Listener discretion is advised, this episode features discussions of murder, medical malpractice and mental health conditions that may be upsetting. We advise extreme caution for listeners under 13.

There is a certain promise of trust between the doctor and their patient. A medical professional is expected to have years of knowledge to back up their diagnosis and treatment. Of course, if the treatment is an ice pick to the brain, one would expect a natural hesitation from the patient. But when Dr. Walter Freeman suggested it, many patients and their families were eager to accept. Of course, many of Freeman's patients did exhibit a particularly bizarre behavior after their first experience with his ice pick, they asked for it again.

This is Medical Murders, a podcast original. For decades, thousands of medical students have taken the Hippocratic Oath. It boils down to do no harm, but a closer look reveals a phrase much more interesting. I must not play it God. However, some doctors break that oath, choosing to play God with their patients, deciding who lives and who dies each week on medical murders. We'll investigate those who decided to kill. We'll explore the specifics of how they operate not just on their patients, but within their own minds, examining the psychology and neurology behind heartless medical killers.

I'm Alastair Madden and I'm joined by Dr. David Kipa, M.D..

Hi, everyone. I'm Dr. Kipper, and I'm thrilled to be joining Alistar, providing some medical insight and information for our second episode of Walter Freeman. Clearly a controversial doctor, but also a very important part of the story of treating mental health.

You can find episodes of medical murders and all other podcast originals for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts to stream medical murders for free on Spotify, open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. This is our second episode on Dr. Walter Freeman, an American neurologist who developed the icepick lobotomy over the course of three decades. Freeman personally lobotomised well over 2000 patients. He also trained other doctors to perform thousands more, all while ignoring the inhumane effects of the procedure and the growing number of fatalities.

Estimates vary, but at least 400 people died from complications after these lobotomies and hundreds more were left with the cognitive ability of a child. Today, we'll look at Freeman's reckless obsession with lobotomy as he travels across the US visiting hospitals with large numbers of mentally ill patients. We'll also explore the tragic deaths from lobotomies, Freeman's downfall and his final years spent seeking redemption. All this and more coming up. Stay with us. In 1948, Maythe Engberg visited Dr.

Walter Freeman's private practice in Washington, D.C. It wasn't her first time in his office, may have had been there in 1947 for a prefrontal lobotomy with Dr. Freeman and his surgical partner.

Dr. James Watts wants reluctantly participated in Freeman's early lobotomies, but he was never fully behind the procedure. He believed lobotomy was still an untested and reckless treatment at best. At worst, it could be fatal and Masvingo Case would prove him right.

Moves first, the ball to me had gone poorly while trying to sever the frontal lobe tissue, Watson Freeman had accidentally punctured a part of her brain known as the ventricular system. This was a serious mistake.

The brain's ventricular system is made up of four connected ventricles or cavities filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The ventricles are located inside the brain. So if you can picture your concept of what a brain looks like, they're right in the middle. There are two lateral ventricles, the big ones, and they're right in the middle and there is a third ventricle that sits between them and that leads through an aqueduct or a little canal to the fourth ventricle, which is closer to the bottom of the brain.

When the ventricle is punctured, the cerebrospinal fluid that is contained within leaks into the brain tissue. With this injury, Freeman created an obstruction inmate's ventricular system that prevented normal flow and absorption of her cerebral spinal fluid. This then led to fluid becoming trapped in certain regions, producing the symptoms of swollen ventricles, which include headaches, memory loss, an altered gait and urinary incontinence. If Freeman truly understood her symptoms, it surfaced after the first lobotomy. It's unclear from a medical perspective why he thought a second lobotomy would alleviate may have symptoms.

Perhaps he felt that an additional trauma to the ventricular system could somehow disperse the fluid on a more sinister level. Maybe he just wanted to see what would happen.

The doctors saw evidence of Naves enlarged ventricles, but Freeman wasn't concerned with that. They also realized that the first lobotomy had missed severing some of the usual frontal lobe tissue. Freeman was certain that a second lobotomy was the solution they wouldn't miss again. Faced with the evidence and the support of Naves family, what's agreed to perform a second prefrontal lobotomy? While Freeman instructed him, unfortunately, they did nothing to address Marv's new-Found condition, even if they'd caused it.

Their mission was a successful lobotomy, not fixing enlarged ventricles. The day after the procedure was finished, Maev went home. Though the second lobotomy had successfully cut the frontal lobes, the fluid was still building up in her brain.

