Howard Dully
Howard Dully was barely twelve years old when he was admitted to a private hospital in San Jose, California for an encounter with a man he had met only a few weeks earlier, Dr. Walter Freeman. Howard was what most would consider being a normal American boy of the time, who would occasionally fight with his brother. He delivered newspapers, and would sometimes disobey his parents, but there was little to indicate any form of mental illness.
It was in December of 1960, a little over a week before Christmas that Howard was admitted to the hospital. The following day he awoke with two black eyes and a severe headache. He later described feeling, “…like a zombie.” Howard had been given a transorbital lobotomy at the request of his parents, more specifically at the request of his stepmother. She was referred to Dr. Freeman, who met with the boy and diagnosed him as being schizophrenic. Freeman’s notes include a passage which reads, “He is defiant at times…He has a vicious expression on his face some of the time.”
Howard Dully was the youngest patient ever to receive a lobotomy at the hands of Dr. Freeman. He recovered from the operation and eventually wrote his autobiography, describing his life both before and after the operation, including his research into the operation itself, having no memory of the surgery. In 2003 researchers for National Public Radio contacted him and requested to make a documentary about his experience and how his life transpired following the operation. They brought with them the medical files and notes which had been prepared and kept by Freeman.
As Dully’s book was awaiting publication in the United Kingdom in 2008 (it had already been published in the United States) he told a British newspaper that his stepmother, who was by then deceased, had manipulated his father into agreeing to the operation, threatening him with a divorce if he didn’t follow through with the procedure. Following the operation and through his teens Howard spent several stints in mental institutions. He became involved with petty crimes and spent some time in jails as well, and for a period of time, he was homeless.
Eventually, Howard Dully straightened out his life and came to terms with the operation which was forced on him before he even became a teenager. There is no way to compare his life to what may have happened had the operation never been performed. Howard himself describes his behavior prior to the lobotomy as being uncooperative, at least in regards to his stepmother. During his lifetime Walter Freeman performed just fewer than 3,500 lobotomies, some of them on patients more than once. His last, in 1967, was the third he performed on Helen Mortensen. She died as a result of the operation. About 14% of all his lobotomy patients died as a result of the procedure. Howard Dully is one of the lucky ones who eventually regained most of what had been taken from him by the procedure.
Where do we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
“The Lobotomist” By Jack El-Hai, The Washington Post, February 4, 2001
“The gruesome, untold story of Eva Peron’s lobotomy” by David Robson, The BBC, July 10, 2015
“How Rosemary Kennedy went from a vibrant young beauty smiling with brother John F. Kennedy to a feeble spinster” by Caroline Howe, The Daily Mail, September 24, 2015
“The strange and curious history of lobotomy” by Hugh Levinson, BBC News, November 2011
“Robi, Alys”. The Canadian Encyclopedia
“Top 10 Fascinating And Notable Lobotomies” by Blogball, List Verse, JUNE 24, 2009
“Blow Out Your Candles: An Elegy for Rose Williams” by Susannah Jacob. The Paris Review
“Psychosurgery and the child prodigy” by Anthony Feinstein. History of Psychiatry
“Warner Baxter, 59, Film Star, is Dead” obituary from the New York Times. Psychosurgery.org
“The Mad Earl and the wee divorcee” by Anne Chisholm, The Telegraph, July 27, 2004
“Sigrid Hjerten” UK Disability History Month (UKDHM). ukdhm.org
“Frances Farmer: Shedding light on Shadowland”, by Jeffrey Kauffman
“He was bad, so they put an ice pick in his brain”, by Elizabeth Day, The Guardian, July 13, 2008