Holding an ice pick to Ionesco’s tear duct, the doctor began chiseling into her eye socket. With an audible crack the thin layer of bone separating Ionesco’s brain gave way, and the ice pick sunk deep into her frontal lobe. Freeman then swished the metal rod back and forth, severing the neural pathways he believed were the root of Ionesco’s illness.¹

This was in 1946 people. “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chicken’s” was tearing up the jukebox charts. Future sitcom legend Ed O’Neil was born amid thunderous hooting and canned applause. And Walter Freeman, who would go on to perform thousands of similar operations in the coming years, was well on his way to garnering one of the more sinister nicknames in modern medicine—The Ice Pick Lobotomist.

Lobotomy: A surgical operation where connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain are cut in order to alleviate mental illness.²

Here’s a fun experiment. Tell your friend you’re going to give them a lobotomy. Tell ’em you just read this great article in O Magazine and you’re convinced this simple procedure is the only way to cure their mild anxiety / seasonal depression / Game of Thrones withdrawal. “Yessss,” they will say, “sure thing buddy,” as they slowly back out of the room and your life forever. You see, the very concept of a lobotomy seems so barbaric that modern man, with his vape cigarettes and vegan cheese substitutes, simply cannot fathom it.

But in the 1940s, a mere Ed O’Neil’s lifetime ago, lobotomies were cutting edge psychiatric therapy. By severing connections in the frontal lobe, many believed they could also sever the connections between a mentally ill person’s thoughts, and the intense negative emotions associated with them.² And what’s even weirder is it sometimes worked.¹

Freeman’s surgeries were so brutal to behold that during one filmed screening at a Bristol high school 5 students fainted and had to be dragged out¹…care to see for yourself?

After Ellen Ionesco’s surgery, her depression and suicidal thoughts vanished completely. She was able to hold down a job, take care of her daughter, and actually lived a long healthy life.¹ In fact Freeman, who kept tabs on nearly all his 3,000+ patients,³ claimed that 40% of the state hospital patients he operated on were later released.⁴

But success was hard to predict. A botched lobotomy by Freeman left JFK’s sister Rose Kennedy with the mental capacity of a 2 year old.¹ Another experiment permanently shattered the mind of a 6 year old child, who was left “gazing into space…rocking back and forth, showing no affection for anybody.”¹ In case you’re wondering by the way, the youngest lobotomy patient in the US was only 4 years old!⁵ And you thought giving grade schoolers Ritalin was crazy.

Your frontal lobe is the command centre of your brain. If you’re anything like Dave from the movie Meet Dave and your brain is controlled by a tiny version of yourself (played by Eddie Murphy), this is where you sit. Mess with your frontal lobe, and you mess with your ability to plan and self-motivate. If you damage a troubled person’s frontal lobe, they might stop caring about what’s troubling them, but they could just as easily stop caring about their appearance, their job, their family. And they often did.

A lobotomy patient before and 6 months after.

But don’t take my word for it. “Rose is a smiling, lazy and satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster,” Freeman cheerfully notes in one post-lobotomy follow up, “She pours and pours from an empty coffee pot. She can’t remember my name.”²

Ummmm “personality of an oyster?!” “Pours from an empty coffee pot?!” If brain surgery turned someone you cared about into a memory impaired mollusk you’d be pissed. It’s hard for us today with our newfangled conceptions of “medical ethics” and “human rights” to understand how a brain surgery that literally damages your brain and dulls your personality could be seen as a good thing.

As an intern Freeman once dislodged a cock ring from a young man’s penis. “The boy asked for the ring but I told him it was a specimen and that I would have to keep it,” he wrote. “I had the ring repaired and the Freeman crest engraved on it.” The doctor wore the ring around his neck for years.¹

What you’ve got to understand is that psych hospitals in Freeman’s day were seriously overcrowded.¹ We’re talking Tokyo subway overcrowded here. And once you were committed there was very little psychiatrists could actually do for you. People were desperate for any treatment that could restore even a small amount of function to the locked up and hopeless. If surgery got Rose out of four point restraints and back to her family Freeman would argue that’s a good thing.

But you have to wonder who benefitted more, the patients or the caregivers?

In any case, frontal lobotomies grew quite popular in the 40s and 50s, with around 100,000 lobotomized worldwide over that period.⁶ And Freeman’s maniacal zeal for slicing open peoples’ brains played no small part in the procedure’s success.

