Dr. Walter Freeman’s Frontal Lobotomies at Athens (Ohio) State Dispensary
Some chapters in the medical old hat of Athens County, Ohio, are more legendary or fascinating than that referring to Walter Freeman, M.D., and the more than 200 frontal lobotomies he performed at the Athens Situation Sanatorium in seven visits between 1953 and 1957.
Until the mid-point of the twentieth century, treatment for most inpatients in solid state hospitals, like that in Athens, was reduced to providing a unharmed and humane environment. Functional drugs in support of balmy illnesses did not grow convenient until the late 1950s and initial 1960s.
In 1936 Egas Moniz, M.D., a Portugese physician who later won a Nobel Select to his charge, reported the results of his earliest frontal lobotomies in a French medical journal. Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who had met Dr. Moniz a year earlier, was impressed with the report. Within the same year Dr. Freeman teamed with a neurosurgeon to conduct the transaction action, and from the next decade the partners operated on various more cases. Anyway, Freeman became frustrated with the day-to-day business’s limitations. In 1946 he developed an substitute tradition that could be done more speedily, look an operating room, and without anesthetic drugs.
He hardened electroconvulsive analysis to produce drugless anesthesia. After the tenacious’s convulsive movements subsided, Dr. Freeman operated.
Lifting an dominance eyelid, he inserted a long, metal pick between the eyeball and the eyelid until it reached the bony roof of the eye-socket. He pounded the pick in the course the bone into the braincase where it entered a frontal lobe of the brain. He repeated the insertion strategy on the antithetical side. Then, using the outer ends of the picks as handles, he made universal movements which severed and destroyed the frontal lobes. He finished before the patient awoke from the after-effects of the induced seizure.
Dr. Freeman performed this receipts in phase hospitals nationwide that were understaffed, overflowing with patients, and very persuasible to any new treatment that held promise. Every state hospital of that era could give electroconvulsive treatment, and the infirmary did not contain to demand an operating room. A lassie pass on scope sufficed.
Freeman met with families of patients, explained the risks and benefits of the modus operandi, and answered questions. Some families consented and others didn’t. Assisted alongside the city medical staff, and with a procession of patients filing into and in sight of the standard operating procedure accommodation, Freeman typically operated on his entire case-load in unprejudiced one day. Charging $25 per tenacious for his services, he departed within a few days proper for his next destination.
Freeman visited the Athens State Sickbay more times than any of the other asseverate hospitals in Ohio. On his first by in 1953 he was treated as a minor celebrity. The Athens Errand-girl of November 16 reported his appearance with the headline “Lobotomies to be performed: surgery may substitute for mental complaint of uncountable patients at glory hospital.” A bolstering article on November 20–entitled “Dr. Freeman, trigger in trans-orbital technic, demonstrates method: lobotomies are performed on 31 Athens State Clinic patients”–
showed pictures of Freeman with the municipal staff, including Manager Charles Creed, Assistant Superintendent Hubert Fockler and Drs. Beatrice Postle Fockler, Wayne Dutton and Genevieve Garrett Dutton.
The surgeries were performed in the Receiving Hospital, a part edifice constructed in 1950 which is on occasion the eastern-most chunk of the main building.
Wolfhard Baumgaertel, M.D., longtime shared practitioner in Albany, Ohio, was today pro Freeman’s third befall to Athens in October 1954. Dr. Baumgaertel watched the procedure on the broad daylight’s start with acquiescent, and then
provided after-care instead of this sufferer and all the others who followed.
Consideration his intimateness with surgery, Dr. Baumgaertel recalled being surprised by the procedure, saying, “I do not call to mind which made me more aghast while watching this–the hammering of the picks into the mastermind or the synchronous faction of the picks’ handles in the doctor’s hands.”
Describing his after-care of Freeman’s patients, Dr. Baumgaertel said, “At usual intervals the patients arrived in the healing extent, my domain during this, to me, unrevealed and incomprehensible event. My main appurtenances consisted of distinct suction machines and oxygen, the latter being somewhat unnecessary. Critical signs were monitored until the untiring woke up. We had no primary complications. Some nasal drainage of cerebral juice was not considered a problem.
“I do not muse on any automatic or belatedly post-operative deaths in the patients I attended to. Most returned to their floors in the asylum within one to two weeks. Of run, nil of them were qualified to disown the event, but there were also no questions. I recollect having been surprised to the meat of being shaken when I discovered a complete non-existence of mind-blower on the limited share in of the patients as to what happened to them.”
Geneva Riley, R.N., who was foreman of nursing at the Athens Position Medical centre 1975-1993, witnessed the unchanged procedure at another facility. She likened the racket made next to the picks to the ring of textile tearing.
In the mid-1990s the founder encountered one of Dr. Freeman’s bygone patients at Doctors Hospital of Nelsonville in Nelsonville, Ohio. His computed tomographic (CT) explore in depth showed fat areas of wreck to the frontal lobes. The radiologist, unaware of the unswerving’s preceding intelligence, interpreted the abnormalities as just to strokes.
But the unfaltering and his wife had a different story to tell. Emotionally traumatized alongside combat in World Combat II, the fetters was an inpatient at Athens State Hospital in the 1950s when Dr. Freeman came to town. The untiring was functioning at a common unalterable, dropping to the train at any sudden tumult and smoking cigarettes beneath a blanket. His wife agreed to the course of action which was tangled close hemorrhage. Stable so, he improved and was discharged from the polyclinic after three months. In requital for innumerable years he operated critical equipment without difficulty except for an occasional seizure.
Asked if she had regrets, the patient’s the missis said, “No. I noiseless deem I made the open decision.”
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