Lobotomies Aren’t Funny
This week, I was targeted three ads for three separate products. One was a t-shirt with the words “Live, Laugh, Lobotomy” on it. The second, a shirt proclaiming “I got my lobotomy done at Toyotahon!” The third, a sticker, stating “I got a lobotomy at Claire’s!”
I was kind of… horrified.
I recently wrote a story on Walter Freeman and the infamous American lobotomy, known better as the “ice pick” lobotomy that gained traction as a “cure” for mental illness in the 1950s. During his tenure as a lobotomist, Freeman would perform over 3,500 lobotomies himself and invent the trans-orbital lobotomy, an “upgraded” procedure from his predecessor’s pre-frontal leucotomy. Nearly 15% of patients died from his procedure. That’s over 500 people.
Freeman performed lobotomies on all kinds of patients. From the severely mentally ill to the neurotic housewife, from the homosexual to the loud black man, from the immigrant to the eight year old boy. Anyone and everyone could be lobotomized.
Freeman’s reign of terror ended in 1967 when his license to practice medicine was revoked after a patient, who had returned to him for her third lobotomy, died. He would only live but two years longer.
Gen X onwards will never know the destruction caused by Walter Freeman and the American lobotomy. We will never understand the repercussions. And so, generations later, we make fun of it. We make fun of one of the darkest chapters in American medical history because we do not understand.
We do not understand that the lobotomy entailed completely severing the frontal lobes from the thalamus. Or that people often lost all faculties and became incontinent for life afterwards. We don’t understand that Freeman stated that he’d rather his patients be without personalities than with mental illness.
We do not understand the grave injustice of it all.
So instead, we make cutesy t-shirts and bumper stickers because we know that sometime, in our history, something about lobotomy was cruel.
It was so, so very cruel.
