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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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.

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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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