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.

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With your last ounce of strength you set out and grab the sturdiest, most passed-out homeless man you can find and drag him to the nearest experimental surgery clinic that’s open late. Plunking his rum-soaked body on the counter so as to startle the triage nurse you yell, “I need a full body transplant! Stat!”

It may seem like third-rate sci-fi (or a first-rate Rob Schneider vehicle), but total body transplants, or head transplants, depending on your perspective, have been around for over a half century.

Soviet transplanteer Vladimir Demikhov got the ball rolling in 1954 when he successfully grafted a living dog head onto another dog’s neck.¹ A crackerjack surgeon, Demikhov previously performed the first successful lung transplant¹ and first successful coronary bypass² before embarking on his experimental head transplantation program, which produced a full 20 “surgical Sputniks.”²

Two heads are better than one. It's double the pleasure babe. It's triple the risk of post-operative infection.

For some weird reason, head-neck grafts never quite caught on the same way as Demikhov’s previous two breakthroughs. But that didn’t stop the Stalinist propaganda machine from lapping it up.¹ I mean just think of the possibilities comrades!

Imagine, the ideological fervor of Lenin bolstered by the technocratic prowess of Leonid Brezhnev’s head. Or how about the thick-necked brinksmanship of Krushchev tempered with the humanism of Mikhail Gorbachev. Talk about your heads of state!

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, two-headed Soviet autocrats would be amazing, but that ain’t a true head transplant. Whatever happened to just chopping off the other guy’s head and sewing a new one on?

The brain remained active for over than 12 hours.

I hear you. And more importantly, America hears you, cause in the 60’s they started funding research for head transplants proper.³

Cleveland-based neurosurgeon Robert White started off with a reasonable if mercilessly sadistic research question: Can a brain survive completely severed from its body?⁴

Cracking open a rhesus monkey’s skull, White severed the brain’s arteries, and hooked it up to a home-brewed mechanical blood supply. To his surprise, the brain continued to register striking neural activity.⁴ But what did this activity signify? Was the monkey still conscious? If so, what tortured, hellish thoughts pulsed through its head?

Faster than you can say electroencephalographical incomprehensibility, White hashed out a new experiment: Sever a monkey’s head intact and rapidly stitch it to the neck of another recently beheaded monkey.⁴ In 1970, after a tense and lengthy stretch in the OR, the good doctor emerged with his groundbreaking specimen.⁴

Dr. White surveys his handiwork.

It could do almost everything a normal monkey could do—eat, react to stimuli, snarl when prodded.⁴ But alas, while blood vessels are easily reconnected, spinal nerve fibers are not. The chimeric monkey couldn’t control anything below its neck, or, as would soon be apparent, live.³

Nevertheless, White spent much of his life tirelessly campaigning for head transplants in humans. If it’s not quite ready for the general population, White claims the procedure could realistically extend the lives of quadriplegics whose bodies are failing.⁵ And are you gonna split ethical hairs with 1994’s Catholic Man of the Year?⁶ This guy even received the Humanitarian Award from the American Association of Neurological Surgeons⁶ (though we can safely assume there were no monkeys on the voting committee).

What have we wrought??!!!!

It’s heartening to learn that Cold War one-upmanship, which touched so many aspects of society and culture, branched too into the domain of mad science. I’m sure the Google and Bing search bots that make up the majority of my readership can appreciate the humor in a country so eager to outdo its rival, it’ll even one-up research that is actually legitimately insane. As an amateur, budding, would-post-more-often-but-I-haven’t-really-had-the-time-please-don’t-hold-it-against-me-I’ll-try-and-make-it-up-to-you science blogger, I’m proud to offer Demhikov and White the auspicious 13th/14th spots in the mad scientist hall of fame. But I’m warning you, if Kevin James ever wakes up to find his head on Eddie Murphy’s body, you better damn well hope it goes straight to video.

Sources
1. Langer, R. M. (2011). Vladimir P. Demikhov, a pioneer of organ transplantation. Transplantation 2. Proceedings, 43, 1221-1222.
3. Boese, A. (2007). Elephants on acid: And other bizarre experiments: Mariner Books.
4. White, R. J. (1999). Head Transplants. Scientific American, 10, 24-26.
Fields, J. (Writer) (2007). A: Head, B: Body [Short Film]. USA.
5. Konstantinov, I. E. (2009). At the cutting edge of the impossible: A tribute to Vladimir P. Demikhov. Texas Heart Institute Journal, 36(5), 453-458.
6. Szczeklik, A. (n.d.). Accademici defunti: Robert White (Academic obituaries: Robert White). In Pontificia accademia delle scienze (The pontifical academy of sciences). Retrieved Dec 30, 2012, from http://www.casinapioiv.va/content/accademia/it/academicians/deceased/white.html

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The second problem is that cadavers are…um…dead. All the muscles, viscera, nerves and ligaments are there in plain sight, but they’re still and lifeless. What’s more, the very act of dissection cuts their connection to the skin, prohibiting us from understanding precisely how the body’s internal mechanics give rise to a coherent outward appearance.

19th century French physiologist Duchenne de Bologne cracked this little conundrum. He discovered a way to perform living dissections through electrical stimulation, which is (slightly) less sadistic than it sounds.

