as what happened to her, that this is really what caused that. I had no idea. Well, the Kennedys were very good at public relations because everybody sort of knew that there was a daughter who was somewhere. And and you would hear different things about, well, you know, she's mentally ill or there's something wrong with her from birth.

But I don't I don't know that it was widely understood that she was the victim of an insanely botched batshit medical procedure. Well, I don't think that was widely known at the time. It is now, but I don't think it was widely known at the time when she disappeared from public view and was like the family secret. Well, I mean, I think that times were times were different. That's one thing. And so I think that when when bad things happen, we hid them. I'm not saying that justifies what they did, but I'm saying that that was that was common practice with all kinds of things.

Hell, you can see that with what the Catholic Church did with Roman Catholic priests that were abusing children. What would they do? Well, they'd hide it. They would say, look, you shouldn't have been doing this, but we'll we'll discipline them. This isn't a legal matter. This is a this is our matter and we'll move them somewhere else.

So that was the idea with all kinds of things that were happening. School teachers, the same thing. Teachers would pop up at one school and they would do something there and they would end up at another school somewhere because I guess, you know, you didn't have the way to check a lot of that stuff at that time. But I also think that there was the idea of we don't want things to look inappropriate. Well, and the culture was different, too, like the press, the press conspired to keep certain secrets.

Oh, yeah. Now, now that while we're in a weird moment now, but broadly speaking now, the media can't wait to tell you a salacious secret about a public figure or a politician. Right. But back then, and we really saw this in the JFK White House, the Camelot years, they all knew that JFK was a cheating, horny dog. But it was like a gentleman's agreement. It was like a gentleman's agreement that, OK, fine, you're doing this, but we're not going to reveal it because we're not going to reveal it.

And the same was true. The culture back then, what you said is what really resonated with me about how people kept family, difficult family things private. It was understood that that was a family matter. I think that although the public didn't know what was going on with Rosemary Kennedy, a lot of people, including in the press, did.

But it was considered, well, that's a family matter. She's not a public figure. We shouldn't in any way make life difficult for her. And Rose Kennedy, her mother, was also not a politician or tycoon or public figure. And it's a mother's grief. So you could say that that sort of culture of protection back then. You could argue, I think, that those were better days. Those were better days. We are not entitled to know what public figures ate for breakfast or what their biggest embarrassing moment was. We really aren't entitled to know that. What we're entitled to is when public figures in a position of the public trust do something to betray that trust.

Well, and I think to go back to how much they could have stepped up and said this didn't work. This needs to stop. But I guess they didn't want to admit that that's what they did. They didn't want to admit that they had a daughter that they felt they needed to do this with. I don't know. I think that's a lot of that. And every like we all get choices like sometimes you're making a choice a minute that can dramatically change the course of your life. So when you think about how different the world would be if the Kennedy parents had come forward and put a stop to this, they would have been the heroes of this story instead of one of the villains.

And the downstream effect of blowing the whistle and putting a stop to this bizarre period of just fishing around in people's brains, you know, for sometimes for an audience, for entertainment purposes. They could have ended that. They could have ended that. And they didn't. And they they I think they made a selfish decision to protect their quote unquote reputation, their family honor or whatever that betrayed humanity and their daughter. I don't think it's too strong to say that. I think they it was a betrayal at a very high level.

But I do think that I guess they did. If I remember the story correctly, the people from George Washington did reprimand him at some point along the line for some way that he was handling some of this. I mean, it did happen there. But at some point along the line, they did. If I remember the story correctly, they did say, you know, you need Dr. Freeman, you need to be doing this anymore.

Well, they they certainly banned him from doing the procedure there, which I guess is the limit of their power. Right. Like they were they were only empowered to decide who could or couldn't practice medicine there. So, yeah, there I mean, there were people that forcefully stood up his partner, his former partner, Dr. Watts.

Yeah. It's just it's it's insane to me. That this happened at the in the magnitude that it did. This isn't like, well, a handful of people and they had a terrible outcome and oops. This. Yeah, this was the fact that he was killing people. There were people that died from this. But of course they did. You're you're you're in there and you don't really you sort of kind of know where you're going. When I think about when I get when I have had back problems and I've gotten injections in my back, they have they have a way that they can see where they're putting the needle.

