Dr. Walter Freeman’s Frontal Lobotomies at Athens (Ohio) State Hospital
Few chapters in the medical history of Athens County, Ohio, are more notorious or fascinating than that concerning Walter Freeman, M.D., and the more than 200 frontal lobotomies he performed at the Athens State Hospital in seven visits between 1953 and 1957.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, treatment for most inpatients in large state hospitals, like that in Athens, was limited to providing a safe and humane environment. Effective drugs for mental illnesses did not become available until the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In 1936 Egas Moniz, M.D., a Portugese physician who eventually won a Nobel Prize for his work, reported the results of his earliest frontal lobotomies in a French medical journal. Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who had met Dr. Moniz a year earlier, was impressed with the report. Within the same year Dr. Freeman teamed with a neurosurgeon to perform the operation, and over the next decade the partners operated on many more cases. However, Freeman became frustrated with the operations limitations....
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