He took pains to portray lobotomy as a simple, quick, and painless operation. And the popular press followed suit. “Brain operation to cure worry,” wrote The Brisbane Worker.⁷ In 1941 the Associated Press called the procedure a “personality rejuvenator” that cuts the brain’s “worry nerves,” and “is only a little more dangerous than an operation to remove an infected tooth.”¹ Another story claimed it’s less painful than “having a corn removed from your little toe.”¹

You didn’t need to be a brain surgeon to do an ice pick lobotomy, Freeman claimed.¹ Any two bit field psychiatrist capable of hanging his own wall art was more than qualified. And at a mere 10 minutes in length,⁸ the whole operation is over in less time than it takes Mr. Bean to shame himself in a public pool.

Freeman operating on a patient. Gather ’round folks don’t be shy!

But there was something about the doctor’s casual attitude towards brain surgery that rubbed medical folks the wrong way. For starters, he wasn’t even a brain surgeon. He actually had no formal training in surgery.¹ But what he lacked in credentials, he more than made up for in bizarre theatrical antics—like using a regular carpenter’s hammer in lieu of a surgical mallet, or nailing two ice picks at once.¹

Student nurse Patricia Derian described her experience watching Freeman as a living nightmare, “I thought I was watching a circus act.”¹ There are numerous tales of doctors fainting as Freeman operated,⁹ and one report of a nurse who was so disgusted with Freeman’s work that she quit medicine entirely.¹

Man in undergoing insulin shock coma treatment gets some much needed glucose.

Still, other psychiatric treatments in Freeman’s time were just as queasy. Insulin shock therapy saw psychiatrists forcing patients into medically induced hypoglycemic comas for months on end.¹⁰ Metrozol shock therapy, elecroshock’s primitive cousin, involved medically induced seizures so severe they caused spine fractures 43% of the time!¹¹ In these cases, the idea was to “shock” the patient out of insanity, much in the way a well timed BOO! can cure your hiccups.

Ultimately lobotomy’s deathblow came not from some grand ethical awakening, but from Thorazine, a powerful anti-psychotic that was initially advertised as a “chemical lobotomy.”¹ At least you didn’t have to crack open someone’s brain, but Thorazine was no beach picnic, with all sorts of evil sounding side effects like akathisia, dystonia, and irreversible tardive dyskinesia.

Early ad for Thorazine

Compared to a frontal lobotomy, psychiatric drugs were just way more efficient to administer. Even 1,000 Walter Freemans amped up on Rockstar Energy beverages lobotomizing without sleep for months on end couldn’t come close to matching the power of Thorazine.

This should have been obvious to Freeman. But no! He stubbornly insisted this whole drug thing was just a passing fad until his death in 1972.¹² “They’ll be back,” Freeman presumably scowled from his window, as the last lobotomy patient (again I’m presuming here) shuffled away in his hospital gown towards a complimentary Thorazine IV drip.

Perhaps someday brave microscopic robots will roam the inner reaches of our brains, zapping away misfiring neurones before we even notice a problem. Is this really so far fetched? After all we don’t give our cars drugs when they’re acting funny. We don’t shove klonopin tablets into our laptops when they freeze up. If scientists can actually pinpoint brain abnormalities that cause mental illness, why shouldn’t they go in there and fix them? But maybe don’t use an ice pick next time. Just sayin’.

Sources:
1. El-Hai, J. (2005). The lobotomist: A maverick medical genius and his tragic quest to rid the world of mental illness. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
2. Raz, M. (2013). The lobotomy letters: The making of American psychosurgery. University of Rochester Press.
3. Freeman, W. (1957). Frontal Lobotomy 1936-1956 A follow-up study of 3000 patients from one to twenty years. American Journal of Psychiatry, 113(10), 877–886.
4. Freeman, W. (1958). Psychosurgery; present indications and future prospects. California Medicine, 88(6), 429–434.
5. Lutz, P. L. (2002). The Rise of Experimental Biology: An Illustrated History. Humana Press.
6. Knowles, S. (1974). Beyond the Cuckoo’s Nest: A Proposal for Federal Regulation of Psychosurgery.
7. Brain Operation To Cure Worry. (1945, October). Worker (Brisbane, Qld. : 1890 – 1955). Retrieved from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article71460390
8. Tranøy, J., & Blomberg, W. (2005). Lobotomy in Norwegian psychiatry. History of Psychiatry, 16(61 Pt 1), 107–110. http://doi.org/10.1177/0957154X05052224
9. Youngson, R., & Schott, I. (2012). A Brief History of Bad Medicine. Running Press Book Publishers. Retrieved from https://books.google.ca/books?id=-5MmYAAACAAJ
10. Braslow, J. (1997). Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. University of California Press.
11. P, P., MM, F., MM, H., & WA, H. (1939). Vertebral fractures produced by metrazol-induced convulsions: In the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Journal of the American Medical Association, 112(17), 1684–1687. http://doi.org/10.1001/jama.1939.02800170030010
12. Freeman, W. (1958). Psychosurgery; present indications and future prospects. California Medicine, 88(6), 429–434.