Yeah, because it's my spinal cord and it's really important to me that nothing bad happens to that. But they're able to see where they're going in with that and they're able to look at that stuff. There was there was there was no mechanism for that. None of that. They were literally just shooting in the in the dark, you know, that's all they were doing. They were guessing. And and the guesswork was really extra big and bad because they all not only could they not see the brain that they were lobotomizing.

But before they went in with the ice pick, they were real, real unclear as to what parts of the brain might do what. So we had ignorance compounded on top of ignorance using people as guinea pigs. And part of the reason that they did successfully get away with so much of this for so long has everything to do with how we think of people with mental health disorders in American culture. We no longer use the word defective, although I think there are people out there that still think it.

But we no longer the word defective was was a medical term. Which episode of this podcast was it where we broke down the different definitions of moron imbecile? Was it asylum? I think that was that's the one because of those were those were justifications for putting these women in institutions. Yeah, they were considered legitimate diagnoses. So it's the way we think about the people that received these treatments with Freeman and these other doctors who were doing, you know, DIY lobotomies. We don't in American culture, those people, they did not they were not worth as much as you.

We we valued them as lesser human beings. And the greatest proof of that can be seen in the way these old state hospitals, which were constructed to be lunatic asylums. That's what they were first called. And then they were, you know, they would get other names like mental health asylums or hospitals or whatever. So many of them have so many unmarked graves on the grounds.

You can tell a lot about a civilization by the way they treat their dead. And we've been pretty astounded in recent years to discover early human cousins, not homo sapiens, but other hominids that like twenty three thousand years ago were treating their dead with reverence, you know, burying them with tokens and objects and flowers and with reverence.

Right. Treating the dead with reverence. That's one of the hallmarks of civilization. So what does it say about us that in the nineteen hundreds, 30s, 40s, 50s, right up until the 70s at the reform school, the Florida School for Boys, we did the episode on. Yeah. We we decide certain human beings are deserving of less than others. And people in this country with mental health diagnoses have almost always consistently been accorded less value.

We have seen it over and over again. And that's because there is such a strong eugenics thread that runs throughout our history. This idea that some people are more fit to breed than others. And by the way, it's it never goes away. It never goes away. But it's it changes its masks and it rears itself up in different ways. Like right now, these people on the Internet that are banging the drum about replacement theory. Oh, the white race is being replaced. That's eugenics, because what they're even though they don't use that word, and many of them, I'm sorry, y'all don't even know the word. But here's what they're saying.

Eugenics is basically, in a nutshell, who is fit to reproduce and replacement theory is saying white people are fit to reproduce more fit than than anything else. So it never goes away. It's a through line in this country since our earliest days. And you see it play out in every generation. It puts on a new mask and takes a new form.

And we we see it all the time on True Weird Stuff. You know, we saw the eugenics rear its ugly head in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Right. That's right. Yeah. The asylum ladies. The other one was I was thinking about the juvenile detention camp that was down in Florida. I remember when you when you started talking about that with the graves, I went, oh, yes, we yeah, we approached the subject a few times.

This is what we do. You know, this is just this is what we do. And until we I think we're a little bit like I think as a as a nation, as a people, we're a little bit like the people in this story. I speak to the brain. We're we're acting and we're in the moment. And what we're not realizing are the historical and karmic forces that are waiting to pounce.

As they always as they always seem to in the stories. So. This this episode was early on in the life of True Weird Stuff, and we would do it very differently. But Max and I were talking last night, we would do this very differently today. We would have Don Morgan doing the voice of Dr. Freeman. Doc, our other producer said you should rewrite this and put it in the characters voices. Hold on. Morgan would make a hell of a. Oh, yeah. Dr. Freeman. So when we first started this podcast, we had the idea and we had the passion and we thought, well, we're not really sure we're going to let it tell us what it is as we as we go.

But our day jobs are radio and in radio, everything moves really fast. No dead air. Get to it. Get to it. Get to it. Get to it. Because people have, you know, a lot of distractions and we all have short attention spans. So listening to this episode, I know we were both screaming. Well. Yeah, go ahead. Sure. And we also as with every episode, we would be like, well, what if we did it this way? What if we tried it that way on everything from the writing to the casting to the production to the music? And I remember this episode when when we were working on it, I was like, Max, I have an idea. Don't know if it'll work.

What if what if they're talking about Rosemary Kennedy singing while they perform the lobotomy and they didn't know they ruined or they didn't know they went too far until she fell silent? Would it be too much? Would it be too melodramatic to build that into the episode? And we were Max was like, it's worth a try. And so this is one of the first episodes where we kind of.

