Editorial Review
The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman’s documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.
The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Although many patients did not benefit from the thousands of lobotomies Freeman performed, others believed their lobotomies changed them for the better. Drawing on a rich collection of documents Freeman left behind and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look into the life of this complex scientific genius and traces the physician's fascinating life and work.
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Customer Reviews
Where did the lobotomy come from? 
2007-11-27
Excellent book. If history is your interest, you will not be able to put the book down. It puts a scary spin on what we allowed to transpire in the name of science when in reality we knew so little about the brain.
Captivating: A Look into Chipping Away at the Mind 
2007-11-25
El-hai's The Lobotomist is an engaging read. He brings into light the grim world of psychiatrics and neurosurgery during the twentieth century. A vivid look into the disturbing mind of Walter Freeman, the man on a mission to chip away at insanity through experimental lobotomies. El-hai's book is a definite read for medical school students, as a reminder of what medicine used to mean and as a way to not repeat the mistakes done in the past. The Lobotomist is very well written, and is scary enough to make one forget that it is non-fiction.
Very interesting but.... 
2007-10-12
I had never heard of Dr. Freeman before and therefore was very interested in reading about him. However, this book does go on for a while. It tends to be quite repetitive in some places and just when you think you are going to go into another phase of his life, it backtracks. It is taking me a little to get thru it but, it is interesting all the same.
One of the strangest, most engrossing books I've ever read 2007-10-10
The Lobotomist by Jack El-Hai can be recommended for its wealth of detailed information. The author has researched the subject very extensively with over three hundred footnotes and six pages of bibliography. The subject matter is engrossing and, at least to me, poses the moral dilemma of whether or not, if in the same position as Walter Freeman, I would perform lobotomies.His results ranged from the disastrous to the miraculous. If one were faced with a life in an institution would one opt for psychosurgery?
Given that the information and subject matter is worthy of a read, the author's style is the strangest I've ever encountered. The reviews of this book are impressive. The author's credentials seem impeccable. He is, or was, the President of the American Society of Journalists, has published extensively and received several awards.
Nevertheless, I would have to term Mr. El-Hai's style as that of a writer with literary Tourette's Syndrome!Examples abound. On page 20: "At one point, stress from his heavy workload produced in him a painful three-day-long suppression of his urine."Page 37: "After attended a chorus rehearsal, he kissed a girl for the first time." Page 62: ""...Freeman was impressed by her good figure and healthy head of hair."On page 216, discussing a woman patient of his: "...eventually became an accomplished weight lifter."On page 276, discussing a former patient, El-Hai says: "He found that her obsessive need to recall names of people and places was confining her to her home, where she ate too much angel food cake...". Numerous other "non-sequiturs" abound.
His style reminds me of a schoolboy who had a writing assignment that had to contain a minimum number of pages "padding" his text. Obviously, Mr. El-Hai had no need to increase the page count of a book that exceeds 350 pages.
In conclusion, the life of Walter Freeman and others who either endorsed or condemned his methods is fascinating and enlightening. I just can't understand the glowing reviews and where oh where was Eric Nelson, his editor?
Not a fan 2007-06-27
Everyone seems to really like this book. I didn't. The story itself is interesting, but the book gets too bogged down in minute details that, at times, border on boring. Also - and this is just a matter of personal taste - I found that the man in the book was so arrogant that his arrogance actually distracted me from enjoying the book. The ethical issues addressed are interesting and disturbing.
Okay, what REALLY happened to those patients? 2007-02-14
The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman’s documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.
The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, M.D., who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Although many patients did not benefit from the thousands of lobotomies Freeman performed, others believed their lobotomies changed them for the better. Drawing on a rich collection of documents Freeman left behind and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look into the life of this complex scientific genius and traces the physician's fascinating life and work.
He was a neurologist and NOT a psychiatrist 2007-01-14
I bought this book out of professional interest for the subject. The text flows freely throughout, and the author does a good job at describing the scientific thought process behind what Dr. Freeman pursued for much of his career. It is instructive to learn about he prevailing scientific climate at that time - which only permitted him to go forward with his 'project' rather than to rethink it before starting to cut out frontal lobes. Remarkable how little opposition came from contemporaries of Dr. Freeman, physicians and ethicists alike! Again, a sign of the times. What could psychiatry offer back then but lengthy talk therapy for which there still is no definitively positive evidence that it works, in general and especially for the severely mentally ill?
On the flipside, the book is too long and, being a visual type, I thought a few more pictures would have enhanced the reading experience considerably.
Please note that Dr. Freeman was a neurologist and neuropathologist and NOT a psychiatrist.
This Book Surprised Me 2006-05-07
I love to read biographies. When I heard my friend, Jack El-Hai had written The Lobotomist, I purchased a copy of the book to support his work. Then I started reading it--and my fascination grew with each page.
As an editor, I have a lot of reading which is forced into my daily life and I had no professional motive to read The Lobotomist. I wasn't going to write about it or anything else. I couldn't put it down. I'll admit to actually trying to stop reading it--and being unable. The storytelling, the writing and the research are stellar. I highly recommend this title.
