no doubt, many of you will be running off to enjoy the beautiful weather (at least if you're in ny) and down some happy hour beers in the next hour or so.
so have something interesting to tell all your friends, and read a little about this guy: Walter Freeman, "grandfather of the lobotomy".
Freeman invented the "ice pick" or transorbital lobotomy, which quite literally used an ice pick hammered through the back of the eye socket into the brain;
In 1948 Freeman developed a new technique which involved wrenching the leucotome in an upstroke after the initial insertion. This procedure placed great strain on the instrument and often resulted in the leucotome breaking off in the patient's skull.
and then, oh my fucking god:
Freeman embarked on a national campaign in his van which he called his "lobotomobile" to "educate and train" surgeons in the procedure at state-run institutions.
I'm so sorry -- the loboto-fucking-mobile? are you fucking kidding me? it seems to me that if some doctor is driving around in a van and calling it the "lobotomobile", maybe he's the one who needs a lobotomy....
According to some, institutional care was hampered by lack of effective treatments and horrible overcrowding, and Freeman saw the transorbital lobotomy as an expedient tool to get large populations out of treatment and back into private life. Critics contend that Freeman was a sociopath who greatly enjoyed lobotomizing people. [emphasis mine]
by critics, they mean "anyone with a conscience and compassion for other human beings"
seems it might have worked for some of the people who didn't die
some of his patients remained life-long friends and thanked him profusely for allowing them to return to relatively productive and peaceful lives
apparently someone wrote a bloody book about this cat. i'm so reading that shit.
so go out there and drink up, and talk about lobotomies!
and earlier sick-ass shit.
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