Download My Lobotomy: A Memoir AudioBook Free
A gut-wrenching memoir by a man who was simply lobotomized at age twelve.Assisted by journalist/novelist Charles Fleming, Howard Dully recounts a family tragedy whose Sophoclean proportions he could only sketch in his powerful 2005 broadcast on NPR's WITH THAT SAID.“In 1960,” he writes, “I was presented with a transorbital, or ‘ice pick' lobotomy. My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the daddy of the American lobotomy, explained he was going to do some ‘tests.' It took 10 minutes and cost two hundred dollars.” Fellow doctors called Freeman's technique barbaric: an ice pick–like instrument was inserted around three inches into each eye socket and twirled to sever connections from the frontal lobe to all of those other brain. The procedure was designed to help curb a variety of psychoses by muting emotional responses, but sometimes it irreversibly reduced patients to a childlike state or (in 15 percent of the functions Freeman performed) killed them outright. Dully's ten-minute “test” did neither, however in some ways it had a far crueler result, since it didn't end the unruly behavior that had set his stepmother against him to get started with.“I spent another forty years in and out of insane asylums, jails, and halfway houses,” he tells us. “I used to be homeless, alcoholic, and drug-addicted. I used to be lost.” From all accounts, there is no excuse for the lobotomy. Dully had never been “crazy,” and his (not very) bad behavior sounds like the normal acting-up of a child in desperate need of affection. His stepmother responded with unrelenting abuse and neglect, and his father allowed her to demonize his son rather than admitted his complicity in the lobotomy; Freeman capitalized on the monumental dysfunction. It's a tale of epic horror, even though Dully's courage in telling it inspires awe, listeners are left to take a position about what drove supposedly responsible adults to such unconscionable acts.
