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Walter Jackson Freeman II (November 14, 1895 – May 31, 1972) was an American physician who specialized in lobotomy. [1] Wanting to simplify lobotomies so that it could be carried out by psychiatrists in psychiatric hospitals, where there were often no operating rooms, surgeons, or anesthesia and limited budgets, Freeman invented a transorbital lobotomy procedure.
Lobotomies were performed on a wide scale during the 1940s; Freeman himself performed or supervised more than 3,500 lobotomies by the late 1960s. Freeman performed his first transorbital lobotomy on Ellen Ionesco, a woman who suffered from bouts of manic depression and suicidal ideation.
Watts and Freeman wrote two books on lobotomies: Psychosurgery, Intelligence, Emotion and Social Behavior Following Prefrontal Lobotomy for Medical Disorders in 1942, and Psychosurgery in the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain in 1950. He is also known for carrying out the lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy under the supervision of ...
Neurologist Walter Freeman had diagnosed Dully as suffering from childhood schizophrenia since age four, although numerous other medical and psychiatric professionals who had seen Dully did not detect a psychiatric disorder and instead blamed poor parenting by his stepmother. Freeman's notes stated that Dully's stepmother feared him, and that ...
It was invented by Dr. Walter Freeman in 1948 to replace the unique form of leucotome used up until that point for the transorbital lobotomy procedure. This instrument is, essentially, an ice pick with some gradation marks etched onto the shaft.
The 1940s was the decade when psychosurgery was most popular, largely due to the efforts of American neurologist Walter Freeman; its use has been declining since then. Freeman's particular form of psychosurgery, the lobotomy, was last used in the 1970s, but other forms of psychosurgery, such as the cingulotomy and capsulotomy have survived.
The American neurologist Walter Freeman and neurosurgeon James Watts adapted Moniz's techniques and coined a new term: lobotomy (cutting of the lobe). In the United Kingdom, psychiatrists used the Freeman-Watts surgical technique but retained the terminology of Moniz – leucotomy and psychosurgery.
The eighth chapter tells the story of Walter Freeman and his lobotomy work, where he acted as the eponymous icepick surgeon by devising a new method for conducting lobotomies involving an icepick inserted through the eye socket in order to cut the limbic lobe from the rest of the brain.