The post Walter Freeman: Ice Pick Lobotomist appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

Most amputated limbs wind up in the hospital incinerator, but Dr Pierre Barbet had other ideas. Having recently lopped off the arm of a “vigorous man,” the Parisian surgeon squared a large nail in the center of its palm and mounted it as one might the prized head of a slain beast.¹

Barbet then tied a 100lb (45kg) weight to the elbow, causing the palm’s flesh to buckle and tear under its pull. After about 10 minutes, the initial wound had stretched into a gaping hole, and Barbet felt it was time to give the whole thing a good shake. What was left of the cadaverous palm burst open and fell to the floor, raising the question: was Jesus Christ really crucified with nails driven through the palms of his hand?

THE MAN OF THE SHROUD

To the uninitiated, the research of Pierre Barbet (1884-1961) might seem morbid, but he is far from the only scientist to become captivated by Jesus Christ’s death. Jesus’s final moments have always been shrouded in mystery, but in the past two centuries his Passion has increasingly become the subject of dispassionate investigation. By exposing the dead and the living to all the torments of Christ, researchers believe they can reveal the medical facts behind the scriptures. Sides have been speared. Scalps have been pierced with thorns. Countless bodies, both living and dead, have been crucified in the pursuit of knowledge.

Crucifixion science tries to unravel the mystery of Christ’s death. The scriptures say Jesus died on the cross, but that’s only half the story. Crucifixion victims regularly hold out for days.² Yet the Gospels agree that Jesus died in a matter of hours.³ Why did this healthy, fit, and relatively young man die so soon?

Cadaver crucified by Dr. Pierre Barbet to determine the true position of Jesus on the cross.

In the late 1940s, with the scientific atrocities of the war still fresh in people’s minds, German radiologist Hermann Mödder somehow managed to get away with crucifying medical students. Stretching their arms out to mimic the pose of Christ, the Cologne-based doctor hung students by their wrists and monitored their vital signs. After six minutes of hanging, the students’ blood pressure dropped, breathing became difficult, and their skin turned sickly damp. According to Mödder: “What will set in after the end of the sixth minute can be foreseen by the physician: unconsciousness, intense pallor, sweating. In short: collapse due to insufficient blood supply to the heart and brain.”⁴

Evidence shows that the Nazis carried out the same type of pseudo-crucifixion as a deadly form of torture. While imprisoned at Dachau, Father G Delorey was forced to watch as his doomed fellow inmates “were suspended from a horizontal bar by means of leather straps around their wrists… After their hanging for one hour the victims could no longer exhale the air that filled their chest.” The only way victims could breathe normally was if they pulled their whole body up, as if performing a chin-up at the gym. This agony could go on for up to six hours. According to Delaney, “only at the end of the torture, when the victim’s strength failed, did asphyxiation take place, generally within two to four minutes.”⁵

Could Jesus have suffocated on the cross? If so, then he too would have raised his body in order to breathe like the Nazi torture victims. This is indeed what Pierre Barbet found when he examined the Shroud of Turin, the alleged burial shroud of Jesus.

The Shroud has been mired in controversy ever since its ‘discovery’ in the 14th century. It depicts a faint bloodstained image of a dead man who appears to have been beaten and crucified in the same manner as Christ. Radiocarbon tests date the Shroud to around the 14th century, suggesting that it’s a forgery.⁶ Yet no one has been able to demonstrate conclusively how the image was formed. This has led to speculation that the Shroud could be anything from an ancient X-ray triggered by a radioactive earthquake,⁷ to a secret photograph by Leonardo Da Vinci.⁸ Despite its controversial status, the Shroud is often cited as evidence in crucifixion research.

Some believe that these bloodstains are proof that Jesus raised and lowered his body while on the cross.

Barbet noticed that the blood emanating from The Man of the Shroud’s hand wound seemed to flow in two separate directions. He wondered if the two distinct bleeding patterns were evidence of two distinct postures.⁹ If Jesus raised himself in order to breathe, we would expect his arms to pivot slightly – thus blood would drip from the hand wounds at a different angle than when his body was lowered. What Barbet needed to prove was that Christ’s body sagged on the cross. He believed that Christ, like the Nazi torture victims, would have found breathing difficult in such a strained position.

