What an absolutely incredible and heart-wrenching story. (Warning: horrible photo at the top – difficult to look at. Sorry, ricki!! Should have put a warning there.)
I have extremely personal responses to the issue of lobotomy – and I don’t know why. I don’t know anyone who was lobotomized. But it fills me with horror – and yet I also am drawn to the topic. Tennessee Williams’ sister, etc. … If I believed in previous lifetimes I could theorize that either I had been lobotomized or I was a doctor who performed them. It brings up such a visceral response of terror and pity. For example – I could barely get through the article above. It was very painful for me to get through, and I had to ignore the top photo. Too much. Odd. I can’t explain it.
Good for you, Howard Dully, good for you for having the courage to look into your own past, to try to find out “what was missing”. And then for having the courage to share it.
Amazing.
you’re a stronger woman than I. I could not get through the article; that first picture upset me too much.
And I’m a biologist.
the description – which I did, unfortunately, read, makes it sound not unlike the (now discredited) procedure of “pithing” a live frog before dissection (I don’t know anyone who still does that; most biologists, I think, would consider it unnecessarily cruel)
It amazes me, a lot of the things that were done in the name of health.
I skipped the first couple paragraphs so I didn’t have to look at that first picture.
Horror.
I read this man’s story in People and I was horrified. Butcher part of a kid’s brain because he didn’t get along with his stepmom? That’s a little extreme.
If you’ve read The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Doris Kearns Goodwin says that Joe Kennedy ordering Rosemary’s lobotomy — and her subsequent decline — fractured the Rose/Joe marriage. She had turned a blind eye to his questionable business dealings and his numerous infidelities for YEARS, but the lobotomy of their child was the last straw. She never forgave him, and basically lived a life separate from him until his paralyzing stroke and death.
What an abomination.
Yeah, what was done to Rosemary was unforgivable – so inhuman. horrible.
He was lobotomized, it turns out, for no other reason than that he didn’t get along with his stepmother
WTF?! I gues that means that I’m a candidate for a lobotomy as well. I wonder if they’ll let me keep the brain hunk in a little jar.
//He nevertheless became a champion of the operation and to publicize it gave virtuoso demonstrations in which he sometimes used a carpenter’s mallet instead of a surgical hammer and sometimes wielded two hammers at once, cracking both eye sockets simultaneously.//
You’re an asshole buddy! I’d like to give a virtuoso performance on his freaking head! Egomanic. Oh, he’s dead already. Oh well.
So far so good, other than having to wear a headband everywhere I go.