Prologue.
1. September 1936.
2. Rittenhouse Square.
3. The Education of a Lobotomist.
4. In the Hospital Wards.
5. A Perfect Partner.
6 Refining Lobotomy.
7. The Lines of Battle.
8. Advance and Retreat.
9. Waterfall.
10. Fame.
11. Road Warrior.
12. Leaving Home.
13. Decline.
14. Ghost.
Acknowledgments.
Notes.
Bibliography.
Index.
JACK EL-HAI is the Executive Vice President of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and a winner of the June Roth Memorial Award for Medical Journalism. A contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post Magazine, American Heritage, and numerous other publications, he lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two daughters.
"Written with such clarity and engaging detail that a reader
has
difficulty in putting it down." (The New York Review of
Books, August 11, 2005)
?Jack El-Hai has written an absorbing, unsettling and
cautionary story of the man who sold the lowly ice pick as the
surgical solution to the mental illness of tens of thousands of
people?. The author, a respected science journalist, started
his research assuming that Freeman was akin to Josef Mengele.
He
ends this book with a nuanced, haunted view of his subject?
With The Lobotomist, El-Hai gives his readers a first-class
biography and, without saying so, a tutorial in the sober need
for
professional humility.? (Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain
Dealer)
?One of the many virtues of El-Hai's text is the rich
detail he provides about Freeman's life and ideas. His readers
will
thus be able to judge Walter Freeman for themselves and decide
whether he is, as El-Hai would have it, "a maverick medical
genius"
or, as others have concluded, a moral monster.? (Andrew
Scull, The Los Angeles Times, April 24, 2005)
?Parts of The Lobotomist can best be read curled in
a fetal position, but the reader would be well-advised to make
the
effort to wade through the relievedly short gruesome passages.
That?s because Walter Jackson Freeman is a man worth getting
to know, a classic American archetype of genius whose one
crucial
idea is wielded over and over again.? (Sam Stowe,
California Literary Review , April 3, 2005)
?For anyone interested in the science of mind and body,
The Lobotomist is surely a reading must.? (Louis C.
Martin, Science and Theology News)
?a lively biography of a much maligned and misunderstood
practitioner?? (Journal of the Royal Society of
Medicine, August 2005)
??a well researched account of psychosurgery in the
mid 20th century?? (The Guardian,
June 11, 2005)
??fascinating book?an important and disturbing
contribution to the history of psychiatry?? (New
Statesman, June 17, 2005)
??meticulously researched account??
(British Medical Journal, 28 May 2005)
According to freelance journalist El-Hai, Walter Freeman
(1895-1972) was "the most scorned physician of the twentieth
century" except for Nazi Joseph Mengele. In this first
biography,
he deftly chronicles the rise and fall of Freeman and the
procedure
he championed. Nearly 70 years ago, Freeman began refining
lobotomy, in which a sharp instrument is inserted under the
patient's eyelid and into the frontal lobes of the brain; this
resulted in nerve damage that seemed to offer remarkable cures
in
many psychiatric patients. Over time, the operation became
widely
adopted by the medical community and supported by mental health
professionals, families, and many patients themselves. Yet
there
were always dissenters who attacked lobotomy as useless, cruel,
or
indeed criminal. Freeman, in turn, spent his entire career
performing, promoting, and justifying the operation-even after
the
development of drugs like chlorpormazine that offered the
promise
of "chemical" lobotomies. By the time of his death, lobotomy
had
been gone for more than a decade. A worthy purchase for
any
library, especially for medical and large public libraries.
--A.J.
Wright, Univ. of Alabama Lib., Birmingham (Library Journal,
January 15, 2005)
"In The Lobotomist, Jack El-Hai's lively biography,
Freeman comes across as a classic American type, a do-gooder and
a
go-getter with a bit of the huckster thrown in." --William
Grimes,
The New York Times
"Driven, egotistical, brilliant, and focused, Freeman is as
fascinating as the chronicle of twentieth-century psychiatry in
which El-Hai sets his story." --Donna Chavez, Booklist
"There are more curious characters than Freeman in the annals
of
medical history, but few are so curiously American."--Verlyn
Klinkenborg, Discover Magazine
"In this first biography, El-Hai deftly chronicles the rise and
fall of Freeman and the procedure he championed." --Library
Journal
"Good biographers must keep an open mind, to avoid stereotyping
and reductionism. Fortunately, El-Hai turns out to be a good
biographer."--Steve Weinberg, The Philadelphia Inquirer
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