The doctor scoured the hospital grounds for a suitable test subject, settling on a half- starved, wraithlike cadaver he apologetically describes as the “least ugly” he could find. Operating swiftly, so as to approximate the brusque, brutish manner of a Roman executioner, the surgeon nailed his corpse to a homebuilt cross and raised it. The results, photographed in Barbet’s 1950 book La Passion de N.-S. Jésus-Christ selon le chirurgien, were compelling, if a little unnerving to look at. Not only did the dead body slump as predicted, but it fell at exactly the same angle as indicated by the Shroud. Jesus’s body must have sagged on the cross. The bloodstains on the Shroud suggest that he raised himself periodically to gasp for air. But when his strength gave out, he would have suffocated.

By the mid-20th century, suffocation had become the dominant explanation for Jesus’s death. But debate over his death would not die so easily.

Shroud of Turin. The alleged burial shroud of Jesus.

CRUCIFY THE LIVING

It might seem strange, but medical examiner Frederick Zugibe (1928-2013) has crucified more people in his suburban home of Rockland County, New York, than perhaps anyone since Roman times. Armed with a steady stream of volunteers from his local church and enough medical monitoring equipment to outfit a small hospital, Zugibe has given hundreds the opportunity to feel what it’s like to be Jesus.¹⁰ Granted, Jesus didn’t have a team of attending physicians monitoring his every heartbeat.

Like Mödder, Zugibe used straps instead of nails to bind his subjects’ hands. Unlike Mödder, who let his subjects dangle, Zugibe also bound their feet. This seems to have made all the difference. While the bodies did sag, as Barbet predicted, not one subject in Zugibe’s experiments found it difficult to breathe.¹¹ What’s more, contrary to Barbet’s notion that Christ lifted his body on the cross periodically, Zugibe found that it was literally impossible to pull your torso up while you are crucified in that position. He asked his volunteers to push and pull their body upwards as if their life depended on it, but no one could. So even if Jesus did find breathing difficult, he would have been unable to raise himself in order to breathe easier, as did the Nazi torture victims at Dachau.

Zugibe’s volunteer Christs could stay on the cross as long as they wanted, and some held out for close to an hour. Their biggest complaint? Arm pain. But sore arms didn’t kill Jesus, so what did?

Dr. Frederick Zugibe examining one of his crucified volunteers. Volunteers would often arch their back to relieve strain.

One theory that has seen a surprising resurgence in recent years is the idea that Jesus never died on the cross. According to Dr Habib-ur Rehman, “Jesus in fact fainted on the cross, was believed dead, and recovered after a period of coma.” After ‘resurrecting’ himself, the newly beatified Christ made the rounds in Israel before absconding east to seek out lost Hebrew tribes in India.¹²

But Rehman doesn’t take into account the immense trauma Jesus suffered, especially leading up to the Crucifixion. The night before, as Jesus awaited arrest in the Garden of Gesthemane, his agony was so extreme that according to Luke: “His sweat became like drops of blood”.¹³ Christ was then marched for miles without sleep, after which he was scourged to within an inch of his life. As Zugibe notes, the scourging whips of Roman times were often tipped with metal weights powerful enough to break bones and cause significant internal and external bleeding. Piercing lacerations from the crown of thorns would only worsen this blood loss.¹⁴

By the time Christ arrived at Calvary bearing his cross, he was already in very bad shape. Add to that the trauma of being nailed through the hands and feet and you have a recipe for what Zugibe calls hypovolemic shock, a condition caused by severe loss of blood and bodily fluids. Simply put, Jesus lost so much blood that his heart could no longer supply his organs with the oxygen they needed, and he died.

So there you have it; or, well, you don’t. We’re only scratching the surface. Hematidrosis, trigeminal neuralgia, fatal acisodis¹⁵ – Jesus has been posthumously diagnosed with enough scary sounding medical conditions to fill a Robin Cook novel. Zugibe may be the most thorough crucifixion researcher of the bunch, but there is still widespread disagreement as to whether his hypovolemic shock theory, or any theory for that matter, is correct.

And seeing that there is no irrefutable forensic evidence from Christ’s Passion, it looks as if many more will be pinned to the cross before crucifixion scientists are satisfied.

Side view of Barbet’s crucified cadaver.

