As the time comes ever nearer for the publication of Examined Lives, I am still trying to understand the man who performed a lobotomy on my mother. I never met Walter Freeman, the man who was the very public face of lobotomies as cures for mental illness in the mid-20thcentury and at whose own reckoning performed some 3,500 such operations. The photo below of his performing a lobotomy, without mask or gloves, in front of curious bystanders was one of his publicity stunts. The procedure he used extensively, as depicted, involved hammering an ice pick-like device through the eye socket and wiggling it back and forth to severe connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain.
MOHAI, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, 1986.5.25616
Freeman performed that operation on my mother in 1950. He saw her for the first time on a Friday, pronounced her a paranoid schizophrenic, and did the procedure the following Monday. The man wasted no time.
The operation drastically changed my mother’s life and so my own. Her diary and scrapbooks reveal her to have been a vivacious, competent woman. She came to Chicago on her 20th birthday and began her rise in the hospitality industry, starting with serving at the lunch counter at a busy Walgreen’s Drugstore at Rush and Oak Streets, where she ended up supervising 12 other waitresses, to serving as room captain at the Camellia Room of the Drake Hotel, frequented by the likes of Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. In her off hours she devoured the nightlife, visiting numerous clubs on any one night with a string of young swain, several of whom wanted to marry her. One was Jerry with whom she visited a night club and “afterward on the way home Jerry and I spied a baby buggy in an apartment house hall and we stole it and I rode down Rush Street in a baby buggy. Fun. They took the buggy back though.”
After the lobotomy, her drive and “sparkle,” as my aunt put it, was taken from her and in fact she ended up being “adjudged insane” and institutionalized for a period of time.
What led to her having the lobotomy? That is the story I tell in my book Examined Lives, based on thousands of pages of family letters, diaries, scrapbooks, medical records, an unpublished novel, poetry, and photographs. And, yes of course, on the writings of Walter Freeman.