Lou was mad. She was filled with anger and hate. But she didn’t hate her own son George, and she didn’t hate my brother Brian, either. So it wasn’t just a “stepmother problem.” It seemed almost impossible not to believe there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
Was I crazy? I never felt crazy. But there must have been something wrong with me. Otherwise what they did makes no sense. This wasn’t a secret operation they did on me. Dr. Freeman filled out forms. He wrote the words “transorbital lobotomy” on the hospital registration slips. He worked with radiologists and nurses. He was assisted in the operating room. He had signatures on the release papers from my father.
Many times I have wondered, Where were the authorities? Freeman wasn’t a licensed psychiatrist. How could he determine on the basis of a couple of short office visits with me that I had been schizophrenic since the age of four? And why would anyone accept his diagnosis anyway without insisting that I be seen by someone with the proper training? Was there no medical standard for giving someone a lobotomy, especially a child? Is that all it took—one doctor saying it had to be done and he’d be the one to do it?
The sad thing is, the authorities were there. My family had been in contact with any number of doctors. I had been seen by, or Lou had consulted with, the Santa Clara County Family Services people, the experts in child mental health from Langley Porter, and the state mental health officers at Napa State Hospital. Some of them knew I was going to have a lobotomy. All of them knew Freeman was conducting lobotomies on children. Sometimes they protested after the fact, like they did the day Freeman took me and the other kids to Langley Porter to show us off. But why wasn’t anyone taking steps to make sure Freeman wasn’t operating on any more children? Why was this allowed to continue?
And has anything changed today? Where are the authorities now? How come any regular M.D. or pediatrician is allowed to diagnose depression or bipolar illness or ADD in children, and prescribe medications, without a second opinion? How many children are taking powerful brain medications now simply because their parents find them too difficult to handle? How many of those boys and girls are having their childhoods taken away from them, the way mine was taken away from me?
For a long time, the only answer I could find was that Lou and Freeman were right and I was wrong. If everyone knew what was happening to me and no one tried to stop it, it must have been the right thing to do. I must have deserved what they did to me.
But that’s the biggest lie of all, bigger than any lie Lou told about me. It seems impossible to say that I was right and that my parents, my doctor, and the entire medical community around me were all wrong, but that’s the ultimate truth. They were all wrong. To perform a transorbital lobotomy on a twelve-year-old boy was wrong. To perform it on a boy like me, who didn’t even qualify by Freeman’s published standards for the operation, was particularly wrong. But it would have been barbaric to do to any child.
Lou consulted with Dr. Freeman for two months. My father considered whether or not to do the surgery for only two days. The surgery itself took just ten minutes. But those ten minutes determined the next forty years of my life.
For most of that time, my life just passed me by. I felt like a failure. I felt like I never did what I should have done. I always fell back on the idea of “Poor me, I had the operation,” instead of going out and getting a job and making my way in the world.
I became a victim—a full-time, permanent victim. My lobotomy was the explanation for everything that happened to me. My life didn’t really start until I decided to go back to school and try to make something of myself. It started when I stopped acting like a victim.
What I see now is that we are all victims. The people who made the decisions that took away my life were victims, too, just like me. Freeman was the victim of distant, unloving parents, an unhappy marriage, and the tragic death of his son. Lou was the victim of a mother who abandoned her at birth, an alcoholic father, and an alcoholic first husband who left her with no money and two young boys to raise on her own. My father was the victim of his own father’s early death, childhood poverty, the tragic death of his beloved wife, the tragic birth of and then injury to his third son, and the tragic decision to make Lou his second wife. He is as much the victim of my lobotomy, in some ways, as I am, just as they were all the victims of what was done to them.
That’s true for everybody, I guess. We are all the victims of what is done to us. We can either use that as an excuse for failure, knowing that if we fail it isn’t really our fault, or we can say, “I want something better than that, I deserve something better than that, and I’m going to try to make myself a life worth living.”
I could never have done this without the help of a large number of people. I am grateful to them all.
I would like to thank Christine Johnson, who started psychosurgery.org and introduced me to Dave Isay and Sound Portraits, and Carol Noell Duncanson, who introduced me to Christine.
I would like to thank Dave Isay and Piya Kochhar. Dave is a man who changes lives, and Piya is the world’s greatest con artist. She got me to fly! And she got me to interview my father. I’m still not sure how she tricked me into doing those things, but I love her and Dave very much.
I would like to thank all the friends I made at National Public Radio, and at Sound Portraits. I’d like to particularly thank Larry Blood and the other people at KUSP.
I would like to thank all the people who agreed to be interviewed, particularly Frank Freeman and Dr. Robert Lichtenstein.
I would like to thank Dr. Elliot Valenstein for his book Great and Desperate Cures, and Jack El-Hai for his book The Lobotomist. These men and their writings were very helpful in the assembling of this book. Also very helpful to me were David Anderson, Lyle Slovick, and the other archivists at the Walter Freeman and James Watts Collection, Special Collections and University Archives, The Gelman Library, George Washington University. Thank you also to magazine photographer Debra McClinton for her generosity.
My family has been very patient with me through this ordeal. I want to thank my dad for putting up with my questions, and his wife, Lois, for watching over my dad. I love them both so much.
My sons, Rodney and Justin, were very helpful to me, too. I’m so proud of them both.
My brothers, George, Brian, and Kirk were also very patient with my questions. They were willing to go back to a painful place and time. I’m honored to be their brother. I’d like to thank my uncle Kenneth for helping, too.
I want to thank my agent, Gary Morris of the David Black Agency, for introducing me to my cowriter, Charles Fleming, and my editor, Heather Jackson. I want to thank Charles and Heather for believing in this project.
And, last, I want to thank Barbara Lee Dully, my wife and partner. She stuck by me when I was down in the dumps, and lifted me up, time and time again, by showing me that it was all going to work out someday. She was right. I love her, and am honored by knowing her.
Copyright © 2007 by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Crown is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
The medical records used in this book are from the Walter Freeman and James Watts Collections, Special Collections and University Archives, The Gelman Library, The George Washington University.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dully, Howard, 1948–
My Lobotomy / Howard Dully and Charles Fleming.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Dully, Howard, 1948– 2. Psychosurgery—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Frontal lobotomy—Patients—United States—Biography. I. Fleming, Charles. II. Title.
[DNLM: 1. Personal Narratives. 2. Psychosurgery. 3. Patient.
WL 370 D883m 2007]
RD594.D85 2007
617.4'81—dc22 2007006070
eISBN: 978-0-307-40767-2
v3.0
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