NOTES

1. Pierre Barbet, La Passion de N.-S. Jésus-Christ Selon Le Chirurgien, Paris, Apostolat des Editions, 1950.
2. Matthew W Maslen and Piers d Mitchell, “Medical theories on the cause
of death in crucifixion”, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99 (4), SAGE Publications, 2006, pp185-188.
3. Mathew 26:17-27:61, Mark 14:12-15:47, luke 22:7- 23:56, John 13:1-19:42.
4. Hermann Mödder, “Die Todesursache Bei Kreuzigung”, Stimmen Der Zeit, 1949, pp55-59, as quoted in Frans Wijffels, “Death on the Cross: Did the Turin Shroud Once Envelop
a Crucified Body?” British Society for the Turin Shroud Newsletter, no 52, 2000.
5. Antoine Legrand, “Du Gibet Du Golgotha a Ceux de Dachau”, Medicine et Laboratoire, 1952, pp391- 393, quoted in Wijffels.
6. Paul E Damon, D J Donahue, B H Gore, A L Hatheway, A J T Jull, T W Linick, P J Sercel, et al. 1989. “Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin.” Nature 337: 611–15, p615.
7. Alberto Carpinteri, Giuseppe Lacidogna, A Manuello, and Oscar Borla, “Piezonuclear Neutrons from Earthquakes as a Hypothesis for the Image Formation and the Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud.” Scientific Research and Essays 7 (29): 2603–12, 2012, pp2603-04.
8. Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, The Turin Shroud: How Da Vinci Fooled History. New York, Touchstone, 2007, p88.
9. Barbet, op cit.
10. Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, London, Viking, 2003, p161.
11. Frederick T Zugibe, The Crucifixion of Jesus: A Forensic Inquiry, New York, M Evans, 2005.
12. H Ur Rehman, “Did Jesus Christ Die of Pulmonary Embolism? A Rebuttal”,
Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis 3 (9), Wiley Online Library: 2131–33, 2005, p2132.
13. Luke 22:7-23:56.
14. Zugibe, op cit, p131-33.
15. Frans Wijffels, “Death on the Cross: Did the Turin Shroud Once Envelop a Crucified Body?” British Society for the Turin Shroud Newsletter, no. 52, 2000.

The post Mad Scientist #19/20: Pierre Barbet and Frederick Zugibe appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

Photo by Linda Dear

What do you do when you find a bluish lump of fungus previously unknown to science, growing in your petri dish? If you’re Steven Pollock, you eat it, call your friend, and tell him you’ve discovered the one thing that’s eluded men of obscurity for millennia. I am talking of course about the philosopher’s stone—key to the universe—elixir of life—the ultimate essence of all things. In suburban San Antonio of all places. But there’s one quality the Ancients forgot—it gets you really, really high.¹

On first blush, mad scientists and mushrooms don’t appear to have much in common. Mad scientists are reason’s burnt offering to the gods of insanity—twisted caricatures of own hubris, doomed eternally to hollows of our brains.

Mushrooms are a tasty food.

But there is a darkness within the mushroom. An evil that, if left unchecked, can consume the very person that tries to eat it.

Yes they may look cute all bunched up in the produce aisle. But don’t be a fool. The wrong mushroom can kill you. Once you’re dead, others still feast off your flesh. They can warp your mind into insanity. And, in the case of 1970s physician and mycologist Steven Pollock—they can even get you murdered.²

What’s a mycologist? You ask slack-jawed. Loosely put, mycologists study fungi. I say loosely because fungi have found their way into literally every realm of human experience. From pretentious Italian cookery to cancer treatment in canines to obscure tribal ritual, you’d be hard pressed to find anything that mycologists don’t stick their noses in. Noses which, like most parts of the human body, are covered in hungrily munching fungal colonies.³

You might be surprised to know that much of what we cherish and hold dear are in fact mushrooms. Ethnomycologist James Arthur has boldly declared that Santa Claus is a mushroom clad stoned shaman from Siberia.⁴ John Allegro argues that Jesus Christ himself, despite appearances, was in fact a mushroom sacrament, ingested by a secret Judaic fertility cult whose scripture inadvertently gave rise to modern Christianity.⁵

Pollock believed that many modern medical treatments could effectively be replaced by mushrooms, psychedelic mushrooms to be precise.⁶ While his facial hair suggests a nudist colony off the Puget Sound, or maybe even an obscure Ben and Jerry’s flavor made with beard chunks and thick-rimmed glasses, the San Antonio based doctor had his sights set firmly on the mainstream medical establishment.

By the late 70s, natural medicine was quickly going mainstream, and there are few natural medical compounds more psychoactive than psilocybin, shroom’s active ingredient.

Does this red and white mushroom account for the origins of Santa Claus?

With medical marijuana gaining a grudging legal acceptance, Pollock believed it was only a matter of time before Uncle Sam would wise up to the benefits of medical mushrooms. And when he did, the doctor would be first to the party, satchel of Psilocybin ℞ in one hand, a bestselling hardcover in the other.

He wrote extensively in publications like the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs on the potential of shrooms to treat illness and improve overall life quality.^6,7,8 And yes the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs is a real scientific journal—you have to respect a publication that lets a sentence like, “I felt as if I were perceiving stimuli traveling through multifocal space warps,”⁹ go to print.