Three weeks later, she was dead. Freeman was unmoved by Naves death, he believed it was an unfortunate set of complications that killed her, not the procedure. He refused to take any blame for the first lobotomy causing the deadly hydrocephalus. The fact that Maev might have lived much longer if she never had a lobotomy was immaterial to Freeman.

A longer life with a mental health condition was less important than risking that life for a cure. If anything, Mage's death pushed him to focus on his new transorbital technique, which he considered far less invasive. But Watts was growing suspicious as Freeman perverted the original prefrontal lobotomy, which they had performed in the same way as any other surgery.

By 1948, Freeman had begun performing lobotomies by himself, using ice picks to access patients skulls, what Sid always believed that the surgical procedure was reckless. But now he saw that Freeman's new method was downright dangerous. What's essentially gave Freeman an ultimatum? Either he stopped performing Ice Pick lobotomies in their office or Watts would leave their shared medical practice. Freeman was proud of his new procedure, and he wasn't going to let anyone dictate what treatments he could and could not give patients.

Not even a licensed neurosurgeon, Freeman refused to stop performing transorbital lobotomies. By 1950, the Freeman Watts partnership was over, and Freeman seemed to think it was for the best. Now that he was free of Watts hesitation and worry, he could finally bring lobotomy to the masses. Besides, with his personal technique, Freeman had made the lobotomy a relatively easy procedure possible to complete. In under 10 minutes, he could knock out patients with a portable electroshock machine.

Then, using two slender pecs and a small hammer, he would tap the pecs through the skull plates at the top of each orbital cavity.

Once through the skull, Freeman had direct access into the frontal lobes after a few smooth rotations of the pecs to sever the connective brain tissue, the procedure was finished.

With this new found efficiency, Freeman could perform nearly two dozen lobotomies a day. He left his private practice for weeks at a time as he traveled across the country to state run hospitals. In a single afternoon, he would literally line up a ward of patients with mental health conditions and then walk down the line and lobotomize each one afterward. Most of the patients could go home within the week, even those who had been in hospitals for months or years. On one tour of West Virginia hospitals, he performed 228 lobotomies in 12 days, nearly 20 a day.

Freeman turned the lobotomies into performances for psychiatrists and nursing staff, many of these medical professionals were in awe of Freeman, sometimes literally applauding as he tapped ice picks through the patient's eye sockets. And Freeman loved it.

He drank up the attention, often adding a little flair in his procedures. In addition to using ice picks, he'd occasionally use a big wooden carpenter's mallet instead of a surgeon's hammer. If he'd been working with a mallet in his right hand, he'd switch hands mid procedure. Freeman had been a showman since his days in medical school, and now his audience was no longer students but other doctors. Freeman was finally gaining the professional attention he'd always sought, but he also wanted to be revered by the public.

He began to notify the local newspapers before his arrival so that they could send a reporter to watch the lobotomies and interview him. Freeman was always sure to highlight the successes of lobotomy. He insisted patients were often able to go home within hours of their treatment, even if they'd been in the hospital for months. He also spun his failures like Masvingo was fatal procedure into positive feedback. If the lobotomy didn't work, it was only because the patient was already too severely ill.

If a patient died not long after the lobotomy, it was due to extenuating complications, not Freeman's picking their brain. Maev sister had even thanked Freeman for taking a chance and performing the lobotomy that killed her.

Though Freeman continued to gain positive press coverage, not all doctors were convinced that lobotomy was a cure. Many were shocked at his reckless approach to what they still regarded as brain surgery. Freeman wasn't a surgeon, but he was using lobotomy as a catch all treatment. His revamped icepick technique was also wildly unvetted and reckless.

Today, a surgical procedure is only adopted as medically and legally viable after going through five lengthy phases, starting with an operations description and proof of feasibility and ending with the data on long term effects and outcomes.

Because his surgical innovations are dramatic and important, the vetting period for this does not take a long time and usually this can be done in less than a year.

One contemporary surgical revamp that's been tested and now considered safe is a surgery to replace the mitral valve. This heart valve used to be replaced by cutting a patient's chest open.

But now this damage valve can be access, much less invasive through a blood vessel in the groin.

As a doctor, it's hard to imagine a time when Freeman's approach to lobotomy would be met with anything but horror.

Freeman didn't care what other doctors said. He was convinced his procedure was the best cure available.

Freeman claimed lobotomy could treat any mental health condition, including addiction, schizophrenia and depression, even though there was growing evidence that lobotomy rarely worked at all. In fact, lobotomy was making some patients conditions even worse.

