Brain dead
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- January
- 18
What is the current sub-prime crisis but another example of our need to have  or fix  it all, all at once? Can’t afford a house right now? No prob. There’s always someone to lend you the money, particularly since he’s planning on selling your mortgage to the next guy, who in turn is counting on the fact that you didn’t read the fine print too carefully.
“The Lobotomist”  airing at 9 p.m. Monday on PBS’ “American Experience” (Thirteen/WNET locally)  is America’s need for the quick fix taken to a horrific extreme. It’s the story of Dr. Walter J. Freeman (pictured center below), who is perhaps most famous today for supervising the frontal lobotomy that rendered the mentally challenged Rosemary Kennedy  sister of the late president  severely incapacitated. She, however, was one of thousands who underwent the crude procedure, which often robbed people suffering from anxiety, depression, dementia and psychosis of their personalities and cognitive abilities.
Making stark use of archival footage, which depicts patients in mental institutions as well as the operation Freeman “refined,” “The Lobotomist” is a fascinating tale that’s hard to watch and therefore can’t be recommended for everyone. Those willing to plunge themselves into the darkness, however, will find plenty for the brain’s various lobes to ponder.
How could anything as barbaric and downright nutty as severing the frontal lobe from the thalamus, the place of human emotion, have even been considered, let alone championed by patients, their families, the media and the American medical establishment alike? Producers Barak Goodman and John Maggio, working from Jack El-Hai’s book “The Lobotomist,” do a very good job of explaining the culture of 1920s America, in which Freeman flourished. Back then, doctors were unquestioned gods and the hospitals to which many of the mentally ill were committed, maelstroms of electric-shocking, heartbreaking hopelessness. (I find these images of patients  curled naked into fetal positions or slumped in chairs like rag dolls  even more disturbing than those of Freeman and his associate, the neurosurgeon James Watts, shoving ice picks in the eye sockets of those having quickie lobotomies in the doctor’s office.)
It was amid the Hell that was St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington D.C. in 1924 that a 28-year-old Freeman sought to assuage the suffering of the 5,000 anguished souls swirling about him. So when he came upon a 1936 monograph by Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz , describing a radical new operation, he really believed that this was the answer to so many unanswered prayers.
But Freeman was no mere altruist. He was also a showman, who supervised lobotomies in front of the press as well as medical students. (As a neurologist, Freeman did not perform the surgeries. Watts did.) “The Lobotomist” suggests that Freeman needed the lobotomy and its illusion of a miracle cure far more than his uncontrollable patients and their despairing family members did.
Ultimately, drug therapy would replace the temptation to such a last resort, although the program ends with the chilling statement that modified lobotomies are still performed in the case of some obsessive-compulsives.
“American Experience” executive producer Mark Samels has said of Freeman: “He was not a monster but a tragic figure, incapable of understanding the consequences of his own imperfections.”
But isn’t the failure to dare to think we may be wrong a kind of monstrosity? And what of the acquiescence of an American public that is always looking for the magic pill, the quick cure, the miracle diet, the lottery ticket that will solve all its problems? Is it worth it to be free of suffering if it means sacrificing your very self? Is the brain just a machine or is it the wellspring of the mind and the soul?
“The Lobotomist” offers many questions and one truism: The path to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions.
This entry was posted
on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 5:06 pm by Georgette Gouveia.
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Thank you. This looks like something worth watching and thinking about.