Lobotomies have not gone away....not completely. 2006-04-01
The story of Dr. Walter Freeman, a psychiatrist - is as convoluted as the human brain. After learning about this maverick medical pioneer, I come to believe that Dr. Freeman was a man consumed with finding the ultimate cure for those stricken with debilitating mental illnessess. He witnessed the mental asylums of the 1930's - and these houses were wretched prisons where the truly lost souls of our planet were housed.
Freeman could not bear to leave those patients with no hope / no chance of a treatment or way of getting better. Persons who were insande in the 30's, 40's and 50's were left with no treatment whatsoever. God help those who were schizophrenic, or obsessive-compulsive or agitatedly depressed or suicidal. In those early days, there was nothing other than confinement to treat the mentally ill.
A lifetime of confinement...loneliness...despair.
Dr. Freeman developed psychosurgery in the form of the frontal lobe, bilateral lobotomy procedure...he practiced on hundreds of patients along with his esteemed collegue, Dr. James Watts; a neurosurgeon. Together, they attacked severe mental incapacity with their frontal lobe-disconnecting surgeries....which was first performed with a leucotome inserted through the sides of the frontal lobes in the surgical suite....which then evolved into the use of a simple ice pick, which was inserted straight into the frontal lobes via the superior medial aspects of the orbits of the eyes!
This approach sickened and repulsed all nurses assisting in the procedure, no matter how experienced they were.
The method of anesthesia was delivering several jolts of electroshock therapy....which wasn't actually anesthetizing, it more promotoed amnesia and unconsciousness than actual sedation, but the manuver worked.
Thus, this rather barbaric approach to lobotomies is what Dr. Freeman stuck to for the remainder of his less-than-illustrious medical career. This outraged many of the medical community; eventually even Dr. James Watts distanced himself from the practice, preferring the use of the sterile surgical environment.
Other shock treatments that are explained in this novel are Metrazol, Insulin, and electro-shock treaments that helped to erradicate certain psychiatric diagnosies. All with very limited success.
As outrageous as it may seem, the lobotomy was actually researched and found to be theraputic in about 33% of all cases.
19% of the time, it was a miserable failure and the remainder of the time, the patient simply traded one set of psychiatric problems for another set of equally disturbing problems.
Amazingly, 33 % of patients were discharged from state hosptials and could function independently at home.
Dr. Freeman understood the seriousness of the despondency that hung in the wards like a dark cloud in state institutions.
He wanted to do something about it, and he also didn't mind if he were to become famous for discovering a cure.
The life & career of Dr. Walter Freeman is a lesson in the human condition and a wise man once said, "Psychiatry is the management of despair." Lobotomy was basically outlawed by the 1950's and not done hardly at all in the 1960's.
What will shock you most is that now, psychosurgery is experiencing a renaissance. The use of surgery to correct intractable psychiatric problems is once again being used to treat numbers of resistant obsessive-compulsive patients and severly depressed patients. Today neurosurgeons employ more precise tools, such as lasers or radiation to produce tiny lesions in narrowly targeted regions of the brain. So, the term lobotomy is shunned currently. The ghost of Dr. Freeman still hovers over the science of modern neurosurgery for mental disorders and perhaps someday, he will recieved the recognition and praise that evaded him during his lifetime.
This book is an excellent intellectual adventure into the brilliant minds of those who seek cures for those who have not found their cure. Read it!
Important subejct matter, but very badly handled. 
2005-10-07
Jack El-Hai, The Lobotomist (Wiley, 2005)
Every once in a while, a book comes along on a subject so important, and so deserving of elucidation to a public that in the popular mind has misrepresented it, that the book almost cries out to be read. Its very subject matter promises that it will, in fact, be a brilliant piece of work. Then you actually read, or attempt to read, the thing, and... well, it's not.
While Caldwell's Hitler's Pope is still the reigning king in the arena of "important, but unbearably boring" books, The Lobotomist has certainly proved itself to be at least the court jester. Finally, the world gets a biography of Walter Freeman, who worked tirelessly to popularize the lobotomy (and, we note, didn't get a tenth as far in years as Joey Ramone did in less than two minutes), which if it is in any way objective is going to go a long way towards fighting the demonic image the lobotomy has in today's society. And to be fair, Jack El-Hai's book aims to do just that, and to some extent succeeds. The problem is that by the time you get to hearing about Freeman's work in the field, you no longer have any facility for caring left in your brain.
The Lobotomist is written as if it were to be read, in its audio form, by whatever teacher you had in school with the most monotonous, uninspiring voice. El-Hai writes about events that changed the face of society, and them men behind those events, as if he's cataloguing the also-rans at a county poultry show. I understand a bit of journalistic detachment (which is, in itself, a literary trope; Michael Bilton, for example, uses it to great effect in the final chapters of Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper), but it hardly seems human to look at events such as these, report them, and let not even the merest shred of awe or wonder come out in your writing about the subject, does it?
I eagerly await another biography of Walter Freeman, because El-Hai missed, by a wide margin, his stated goal in this one. (zero)