Up next, a new treatment threatens Freeman's career. Hi, listeners.

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Now back to the story, in early 1954, Freeman performed a lobotomy on 24 year old Wilma Rogers. It was intended to aid her crippling depression. But a few months later, she wrote to Freeman saying she felt like a spectator watching a never ending scene of human life, which I am prohibited from ever participating in. It seems so unfair for I tried so hard to be cured. Wilma requested a second lobotomy, and Freeman agreed he even helped to pay for her ticket from New York City to his office at George Washington University.

Freeman, who is trying to help his patients after all but keeping Wilma from writing about her failed lobotomy was a perk to Freeman firmly believed that if the first lobotomy hadn't alleviated Wilma's symptoms, a second one would.

Unfortunately, he was wrong. The second the boss of me within a year left Willmar even more desperate for relief from the darkness, she still felt she tried other treatments with other doctors, but nothing worked.

She wrote to Frieman, begging him to perform yet another lobotomy to try and cure her. But this time, Freeman apparently refused. Freeman was skilled at cultivating his reputation, and he'd staked his career on the procedure as a cure all. Having a patient who required a third lobotomy wouldn't look good. It might suggest the treatment didn't work like he had in Rosemary Kennedy's tragic case. Freeman couldn't concern himself with patients who didn't respond to the treatment, even when Freeman learned that Wilma died by suicide just over a year later.

All he could muster was a cold clinical response, saying it was regrettable, but the treatment I administered was not effective in preventing her from killing herself. Besides, he had plenty of other patients writing him joyful letters, Freeman decided to focus on those. They were a comforting reminder of his achievements. In fact, Freeman maintained correspondence with many patients and their families. The letters were also a convenient defense when Freeman's success was called into question at a medical conference in the early 1950s.

Freeman was speaking to a crowd of doctors whose response to lobotomy ranged from skeptical to vehemently opposed to silence. The grumbling in his audience, he pulled out a box filled to the brim with Christmas cards. He asked the doctors how many of them received Christmas cards from their patients. Every year, the grumbling quieted, and Freeman considered the matter settled. But around that same time, a huge obstacle was emerging that threatened Freeman's career. It was a tiny hill.

The drug was called chlorpromazine, and it had massive implications for treating mental health conditions developed in the 50s and regarded as the first antipsychotic drug.

Chlorpromazine, also branded as Thorazine, is to this day considered one of the greatest milestones in the history of psychiatry and pharmacology.

Chlorpromazine is commonly used to treat mental health conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. This medication works by blocking dopamine receptors in the brain, thus preventing the excess dopamine production responsible for these psychoses and mood disorders. I was a medical student and my older brother had just graduated medical school and we were on my way on our way to my aunt's for Thanksgiving dinner.

And I had the hiccups and my brother knew that this was a treatment for hiccups. So he gave me a Thorazine and I slept for a day and a half. I have no memory of that Thanksgiving dinner or the people that were there. So that was my relationship to chlorpromazine. Patients who benefit from chlorpromazine describe a clear thought process and a marked improvement in anxiety and hallucinations. This represented a monumental transition from psychosurgery to psychopharmacology as a chemical lobotomy. Chlorpromazine as a pill has no surgical intervention to the brain.

Therefore, we would not see the long term effects that we did with conventional lobotomies.

Chlorpromazine ushered in a new era of mental health treatments. Lobotomy was no longer the premier cure, which meant Freeman was no longer the premier doctor. With physicians turning to chlorpromazine in place of lobotomy, Freeman's vast river of potential patients was drying up. So he expanded his criteria to include a new type of patient children. By the end of the 1950s, lobotomy was no longer considered the miracle cure. Dr. Walter Freeman once touted new advancements in pharmaceuticals, meant that many mental health conditions could now be addressed with simple pills.

Fewer patients needed a surgical pick inserted through their orbital cavity, which meant fewer patients needed. Dr. Walter Freeman. But that was something he was unwilling to accept. He was still convinced lobotomy was the best treatment available and he was the best doctor to provide them with the introduction of chlorpromazine. The era of pharmacy prescriptions was already underway. Although Freeman still saw lobotomy as the quickest one time procedure to fix patient's symptoms, very few state hospitals invited him to their wards anymore.