Yeah, took a shot at telling the story in a different way. And Elizabeth Jordan, who's who what he's saying is Rosemary blew our minds, she was so good to go back to what you were talking about with working in radio between voicing it and then producing it. We do everything in a way that if you're listening to the radio, you don't hear any pauses, because if there's pauses, that means something's wrong. And so the noise that's coming out of the radio is constant.

When you do this, you have to have some pauses at some points along the line, and it's a better way of telling the story. You want the story to move. Obviously, you don't want it to become boring. But at the same time, when I was listening to what I did with Elizabeth and the Rosemary Kennedy thing, I went and I would have done this differently. I would do this differently now.

So, you know, we've we've learned as we've gone along. We knew when we started that we would learn. We went, OK, fine. This is the this is what we know we can do at this point. And as we went along, we both have learned an awful lot by it. And we appreciate you coming along for the ride as we learn what we're doing with this podcast.

And I think. Like, I love how the people who listen are true weirdos, the weirdos call themselves in a live happy hour that we did that, that they've been so open to the experimentation because we had to like we just didn't like we had to figure some stuff out and we didn't know what we we didn't know what we were doing.

We didn't know what we could do because we have no resources like we have no budget. We have no time. We don't. We've only got like us and Doc and, you know, Heather and Tony and Steven. And most of it comes down to you and me. Right. And so we figured out we started asking people, hey, would you would you be willing to voice like a couple of lines in an episode of this? And to our shock and amazement, the people that we asked were like, yeah. And then they did it and they were like, that was fun. I'll do that again if you want. And then, of course, I met my muse, Don Morgan.

His history. So, yeah, we didn't know that. Like, you know, aren't you glad that we didn't know that? Isn't it better to sort of learn and have it tell you what it's going to be? It is. Yeah. And so I think that we learned how to tell the story in a more effective way when we started doing that. And it freed us up to like. So, OK, one of the things that and I still do this, I'm still really committed to doing this. I write with an invisible skeptic and debunker sitting next to me who's like, no, that didn't happen. And so I'm like, oh, yes, it did. Let me prove to you that it happened. So I'm like really nerded out on the facts of it and the research of it.

But what we did, we gave ourselves permission to open the story up and allow for because we're not doing a documentary here. Right. We're telling a story. We open the story up and and both in terms of the writing and the sound of production. We allowed ourselves more room to be playful, I think. Yeah. And and not worry and trust that. OK, we tried it with this one. Now we'll go a little bit farther with the next one. We'll try to do something a little bit different. But I think the one thing that I love about the writing, the way you approach it is they're all different.

They all have there's always there is this a consistency of storytelling, obviously, but you go about it in different ways at different times. And that's the thing that I love about it, because it's fun to produce it that way, because each week is a challenge. Now, some weeks the challenge I'm going, I don't have enough time for this because we have a full or full time jobs. I know you might be thinking what I only hear you for so many hours on the radio or with the podcast, but the jobs, the jobs are demanding.

That's not a complaint because we love what we do, but they are demanding and you only have so many hours and you're you know, you're always trying to make sure that you have the balance of being able to have the rest of your life on the outside as well. So. Which, you know, I feel guilty all the time because and for me, it's not really work, you know, when you're you know, when you have something in your life that you do, whether it's like part of your job or a hobby or whatever, and you look up and four hours have gone by.

That's what researching stuff and writing is like for me. It's really not fair to my husband and family because I'm just if I'm not working my day job, I'm not doing the radio thing. I'm almost always working on this, which for me doesn't feel like work, but I'm trying to get more efficient about it so that I, you know, can be more present in my life.

Yes, that's right. And so we can't. We decided that we would other than that, you know, the critical voices in our heads that always tell us how we suck, that we would not like really evaluate growth or performance or anything until we've done it for two solid years. And I'm happy to say that we still don't have any big network behind us, but we've won a signal award. We've won a women in podcasting award. We've won a 50 over 50 award. We're nominated for a Webby and it gets no better than that. I mean, that's the peak. A Webby is the peak for for this.

So, you know, I guess we can take a peek at evaluating a little bit ahead of schedule and say we're still we still have no resources. We don't. But we have people. We have our people. We have our weirdo community. Thank God we have Sherry. Thank God we have people that are willing to work for free as well on this. So, I mean, because we're we you know, we're not we're not making money on it. We're really not.

