🔪 "I suggested them not tell Howard anything about it." A doctor wrote that about a 12-year-old boy in 1960, days before a steel instrument was tapped through the bone above his eye with a hammer. The fee: $200. 🧠

This is the true story of the lobotomy and the part schools skip: it wasn't a hidden horror. Medical journals praised it, newspapers put it on the front page, state hospitals and the Veterans Administration used it, and a Nobel Prize committee honored it. 👏

🕯️ This episode is dedicated to my grandmother, Viola Reese.

🎧 Just Killing Time with Elizabeth Stanton: your night light for the stories that keep us up at night. Truth, crime, conspiracies, and a little hidden history.

🔎 IN THIS EPISODE

Egas Moniz (EH-gahsh moo-NEESH) wins the 1949 Nobel Prize for leucotomy (loo-KOT-uh-mee). It has never been rescinded.

📍 The first U.S. lobotomy, Sept 14, 1936: a woman from Topeka, Kansas

👑 Rosemary Kennedy, 1941, and the secret her family kept

🧊 The kitchen ice pick, the grapefruit, and Dr. Walter Freeman's transorbital (trans-OR-bit-ul) method

🩺 "Operation Ice Pick": 228 operations in West Virginia, July 1952

🎖️ The VA's "Lobotomy Files": about 2,000 veterans

🚐 The Lobotomobile myth, and what the Soviet ban really said

🏥 Oklahoma psychiatric care in the 1940s and 50s, and one family's story of shock treatment

🕯️ Howard Dully, who read his own file after 44 years

❓ QUICK ANSWERS

Who invented the lobotomy? Egas Moniz, Lisbon, 1935. Freeman and James Watts brought it to the U.S. in 1936.

How many Americans were lobotomized? Roughly 40,000. Freeman performed about 3,400 to 3,500 himself, in 23 states.

When did it end? Thorazine arrived in 1954. Freeman's last operation was in 1967, and the patient died.

💬 REAL VOICES

A father: "I was sold a bill of goods." A daughter: "It was just peace." A WWII pilot lobotomized at a VA hospital: "mentally injured, not mentally ill." And Howard Dully: "I know my lobotomy didn't touch my soul." Where sources disagree on dates or numbers, we say so out loud.

📊 KEY FACTS

• 1937: psychiatric patients filled 55% of U.S. hospital beds

• Freeman's patients included at least 19 people under 18

• In Cherokee, Iowa, 3 of 25 patients died in one 1951 visit

• West Virginia, 1952: 25 women in a single day, $25 each

• The U.S. peak was 1949, with 5,074 lobotomies in one year

🔍 TOPICS: history of lobotomy, Walter Freeman ice pick lobotomy, Howard Dully My Lobotomy, Egas Moniz Nobel Prize, transorbital lobotomy, Rosemary Kennedy lobotomy, VA lobotomies of veterans, electroshock history, psychiatric hospital history, Kansas history, hidden history podcast, true crime podcast.

🕯️ Stay for the ending. It's personal, and it starts in Kansas.

▶️ If this episode made you angry, share it. Stories like this only survive when people pass them on.

📚 SOURCES

• NPR, "My Lobotomy: Howard Dully's Journey" (2005) and "A Lobotomy Timeline"

• Jack El-Hai, The Lobotomist; el-hai.com

• Howard Dully with Charles Fleming, My Lobotomy (2007)

• Michael M. Phillips, "The Lobotomy Files," Wall Street Journal, Dec 13, 2013

• Elliot Valenstein, Great and Desperate Cures (1986)

• Mical Raz, The Lobotomy Letters; Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary

• Nobel Prize Foundation (nobelprize.org), Egas Moniz

• Bull Hist Med 2017;91(1):33-61 (Soviet ban)

• Kansas Historical Society, Menninger Foundation records

• KOSU, "The History of Mental Health Care in Oklahoma"; NLM, Mike Gorman profile; Asylum Projects, Norman State Hospital

• Kelly J. Sullivan, smallstatebighistory.com; Mental Floss; Freeman, JAMA, 1953

⚠️ Content note: medical detail of historical brain surgery, including on children. Host opinions are labeled as opinion. Not medical advice.

🔔 Follow, rate, and share this with someone who stays up late with you. Did a relative spend time in a state hospital or VA ward? Send us your Time Killer Files.

#lobotomy #WalterFreeman #medicalhistory #hiddenhistory #truecrimepodcast #HowardDully