By 1960, Freeman had moved to Sunnyvale, California, to avoid the growing scrutiny his procedure faced on the East Coast. But this hardly seemed to dampen his spirits. Freeman simply believed he was still the loan expert on lobotomies. So when Howard dully stepmother came to his office for a consultation, Freeman was eager to provide his treatment. His stepmother said that young Howard was defiant, daydreams and even objected to going to bed. Even though Howard was only 12 years old, Freeman saw how these alleged symptoms might fit the criteria of a mental health condition.

This qualified Howard for a lobotomy, which Freeman was happy to provide while Freeman officially diagnosed Howard dully with schizophrenia, it seems overwhelmingly clear that he was acting like a typical 12 year old boy.

I'm sure we can all say from personal experience that a 12 year old acting out isn't the most shocking thing in the world for lobotomy. Freeman performed on Howard, however, did take away any chance his brain had of developing normally. As he grew older, Howard displayed many behaviors that could be interpreted as side effects of the lobotomy, including a self-described lack of judgment and an inability to focus. And clearly, this all goes back to the severed connections in his prefrontal cortex.

While Howard may have kept much of his mental acuity and personality as he grew up, he says he always felt that something was taken from him. Freeman performed lobotomies on nearly 20 of their children over the years, including one as young as four years old. Many of them didn't come out of their lobotomies, quote unquote, cured. One of them, a child in middle school, even died soon after his lobotomy, possibly from a severed blood vessel Freeman might have nicked during the procedure.

But since Freeman rarely investigated patients negative reactions to a lobotomy, there was little proof of why the boy died. So Freeman was off the hook. But regardless of mounting evidence to the contrary, Freeman's still maintained that the side effects of lobotomy were a small price to pay to cure mental ailments. But by the mid 60s, the medical community and the public firmly disagreed. Many of Freeman's lobotomy patients were now five, 10 or even 15 years post operation.

Freeman claims many were leading so-called productive lives. He had the letters to prove it. But the first long term studies of lobotomy patients were revealing that productive often meant little more than successfully staying alive.

Since the early 1950s, Freeman had a post op questionnaire he called a life chart, it tracks different abilities in patients who had been lobotomized, but Freeman's ego left him unable to see his patients as people. They were only cases to be cured, he told the media. His goal was to have patients return to a productive life. But the chart revealed that the definition was rather easy to meet. The patients simply had to be able to do menial labor.

A woman whose mother had been lobotomized by Freeman in 1955 wrote that her mother's life was a daily routine of handwork, a few household chores, eating the three meals and snacks in between and going to bed pretty early.

Lila Mae, who Freeman lobotomized prior to 1957, was doing well, according to her husband Standard.

He told Freeman that Lila did a very acceptable job in the preparation of meals and the children's lunches for school, which cannot be measured in dollars and cents. For most of Freeman's lobotomy patients, this basic and boring standard of living was in fact the only standard.

Most lobotomy patients were able to manage simple routines and chores, but little else that required critical thinking or emotional perception.

The damage to their brains left them with other long term side effects that affected certain basic bodily functions, like the ability to control your urine or weight when the body wants us to eat the gut sense hormones and cytokines to the hypothalamus located in the limbic system, an area of the brain responsible for the autonomic hunka response, which should really be called the automatic response because it's reflexive and involuntary.

The limbic system then delivers this hunger response signal to the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain that gives us the desire and motivation to eat, damaging the part of the brain responsible for the reward and motivational aspects of eating along with the area that controls the body's natural hunger response. We lose these reflexes, control our appetite.

In a sense, these procedures turn many patients into human machines that were seriously uncalibrated, functioning only on a very basic level and poorly at best to most doctors.

In the 1960s, Freeman's ice pick to the brain cure seems barbaric in comparison to more modern treatments. Many Paul supporters of lobotomy now spoke out against it. The American Medical Association, which had once honored Freeman for developing the procedure, even wrote, It is inconceivable that any procedure that effectively destroys the brain could possibly restore the patient to a normal state. But Freeman didn't care what anyone else but his patients and their families thought, and many was still writing him letters of gratitude.

So he kept seeing new patients and performing lobotomies.

Freeman had always said that if a patient could hold down a basic job or do household chores after their lobotomy, it was considered a success, even if their cognitive abilities were significantly diminished after the procedure. Though patients emotions were often erased, Freeman told families that their loved ones were better off than with the terrible symptoms of mental health conditions. He also assured them that a lobotomy allowed patients to be at home instead of in an underfunded state hospital. But if someone's mother, brother or daughter could find similar relief by taking a pill at home, why subject them to a lobotomy?