Oh, God, no. Oh, no. We're losing. I don't like to say that out loud because I don't want to remind Tony, Tony Garcia that we're actually losing money on this. But it's been so my gosh, it's just been such a labor of love and. We we Doc wants our other producer, the equally odd Kary Bowser, that you hear in the credits, Doc, would like us to go back and put postmortems on the early episodes that didn't have it and rewrite and add voices to some of the other episodes.

And we'll try. We'll try. Thank you. Thank you, Doc. I want to tell you why there why we didn't put postmortem chats on the first wave of episodes, because we kept being told that nobody wanted to listen to a podcast that was more than maybe seven to 11 minutes long. And so we tried. I mean, we never tried to be seven minutes long. You can't tell a story with any dimension.

Seven minutes. I mean, I know baby shoes for sale never worn. I know Hemingway did it. But how are we telling this lobotomy story in seven minutes? How are we telling it in 11 minutes? And also my hyper fixation info dumping bad self just was like, tell you what, we're we're not asking you to pay us for this. Max and I are going to do what we want to do. How's that? That's how I felt about it.

Well, I wasn't sure when we started doing the postmortems, I went, well, this is fun and I like talking to you about it because it's kind of like what we do anyhow, just in conversation about things. And I thought, I don't know if people want to listen to it. Maybe they'll listen to the produced part, but I don't know if they want to listen to this.

And time and time again, we've gotten notes that have said our favorite part is that you're discussing it afterwards. My brother, my brother Mark told me he was like, I love I loved early on. I didn't even tell like, you know, I don't even tell my family that I do these things because then they feel like, oh, now we have to support it and they don't really want to.

And then I find out they haven't really listened and then my feelings are hurt. Now it's Christmas. I just didn't tell like I didn't make a big deal out of while we're doing this podcast, Max and I, my brother found it, found it and tells me after we added the postmortem. Yeah, you know, I listen to Truett stuff every week. I really like it. I like it better now that you and Max added the postmortem chat.

Which you and I thought, well, you know, three people might listen to that. But what ends up happening is like as much detail as we put into these stories, there's always stuff that you can't that you have to cut for time. Like it's not in the episode that they were treating people with ulcerative colitis with lobotomy in Oklahoma because, you know, that would now I'm down another rabbit hole and I've done another tangent and I have enough rabbit holes and tangents in these episodes as it is.

So, yeah, we're able to include stuff in the after chat. And this is the first time, by the way, that we've added a postmortem to one of the early episodes. Which is why we're kind of all over the map because we haven't had a chance to do this. And what a cringe fest listening and being so mad at ourselves and all the ways we could have done a better job with this story.

Like what a what a punishment that's been. But, you know, it's good. The Buddha says that, you know, being humble burnishes the soul and whatnot. So here we are getting our souls burnished. But do I have to have this much, Sherry? I mean, you know, that's why when Doc said he gave us a list of episodes, we should add postmortem chats to. And I know your heart sank, too, because I've got to relisten to it.

So the good news is that lobotomy is illegal in the United States and has been since that terrible day in 1967 when Freeman's last lobotomy patient died. So that's the good news, right? We can be we can be a little bit happy about that. And it's also almost unheard of anywhere else in the world to give people lobotomy.

Which does that surprise you? Because, you know, we have all these expressions about lobotomy in pop culture and it's just this shameful chapter now that's closed. Yeah. It makes me wonder if there's something that's going on now that we're going to be you could do a podcast about 40 years that's happening now. People go, that's horrifying. They're doing this now. So something somewhere that's being done that's like a procedure like this.

I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure I don't. And well, that's the other challenge with this. So like we'll be working on an episode and then news will break and we could pull that we could pull that new information in. But now, you know, now it's like a three part miniseries. So what I try to do with something like that is I make a note and think, all right, well, we'll come back and tell this this version of that story through a different lens, like everything that we're discovering now about what is happening under the pyramids of Egypt or not.

You know, we're still waiting on proof what's happening underneath Antarctica. All of that is sort of like breaking news that figures into previous or upcoming episodes. So we do try. I think we've kind of landed on a standard length at this point. It's longer than seven minutes, but not six hours. And we're forever grateful that you listen to this kooky little podcast. We really are so grateful. It's so much fun. Even the horrific stories are so fun to tell, because when we tell them, then that's one more person who knows that this bad thing happened.