Armed with a set of old-timey electrode thingies, he wandered Paris hospital wards, zapping the unsuspecting infirm. By applying the mild electric shock of his “faradization” device to specific points on the skin, Duchenne was able to provoke the action of individual muscles in isolation. This “vivisection without mutilation” allowed him to study the human muscular system in action, and his experimental results laid the foundation for such diverse fields as neurology, kinesiology, electrotherapy, blah blah blah.

In Duchenne’s zaniest, and hence most historically important work, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, the good doctor turned his voltaic probes to the human face. His goal was ambitious, to determine the exact muscle configurations behind every human facial expression, and thus chart the physiologically defined “language of the soul.”

Since effect of the charge only lasted for a few seconds, Duchenne became the first clinician ever to employ the exceedingly new-fangled technology of photography to document experimental results.

The iconic photograph above shows his principle subject, a toothless (and possibly mildly retarded) old man, his mm. platysma contracted to produce an expression of terror, to which “the horrible pain of torture has been added,” via lowering of the jaw and contraction of the mm. corrugator supercilii. The expression, according to Duchenne, “must be that of the damned.” Let’s look at some more of these:

Stimulation of the muscle of 'foppish dismay'

Buh? Wuh?!

"My readers may think that I exaggerate the truth by saying that the eye sparkles with its own fire, under the influence of an ardent passion, but the preceding experiment is the incontestable proof of my assertion."

I'm going to murder you in your sleep

Single and lovin' it! What's new with you Trish?

Duchenne seems to have gotten a lot of flack for his choice of subject. “The old man photographed in most of my electrophysiological experiments,” he writes in a later version of Mechanism, “did have common, ugly features. To a sophisticated man [man of the world, cosmopolite, sybarite, voluptuary] such a choice may seem strange.” But in his own defense Duchenne claims he “did manage, with the help of my electrodes, to mark the lines of the highest sentiments and the most profound thoughts on the mundane surface of this dull forehead.”

Nevertheless, he released a subsequent “aesthetic” section, “in an attempt to placate those who possess ‘a sense of beauty’.” If the pictures of the toothless old man in Duchenne’s “scientific section” are creepy, his aesthetic section is actually legitimately horrifying.

It also gives us a glimpse into Duchenne’s weird artistic ambition. More than a scientist, Duchenne viewed himself as a critic of the fine arts, and an artist in his own right. With his electrodes and camera, he could literally sculpt portraiture with mathematical precision, thus revealing the shortcomings of other artists’ work. See below:

“There is only a very slight difference between the ecstatic expression of celestial love and that of terrestrial love…this is something that artists have seldom appreciated.”

His photographs are micro-dramas to showcase his theories:

“I wanted to show a little comedy, a scene of coquetry, a gentleman surprises a young lady while she is dressing. On seeing him, her stance and her look become disapproving (cover the bottom half of her face). Nevertheless, we note her nudity, which instead of covering she seems to reveal with a certain affectation. It is the mannered pose of her hand, which supports a rather overly revealed bosom. All this betrays her coquetry. The young man was becoming more audacious, but the words ‘Get out!’ pronounced in a scornful way by the girl, stops him in his enterprise (see only the left side of the lower half of the face). The mocking laughter that accompanies the amorous rejection (see the right side of the lower half of the face), we believe to mean ‘conceited ass!’ Perhaps she says also, much lower: ‘the fool, if he had dared…'”

“A mother comes to lose one of her infants. Another infant—the only one that remains—is equally gripped by a mortal illness; he is on the point of succumbing. Sitting at the foot of his cradle, she abandons herself to the greatest sorrow. Yet a last hope can save him. A crisis may deliver him! Clinging to the life of the poor child, she anxiously follows the progress of the disease and discovers in these features the first signs of this happy crisis; she cries: ‘He is saved!'”

Duchenne’s star pupil, Jean-Martin Charcot, went on to found the scientific discipline of neurology, a field made possible by Duchenne’s unique application of electricity to the study of muscle coordination. It’s been suggested that Duchenne’s sense of theatricality set the stage for Charcot’s renowned “Theatre of Hysteria,” where mental patients at the Salpêtrière, under the close direction of Charcot, would stage fits of insanity to the astonishment and delight of medical students and Parisian gentlefolk. Charcot’s star pupil was of course, Sigmund Freud, who built a career out of his own case histories of the hysterical passions.

Augustine, one of the stars of Charcot's "Theatre of Hysteria"

More obscurely, Duchenne has been cited as an influence on anything from method acting, to plastic surgery, to filmmaking. The Greek-Australian avant-artist Stelarc (whose works include senselessly hurling himself through a pane of glass, and grafting a biologically engineered superfluous third ear beneath his arm) staged a number of performance pieces where audience members were able to control a substantial portion of his body via similar electro-localization methods.

Duchenne really did a lot of other things besides zap the faces of people with questionable autonomy, but he did so with such dispassionate zest that I just can’t be bothered to talk about anything else. You’re in the club Duchenne! We’ll see about Charcot and Freud later.

Stelarc, Ljubljana, 1996

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