It was a question Freeman couldn't answer, and it shook him deeply.

For over 15 years, Freeman had been at the top of his field, but now the field was turning on him. He had few defenders in the medical community. His old partner, neurosurgeon James, was shied away from discussing his history with Freeman. Dr. Agus Moniz, the Portuguese neurologist who had developed the initial new Kotomi procedure and won a Nobel Prize for it, had died in 1955. Several former patients had died or committed suicide, while others were left debilitated.

The shine of lobotomy was now a dark cloud hanging over Freeman. His fame had become infamy. Without his reputation, Freeman likely felt like he had nothing. His family life was far from perfect. He'd had numerous affairs, and his wife suffered from alcoholism. His name was synonymous with the treatment other doctors regarded as cruel and unnecessary. But Freeman needed to be necessary, so he kept doing what he did best lobotomies to maintain his inflated sense of accomplishment.

He was willing to take a few risks with patients lives until the procedure he'd made famous finally cost him everything. Up next, Freeman kills his final patient now back to the story.

In 1967, a housewife named Helen Mortenson returned to Freeman's office for her third lobotomy.

She had been one of the first 10 patients to receive a transorbital lobotomy in 1946 after a relapse of symptoms in 1956. Freeman had done another. Now, over 10 years later, she was requesting a third, unlike Wilma Rogers case years before now. Freeman apparently wanted to do as many lobotomies as possible. After all, there weren't so many opportunities to use his skills anymore. He agreed to perform another procedure on Helen.

Her third lobotomy was supposed to be just like the others, but this time something went terribly wrong. Using his icepick, Freeman created a bleed which immediately depleted the oxygen levels in Helen's brain, ultimately killing her.

If Helen had undergone her procedure by a qualified neurosurgeon and a blood vessel was nicked or cut, that blood vessel would have been clipped immediately and the blood vessel would have been restored to its normal functioning and she would have most likely survived. A neurosurgeon clearly understands the anatomy of the blood vessels in the brain, so when they're doing their operations, they have an idea of what they're about to find. And when they come to blood vessels, they are, of course, particularly careful.

If for some reason one of these blood vessels is nicked or punctured, they have all the tools necessary to repair that vessel right at the time. Freeman, on the other hand, was going after blood vessels without any visual input and could not possibly understand what tissues he was cutting.

Helen's death was the last straw for the medical community. Freeman was no longer allowed to operate on patients. His office was permanently closed. Helen's botched lobotomy was the end of Walter Freeman's career, but it wasn't the end of Walter Freeman. In early nineteen sixty eight, 72 year old Dr. Walter Freeman set out on a cross-country road trip, he was no longer practicing medicine, but he was still seeking patients. Freeman's legacy was on the line and he wanted to revisit his patients to collect evidence that lobotomy worked.

But Freeman discovered he was more notorious than famous. The treatment he had championed for over three decades was now considered a medical mistake or a tool for murder.

Freeman's once revered procedure was now derided in the medical community, and he was viewed as a reckless doctor from a bygone era. Interestingly, however, the legacy of lobotomy has led to some pretty important advances in the treatment of mental illness. For instance, the horrors of this procedure ultimately led to a deeper conversation and exploration into the origins of treatments in mental health, leading to an understanding of the causative relationship between brain chemistry and psychiatric problems. This knowledge has provoked the rise of contemporary targeted psychopharmacological treatments for mental health disorders, virtually eliminating the need for most psychosurgery altogether.

It's unlikely Freeman found what he was looking for in his field trips across the country, he traveled over 7000 miles in the spring of 1968, visiting patients and hospitals. But he found that the correspondence he believed was proof of his success was little more than a pastime for his patients. He saw the lives they were leading, simple, repetitive and devoid of meaning, much like his own, as he'd done his entire career. He resolved himself to see the results he was looking for, even if it meant ignoring evidence to the contrary.

In his journal, Freeman said, I'm like any other hunter that gets on the trail of something, he loses sense of time and distance. It's such an absorbing preoccupation that mere physical matters don't hold to person in his pursuit.

By 1970, lobotomy was illegal in many countries around the world, including Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union. Though there were few parts of the world where his notorious treatment was allowed, Freeman still continued his hunt for glory. At home, he traversed the United States revisiting lobotomize patients years after their procedures and interviewing them, he was seeking a wide enough sample of positive testimonies to justify his glorification of lobotomy.