At the same time, Pollock drew up plans for a multimillion dollar mushroom research center to conduct his own clinical studies.¹ A facility that he hoped to finance, naturally, with magic mushrooms.¹

Under the name Hidden Creek, “the magic mushroom people who are forever keeping your mind in mind,” Pollock sold ready-made magic mushroom grow kits in the back pages of High Times.¹⁰ His unrivaled cultivation skills and bizarre marketing acumen gave magazine readers such evocative products as Hawaiian Cyan, The Cosmic Camote, and Penis Envy (the latter bred specifically to look like a penis).^{10, 11}

The whole thing was actually legit. Magic mushroom spores don’t contain any psychoactive compounds, so not technically illegal to sell them. Of course, you’ll need plenty of mushrooms to create the spores. Which explains why Pollock had, according to one source, “the world’s largest collection of psychedelic mushrooms.”² After his murder police seized 1,758 jars of mushrooms and growing mediums from his modest ranch-style suburban home.²

Hidden Creek was a considerable success,¹ thanks largely to Pollock’s relentless obsession. According to his girlfriend, “We hardly ever went out…Our dates were spent shaking mushroom jars early into the morning, and the sex was often interrupted by technical raps about mushrooms.”²

But still, grow kits weren’t raising the kind of money needed to finance Pollock’s vision. So the good doctor turned to the next best thing—selling narcotic prescriptions for cash out of his home.²

Now here’s where things get really hairy. It seems Pollock’s erratic behavior was quickly pissing off a whole lot of people. Friends and colleagues broke contact.¹ Five separate government agencies took an interest in his activities.² And it didn’t help that he started a cannabis plantation, prescribed Dexedrine to two undercover cops, and purchased a pharmacy to fill his own ‘scrips.¹

Pollock's notorious Penis Envy strain

What we do is that Steven Pollock was shot dead “execution style” in his house on January 31st, 1981.²

I won’t go into the details of Pollock’s brutal murder, which to this day remains a mystery. Was it just a simple robbery as police claim? Or was it a clandestine coup aimed to keep psychedelics out of the medical establishment. You can check out Hamilton Morris’s excellent article in Harpers for more info on the crime itself. Suffice to say there’s enough conspiracy to make your propeller beanie whiz uncontrollably in alarm, with unsubstantiated rumors and hearsay stretching all the way up to the big Texan himself—Ross Perot.¹

“Had Steve worn a tie, had short hair, worked under a government grant at Harvard and sold prescriptions to suburbanites,” colleague Kenneth Blum attests, “He would still be alive today.”² If so, would Pollock’s dream of a mushroom stocked pharmacy on every main street have come to pass?

Thirty-plus years later, and medicinal magic mushrooms still just sound funny, despite psilocybin’s promise in the treatment of anything from obsessive compulsive disorder, to cigarette addition, to headaches. But Pollock’s philosopher’s stone fungus (P. Tampenensis)¹¹ lives on, in the Netherlands of all places, where thanks to a legal loophole it is widely sold under the less arcane moniker, Magic Truffles.¹

True mad science after all is never eradicated. Just when you think history has blotted out any last trace, it pops up in the shelves of an Amsterdam smart shop.

From a '79 issue of High Times.

Sources:
1. Morris, M. (2013, July). Blood spore: Of murder and mushrooms. Harper’s Magazine, 41 – 56. Retrieved from: http://harpers.org/archive/2013/07/blood-spore/
2. Fellner, M. (1980). ’Shroom king slain in his San Antonio home. High Times.
3. Krom, B. P., Kidwai, S., ten Cate, J. M. (2014). Candida and other fungal species: Forgotten players of healthy oral microbiota. Journal of Dental Research, 93(5), 445 – 451.
4. Arthur, J. (2003). Mushrooms and mankind: The impact of mushrooms on human consciousness and religion. San Diego, California: The Book Tree.
5. Allegro, J. M. (1970). The sacred mushroom and the cross. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
6. Pollock, S. H. (1976). Psilocybin mycetismus with a special reference to the Panaeolus. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 8(1), 43 – 57.
7. Pollock, S. H. (1975). The Psilocybin Mushroom Pandemic. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 7(1), 73 – 84.
8. Pollock, S. H. (1976). Liberty caps: Recreational hallucinogenic mushrooms. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 1(6), 445 – 447.
9. Pollock, S. H. (1974). A case study from Hawaii. Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, 6(1), 85 – 89.
10. Hidden Creek [advertisement]. (1979). High Times. Retrieved From: http://www.mushroomjohn.org/cult150.html
11. Morris, M. (2009). A nice, thick, uncut, 12-inch shroom. Vice Magazine, 16(2). Retrieved from: http://www.vice.com/print/12-inch-shroom-603-v16n2
12. Guzmán, G., & Pollock, S. H. (1978). A new bluing species of psilocybe from Florida, U.S.A. Mycotaxon, 7(2), 373 – 376.

