Walter Freeman Pt. 1: “Ice Pick Lobotomist”

Over the ages, arsenic has had many lives — beauty fad, household product, medical prescription… and weapon of choice wielded by killers everywhere from Alabama to ancient Rome. Brine your turkey, knead your dough, and listen to our Thanksgiving Special on the regime-changing, as ...  Show more

Over the ages, arsenic has had many lives — beauty fad, household product, medical prescription… and weapon of choice wielded by killers everywhere from Alabama to ancient Rome. Brine your turkey, knead your dough, and listen to our Thanksgiving Special on the regime-changing, as ...  Show more

With Dr. Walter Freeman’s invention in the 1940s, psychologists could perform a transorbital lobotomy from the comfort of their office… with an ice pick through the eye. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices 

In the 1940s, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking new treatment: the prefrontal lobotomy. His procedure was adopted by hospitals all over the world—but the treatment was controversial, and came to be known as one of medicine’s ...  Show more

American neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman had refined Moniz’s procedure and developed a non-surgical procedure that could be performed in a doctor’s office, which he called a transorbital lobotomy.

Freeman’s procedure involved inserting a medical instrument similar to ...

When Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz developed the lobotomy in 1935, it was little more than a crude surgery developed as a blanket treatment for mental illness that involved drilling into the skull and scrambling the neural connections in the frontal lobe. Less than a decad ...