Unfortunately, he never found them. Freeman's attempt to prove the worth of his career was cut short by a cancer diagnosis in early 1972, he underwent surgery for cancer. It didn't work and the operation led to fatal complications.

Dr. Walter Freeman died on May 31st, 1972, just five years after performing his final lobotomy after causing the deaths of so many. He never faced justice. And though he had traveled to seek out many of his surviving former patients, most never heard from him again. Including Howard Dully, who was 12 years old when Freeman operated on his brain after Freeman's death, Howard discovered that his stepmother had possibly gone to several doctors before Freeman. The other doctors said there was nothing wrong with him and that he was a normal boy.

But Freeman had been willing to lobotomize him anyway. Howard spent years getting his life together, but feeling like he never quite managed to do so, he said. I'll never know what I lost in those 10 minutes with Dr. Freeman and his ice pick. By some miracle, it didn't turn me into a zombie, crush my spirit or kill me. But Walter Freeman's operation was supposed to relieve suffering. In my case, it did just the opposite. Ever since my lobotomy, I felt like a freak, ashamed.

Walter Freeman had been convinced he would influence the fields of neurology and psychiatry forever. In a twist of fate, he was largely correct. Three years after Freeman died, the lobotomy was immortalized in celluloid in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Based on the 1962 novel by Ken Kesey, Jack Nicholson's character is tragically forced to undergo the procedure. The film became the cultural touchstone for lobotomy, a brutal shorthand for psychiatry and mental health that left the public scared.

Then, a decade after his death, a strange medical case provided a twisted conclusion to Walter Freeman's lifelong assertion that lobotomy was a cure. In 1983, a young man with obsessive compulsive disorder survived a terrible head wound, but then discovered he was free from all his symptoms. The doctors treating him said his injury had been somewhat similar to a lobotomy. One difference was that the young man had put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

The horrific effects of lobotomy created a dark reputation for psychiatric surgery for decades. The procedure became so archaic that by the 1990s, many doctors and nurses went their entire careers without encountering a lobotomized patient. But even if they did, the massive damage to the brain caused by lobotomy was frequently unfathomable to modern medical workers in the mid 1990s. Dr. Gary Cordingly worked at a hospital near Athens, Ohio. He'd been called in to consult on a patient after a radiologist had taken a CT scan that showed extensive abnormalities in the patient's brain.

The radiologist told Dr. Cordingly that the patient had likely had a series of massive strokes. But when Cordingly investigated the patient's medical history, he discovered that they were one of Dr. Freeman's former patients. Cordingly realized that the vast stroke, like damage to the patient's brain, had been done on purpose. He was seeing the physical results of a 30 year old lobotomy. Over 40000 lobotomies were done on Americans in the 40s and 50s, not to mention the numerous procedures performed around the world.

This was a time when our understanding of the brain was embryonic and profoundly limited. Like many other areas in medicine today, however, with modern CT and MRI imaging, a lobotomy simply looks like brain trauma.

These scans consistently demonstrate symmetrical, cavernous lesions in the white matter of the brain's frontal lobe, trauma to the limbic system and bone changes where the instruments entered the skull.

In essence, Freeman's cure looks exactly like what it was intentional brain damage.

Dr. Walter Freeman believed he had discovered a miracle cure in lobotomy. Instead, he inflicted serious brain damage on thousands of patients over the course of three decades.

Freeman's need for relevance and fame inflated his ego and blinded him to the barbaric truth. Lobotomy was a dangerous procedure that either erased patient's entire sense of self or killed them.

Thanks for listening to medical murders and thanks again to Dr. Kipa for joining me today. Thanks for having me.

For more information on Walter Freeman, among the many sources we used, we found the PBS American Experience documentary, The Lobotomist, extremely helpful to our research.

You can find all episodes of medical murders and all other podcast originals for free on Spotify, not only to Spotify, already have all of your favorite music, but now Spotify is making it easy for you to enjoy all of your favorite podcast originals like medical murders for free from your phone, desktop or smart speaker to stream medical murders on Spotify. Just open the app and type medical murders in this search bar. We'll see you next time.

Medical murders was created by Max Cutler and is a PARCA Studio's original. It is executive produced by Max Cutler Sound designed by Trent Williamson with production assistance by Ron Shapiro, Carly Madden, Kristen Acevedo, Jonathan Cohen, Jonathan Ratliff and Bruce Kaktovik. This episode of Medical Murders was written by Andrew Messa with writing assistants by Maggie Admire and stars David Kipa and Alistair Murden.

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