The post Mad Scientist #18: Steven H. Pollock appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

With an urgency more commonly found among the living, the Berkeley-based doctor plunges a brew of adrenaline, liver extract, gum arabic, and blood into the corpse’s thigh.¹ He then puffs bursts of oxygen into Lazarus’ gaping mouth as the rocking board slowly draws the solution up and down the body.¹

A leg twitch—a gasp—an unmistakable heartbeat.¹

The wooden teeterboard, typically used to launch circus acrobats to death-defying heights, is being employed by Cornish to raise something far more dangerous—the dead.

Raising the dead is one of mad science’s most secretly cherished goals. Imagine a wondrous world where Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve continued to be hosted by Dick Clark—where you could be served at a TGI Fridays by zombie Einstein—or have your groceries bagged by zombie Abraham Lincoln.

Tobacco smoke enema. They won't teach you this in lifeguard training folks.

Problem was Cornish had no idea where to start. CPR didn’t come about until the 1950s.² Before then even the most basic resuscitation methods had this old-wivey quality. Common guidelines for reviving a drowned person back in the day included:

• Rolling the victim over a barrel on their back.²
• Using a bellows to pump air into their mouth [and presumably right out their nose]. ²
• Siphoning tobacco smoke up the victim’s bum. ²

If reviving an unconscious drowning victim seems ludicrous with these methods, imagine using them to bring back the dead. Robert Cornish tried virtually every reanimation method known to man,³ at one point even jiu-jitsuing a dead sheep,³ without producing so much as a single zombie—or even your basic C.H.U.D.

By the mid 1930s, Cornish finally hit on a winning combination: A rocking teeterboard, adrenaline-based injections, and Fox Terriers.³ Sweet, trusting, Fox Terriers, as opposed to humans, gave him control over both the means of death, and the timing. In 1934, Cornish was able to resuscitate a dead dog, Lazarus IV, 5-minutes after its heart had stopped.⁴ Dogs that stayed dead for longer didn’t fare so well (see Lazaruses I-III).^1,5,6

One of Cornish's lil' pups.

But for some reason, the public found the idea of killing/zombifying Fox Terriers oddly repellant. After much bad press, Cornish was ousted from his UCLA laboratory and forced to conduct studies in a more suitable mad-science locale, his home.⁶

The young doctor needed some way to convince people that his research was not only humane, but vital. This improbable wish was granted in the form of Life Returns⁷, a Universal horror flick that seemingly exists only to advertise Robert Cornish and his research.

In the film, John Kendrick (Onslow Stephens) is a doctor obsessed with life restoration, who works for a drug company that funds his research. When his employer urges him to study something a little more “practical,” Kendrick snaps and spirals into insanity and depression. Somehow it works out that the only way the doctor can win back the respect of his son Danny (George Breakston) is to enlist the help of an on-screen Robert Cornish in reviving his beloved dead dog (uncredited).

Cornish is Kendrick’s former colleague. While Kendrick was foolish enough to throw his lot in with big pharma, Cornish went about research the right way and (in the movie) has become a huge success.

No animals were killed an not subsequently brought back to life in the making of this film.

Amazingly, Robert Cornish actually portrays himself in the film.⁸ Even more amazingly, the dog revivification footage used in the film’s climax is actual footage from one of his Lazarus experiments (spoiler alert: this movie’s terrible).⁸

Life Returns might have turned the public tide in Cornish’s favor, if it wasn’t instantly forgettable. Over the next decade our disputable doctor began to slip steadily into the clammy waters of obscurity. He might have disappeared entirely, if it weren’t for a proposed experiment so ghastly it made killing and reviving dogs look like an invisible man taking a nude dip in an invisible lake, which is to say like nothing.

In 1947, condemned child slayer Thomas McMonigle contacted Dr. Cornish with a bizarre offering—his body.⁹ Awaiting a death sentence in San Quentin, Cornish believed McMonigle could be revived using a home-made heart-lung machine and 60,000 shoelace eyes.¹⁰ All he needed was immediate access to the corpse.⁹

Unfortunately, prison warden Clinton Duffy was dead set against the idea.¹¹ McMonigle was set to be executed in a gas chamber.¹² This chamber required at least an hour to air out after the execution before anyone could safely enter.¹² If Robert Cornish wished to resuscitate the inmate almost immediately after he was put to death, another Robert Cornish would need to be on hand to resuscitate the resuscitator. And that Robert Cornish, succumbing himself to gas poison, would in turn require a third Robert Cornish to resuscitate him. And so on and so forth ad infinitum. But, of course, there are only a finite number of Robert Cornishes. So we can easily see why this is impossible.