One more person that will be sensitized if they see this bad thing happening again. And that's like, you know, that's that's for a story like this. But then there are all these people that were forgotten and we say their names again and we bring them back into living memory. Like Elmer McCurdy, the star of the episode called A Real Stiff or Daisy Dell Simpson, the Lady Hooch Hunter, you know, are all of these all of these people that were pretty awesome and pretty cool and had and either had an utterly a wild, amazing life or an utterly unbelievably tragic life.

Like it's fun to bring their names back into the world and tell their stories again. Yeah. In fact, that's one of my favorite episodes. I love that story about the Lady Hooch Hunter. Oh, I love Daisy Dell Simpson. And how you came upon it, which was another great story. So anyhow. Just love her. So on the next True Weird Stuff, we're going to tell you the story of a man who appeared to everyone's shock and amazement to testify at his own murder trial.

That doesn't happen every day. And that's another one of these great and great American stories, one of these great American stories that's just kind of disappeared because there's so many things happening every minute of every day. You can't keep track of all of it. So that's coming up for you on the next episode of True Weird Stuff. And if you've been here from the beginning, thank you. Boy, have you suffered.

Sherry, we're just too critical of ourselves, I think. Listening to it, I was horrified at certain things from a production standpoint. And then I thought to myself, most people listening, it's going to go, you know. I popped my earbuds in and had it for a walk to re-listen to the episode. I'm surprised nobody didn't call 9-1-1 because at one point I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and yelled, slow down.

I was so mad at myself. Well, I'm driving on the road. Oh, there's an embutment. There we go. Yeah, let me yank this car off the bridge. You know what, Max, we're just going to have to commit to trying even harder to not suck so much. What do you think? There you go, Sherry. Pinky swear right now. Right now. All right. Pinky's out. There we go.

Thank you, True Weirdos, for being here from the beginning. And if you can vote, there's a People's Voice Award component to the Webby nomination. So the Webby's, you're nominated by the judges. Some panel of judges listen to all these things and then declare the nominees. There are five nominees in each category. So we're nominated for individual episode, podcast, history category, along with four other shows, including the side door by the Smithsonian. So the competition is very tough indeed.

Which is a podcast that I listen to. When I saw that, I went, I almost thought, I went, man, we're almost legitimate. And I think if you're so I know some of you don't listen to this real time, but the if you want to vote for this, we have we have a link up on our Web site. It's on our Facebook page. Correct, Sherry? I know it's on the Facebook page.

The link right to it, you can and the voting is up on April 17th, 2025. So I don't know when you're listening to this, but if you're if you're listening to this, you know, as it's dropped or sometime before the 17th, please vote. It really would help us. And I have to tell you all just the nomination. When we got the news, we were working when we got the news.

And I said to Max and Doc, hey, guys, hang on, because I started to cry. I'm like, hang on a little this little podcast. It's more than 11 minutes that everybody's working for free on all of our voice actors. Everybody, Doc, Max, every Heather, everybody's working for free. This little podcast got a Webby nomination for being one of the five best in the world in its category.

It's a deal. It really is just going about going to hyperventilate. We're going to get it. We didn't get it last year because we were talking too fast and making poor choices with. And you should listen to Side Door, but just don't vote for him, OK? Yeah, it's a really good show. Our other fellow nominees in that category include another great show, The Bowery Boys.

Like, it's so fun to like to see your little goofy show next to the Smithsonian is kind of really amazing. Another one. Yeah, there's another one that's from the American Jewish Historical Society. And I have it. I know I'm up against we're up against it, but I have not had a chance to listen to that episode either. And so I'm really excited.

And I'm so I'm so thankful for it, because now, like I can when Max is working 18 hours a day, I can be like, yeah, but hey, buddy. Hey, buddy, I know you can't pay rent with these award nominations and awards, but it ain't nothing. We are rich in spirit, Sherry. And so we're going to do the the updated credits here for this.

We I know there were credits at the end of the produced part, but we're going to do the updated credits coming out here, too. So just, yeah, for twenty, twenty five. Yeah. And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered.

And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird stuff, hit our Web site, true weird stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it. And bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff dot com. And follow true weird stuff on Instagram. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production.

Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr original graphics by Kevin Nash.

Original artworks will be excellent. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright two thousand twenty five. Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.