My Lobotomy: A Memoir, by Howard Dully. Random House, 2007
This is a horror story. There are no vampires or ghouls, but there is an
evil stepmother, a mad scientist, a child who can do nothing right and a
father who doesn’t care.
The mad scientist is Dr. Walter Freeman, the man who invented the ‘ice
pick’
lobotomy, the brain scrambling operation made famous in ‘One Flew Over The
Cuckoo’s Next’. The child who cannot seem to do anything right- at least
in
the eyes of his family- is Howard Dully, who at the age of 12 became the
youngest victim, er, patient to be given a transorbital lobotomy. His
stepmother, a woman who would have benefited from psychiatry care
herself,
hates Howard with an irrational passion that is obvious even to her own
sons. His father works three jobs, in part, I suspect, to avoid being at
home.
Howard is not the ideal little boy, but his main faults seem to have been
laziness and an inability to apply himself at school. No one will ever
know
why he attracted his stepmother’s hatred, but she set out on a campaign to
have him declared insane and removed from the home. After several
psychiatrists tell her that there is nothing wrong with Howard- and is
told
by a couple that she, not the boy, is the problem- she finally lands on
Freeman. At first, Freeman seems to agree with the other doctors that
Howard
is fine. Then the stepmother turns on the lies- do***ented in Freeman’s
papers and refuted 40 years later by Howard’s family- and Freeman is
unable
to resist destroying the front of Howard’s brain with his tools, the
glorified ice picks.
Unlike the 15%, and the other large percent who are left unable to care
for
themselves, of Freeman’s patients who die from the operation, Howard
recovers, albeit slowly, and he is returned to his home. Of course this
makes his stepmother unhappy, and after a great many more lies, he is sent
to a mental institution. Finally he is turned out onto the streets to fend
for himself. The next 40 years of his life is spent drifting, drinking,
doing short stints of work, living on welfare and pursuing petty crime.
When
he gains custody of his son, however, he is motivated to quit drinking and
doing drugs and gets a degree in computer science. A heart attack makes
him
quit smoking. He gets a full time job driving a bus. In just a few years,
he
turns his life completely around. Then he begins a search to find out
what,
and why, was done to him when he was a child. Aided by re****ters from
National Public Radio, he obtains Freeman’s records, the notes that the
doctor wrote when he met with Howard, his father and his stepmother.
Howard
finds himself vindicated, but he still doesn’t know why it happened. His
father is the only one alive who knows, and the re****ters push Howard to
meet him and ask him. It’s an unsatisfactory meeting, with the senior
Dully
claiming total ignorance of what his wife did to his son. This is the
point
in the book where I became angriest- this man obviously knew what was
going
on in his own home and let his wife torture his son because he was afraid
she would leave him. He refuses to say he’s sorry it happened. He ‘refuses
to think about negative things’. This, the man who would beat Howard with
wooden boards on his wife’s say.
The NPR broadcast of Howard opening Freeman’s records and interviewing his
father and other victims of Freeman affected many people. The NPR email
server crashed from the overload when the show aired and all the people
who’s
lives had been affected by Freeman’s barbaric surgeries sent their thanks
for the show.
The book is not the best written one in the world. It’s repetitious and
plodding. But the emotional impact is tremendous. The horrors that Howard
went through as a child, and the fact that no one stepped in to help him-
and his was in 1960, not the dark ages- is appalling. No one ever uses the
words ‘child abuse’. This is a very dark chapter in psychiatric history.
--
Laurie Brown, Dark Phoenix
dark_phoenix@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"To destroy the Western tradition of independent thought, it is not
necessary to burn books. All we have to do is leave them unread for a
couple
of generations."
--Robert Maynard Hutchens.
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