Robert Cornish in Life Returns. "Now sit still, this will only kill you just a little bit."

Cornish and Duffy’s bizarre feud snagged headlines nationwide, with the doctor threatening at one point to gas and revive a sheep as proof of concept.¹³

But beyond practical concerns, there is an even more troublesome legal consideration. If someone on death row is put to death, then subsequently revived, have they already served their death sentence? Would they then, like this former Iranian prisoner, be free? After all, double jeopardy prevents anyone from being tried twice for the same crime.

And do we want to live in a world where zombie Ted Bundies and Timothy McVeighs are free to roam the Earth? I doubt even the judge from Night Court would want to be around when that precedent is set.

B-b-b-b-rains??? Photo by Cory Cousins.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Why should we subject humans to this bizarre experimentation when we’ve yet to perfect it on animals? Dr. Cornish was able to revive a dog that had been dead for just 5 minutes.⁴ If you’re a first responder speeding across town in an ambulance, that window may be just long enough. But if you a last responder, which is to say some sort of criminal mastermind intent on breaking into the city morgue and raising a brood of zombie lackeys to do your bidding, you’re going to need a bit more time.

In 2003, scientists in Pittsburgh discovered that you could revive dogs after they had been dead for up to 2 hours.¹⁴ First, researchers bled their animal subjects to death. They then pumped a near-freezing saline solution into the dogs’ veins. This kept the creatures in a state of suspended animation, chilling their organs to prevent lasting damage. Finally, they swapped the saline solution with the original blood and defibrillated their tiny little hearts back into existence with carefully timed electric shocks. 24 of the 27 dogs tested live to bark about it.¹⁴

"Cornish will revolutionize the world," says random actress from Life Returns.

When it comes to revivification science, it’s tough to separate the practical benefits (i.e. reviving the drowned, shocked, and asphyxiated) from the obvious creep factor. Robert Cornish’s bizarre research style certainly didn’t help with this distinction. From his biblically named Lazaruses (Lazari? Lazarodes?!), to his horror movie cameo, to his plot to turn dead men walking in to the walking dead, it’s like this guy’s trying to come off as a mad scientist.

So the next time you find yourself trapped in an abandoned warehouse, pursued on all sides by brain-ravenous zombies, as you wait out the precious final moments of your human existence, take a couple minutes to think about Robert Cornish, and the mad scientists who made your inevitably grisly demise possible.

Sources:
1. Science: Lazarus, dead & alive (1934, March 26) Time Magazine. Retreived from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,747260,00.html
2. Eisenberg. M. S. (2005). History of the Science of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. In J. P. Ornato & M. A. Peberdy (Eds.), Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (pp. 1-9). Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.
3. Swain, F. (2013). How to make a zombie: The real life (and death) science of reanimation and mind control London, UK: Oneworld Publications.
4. Science: Dog no. 4 (1934, October 8). Time Magazine. Retrieved from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,770001,00.html
5. Science: Dog no. 3 (1934, April 30). Time Magazine. Retreived from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,787857,00.html
6. Science: Dog no. 3 (cont’d) (1934, June 4). Time Magazine. Retreived from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,754224,00.html
7. Life Returns (1935). Stream for free here: https://archive.org/details/LifeReturns
8. Weaver, T., Brunas, M. Brunas, J. (2007) Universal horrors: The studio’s classic films, 1931-1946. McFarland & Company.
9. Murderer offers body: Dr. Cornish would revive dead man. (1947, March 14). Lodi News-Sentinel, p. 1. Retrieved from: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19470314&id=F8czAAAAIBAJ&sjid=p-4HAAAAIBAJ&pg=2614,4837678
10. New Scientist (2009). How to make a tornado: The strange and wonderful things that happen when scientists break free. London, UK: Profile Books.
11. Prison warden bans ‘resurrection’ attempt. (1947, March 14). The Miami News, p. 7A. Retrieved from: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2206&dat=19470314&id=5gctAAAAIBAJ&sjid=h9UFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6320,6111564
12. Doomed convict asks effort to bring him back to life. (1947, March 14). The Saratosa Herald-Tribune, p. 8. Retrieved from: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19470314&id=ZeIcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=n2QEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6321,6372170
13. Test may bring dead to life. (1947, June 8). The Tuscaloosa News, p. 10. Retrieved from: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1817&dat=19470608&id=Ae8-AAAAIBAJ&sjid=FE0MAAAAIBAJ&pg=6390,464891
14. Behringer, W. et al. (2003). Survival without brain damage after clinical death of 60-120 mins in dogs using suspended animation by profound hypothermia. Critical Care Medicine, 31(5), 1523-31.