Listener discretion is advised. This episode features discussions of medical malpractice, mental health conditions and surgical procedures that may be upsetting.

We advise extreme caution for listeners under 13.

There's a common saying about professionals and their work always use the right tool for the job. Doctors trained for years to know which medicines and procedures will best help their patients. And for our episode today, another famous saying is more fitting. When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Today, we'll explore how one doctor's ego led him to believe that he could cure any mental illness with an ice pick.

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

Hi, everyone. This is Dr. Kipper. I'm very happy to be here to assist Alastair with some medical insight and information into the killer's modus operandi. And I'm very excited to hear the story of Dr. Freeman.

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. Just open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. This is our first episode on Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist and medical professor who performed thousands of lobotomies on patients with mental illnesses for over three decades, guided by dreams of fame and willful ignorance. Freeman performed many of his operations without proper consent.

While murder was never his intention, his callous use of lobotomy resulted in the deaths of over 400 people, around 15 percent of his patients. Today, we'll look at the influence of Freeman's education and family dynasty on his ego, as well as his discovery of the lobotomy technique. Next time, we'll follow his growing obsession with the procedure and his eventual downfall.

All this and more coming up. Stay with us. Six year old Angelina Ionesco was scared she didn't know when her mother, Ellen, was going to get angry again. It was a wintery day in January 1946, and Ellen was lying in bed with another dark bout of depression. Angelina was at her bedside watching over her sick mother, but Ellen wouldn't look at her. She only stared at the ceiling.

Occasionally, Ellen pointed up at the blank white space above her, telling Angelina to look at the wires. Those were the torture devices, her mother told her. But Angelina knew there were no wires and nobody was torturing her mother. The only person torturing anyone was Ellen. Her aggressive mood swings kept the whole family on edge. Angelina never knew when her mother was going to explode with aggression. One day, Ellen leapt out of bed and proved that her young daughter was right to be scared, blinded by a fit of rage.

Ellen attacked Angelina and tried to suffocate the little girl to death.

That was the last straw the Ionesco family decided to get medical help for Alan.

A short time later, on January 17th, 1946, the Ionesco family brought Ellen to Dr. Walter Freeman at his Washington, D.C. office. Angelina, Dr. Freeman was a kind man. He smiled at her and he had a funny white mustache. He spoke calmly, describing some kind of procedure that Angelina couldn't understand. Then Dr. Freeman quietly took Ellen into a back room and close the door.

A few minutes later, the patient room was filled with a strange clicking sound like someone tapping two small rocks together.

Just moments later, Dr. Freeman brought Ellen back out of the room as Ellen recovered. Angelina couldn't believe it. Her mother was serene and happy. Ellen even smiled at Angelina, which made the little girl ecstatic. Whatever Dr. Freeman had done, it had apparently cured her mother's strange illness.

Ellen ESCOs symptoms are typical of patients suffering from mental illness, and a good diagnosis in her case would be a bipolar disorder in the 1940s.

However, psychiatric diagnoses were non-specific and defined by manifesting behaviors like depression, anxiety and mania.

Back then, the brain was only superficially understood, and our knowledge came strictly from autopsies and the behaviors that we were able to understand. There were no imaging studies and the link between neurochemistry and these disorders was yet to be realized. In other words, doctors didn't know how to cure mental illness. They only knew how to treat the resulting symptoms. By eliminating Ellen's symptoms, Dr. Freeman was a hero to the Ionesco family, and that was an intoxicating feeling.

Freeman was used to being admired, but now he wanted more.

While this was merely the first time he performed this procedure alone, it felt like he discovered a new path in his career. Freeman felt like he was finally heading for the recognition he deserved, even if he had to endanger his patients to achieve it.

After all, he'd always been destined for greatness in the field of medicine. Not only was Freeman a doctor, but he was sired by doctors, his bloodline included several famous physicians, including Steven Camp, a founder of the New Jersey Medical Society.

But Freeman's most prominent relative was his grandfather, neurosurgeon William Keene. At the turn of the 20th century, Keane was arguably America's most famous surgeon. He had been a surgeon for the U.S. Army during the Civil War and was the first surgeon to remove a brain tumor from a living patient. King was even the medical consultant for presidents Grover Cleveland and Franklin Roosevelt.

Alongside his lineage, Freeman's Ivy League education solidified his belief in his own prowess, especially when he challenged authority while studying at Yale University. Freeman took a clandestine photograph during a meeting of the Scroll and Key Society, one of Yale's oldest and most infamous secret societies. The existence of a photograph alone was enough to stir up controversy. The fact that Freeman sent it to the New York Times for publication made him notorious on campus. But thanks to his newfound fame, he managed to evade any repercussions.

When he graduated from Yale in 1916, Freeman moved on to the next step of his obvious career path. He went to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. Freeman believed he was destined to become a famous name in the field of neurology. His heroes were neurosurgeons like Charles Frazier and William Spillar, both of whom revolutionized the understanding of the brain in the early 20th century. Freeman was lucky enough to work with both of them during his medical training, which likely furthered his belief in a predestined career.

His ego was stoked by their influence, and he saw how highly they were regarded by their patients and their peers. Some of these neurologists made groundbreaking discoveries in a lab without ever performing surgery or slogging through the arduous task of getting a surgeon's license. They revolutionized the field. They with the best of the best, naturally. Freeman wanted to be one of them.

Throughout history, doctors have been highly regarded across the world among the cream of the crop or neurosurgeons whose work tends to be revered. This is largely due to their intensive training and the immensely complicated nature of the brain itself. Naturally, a doctor's perceived importance increases exponentially. The bar their specialty is tied to the difference between life and death. In other words, the more lives a doctor can directly save, the more supposed value they generally hold. Because of this, many doctors find themselves in positions of immense power and respect.

However, for a doctor to be effective and ethical, ego needs to be checked at the door.

Helping patients should always be a physician's first concern, and Freeman did want to help his patients. But once he left academia and began treating real patients, he discovered there were simply too many to help. After Freeman finished his residency in 1924, his famous grandfather helped him get a position as a laboratory director at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., Freeman was disappointed in this job. He'd wanted a prestigious academic career alongside his neurosurgeon heroes. He had applied to teach with him at his alma mater in Pennsylvania, but had been rejected.

28 year old Freeman found a bit of comfort in the fact that he was to be the youngest director of laboratories in St. Elizabeth's history, and he felt much better about his job after he learned about the reputation of the hospital's institution for the insane. St. Elizabeth's was home to nearly 5000 patients with mental health conditions, and St. Elizabeth's was hardly unique. The number of psychiatric patients and hospitals in the US had increased significantly in the previous 20 years. Freeman found himself in charge of research at one of the busiest mental hospitals in the country, and he was determined to turn it around.

The psychiatric hospital was seven decades old and in rapid decline. It had become little more than a dilapidated warehouse for patients with schizophrenia, dementia and psychosis. As he walked through the overstuffed wards, Freeman said he felt a weird mixture of fear, disgust and shame.

He was intrigued by the helplessness of these patients, but not out of sympathy alone. Freeman also saw a medical mystery that only he could solve for him. Patients were research opportunities.

He drove into treatment research for the further the other doctors and nurses couldn't believe.

Freeman quickly developed a reputation for trying unconventional treatments like chemical injections that traveled quickly into the brain and a fast invasive procedure. He called a Jiffy Spinal Tap. But Freeman's procedures were hardly worse than the other treatments for mental illness that were popular at the time.

It's true among the fast acting injectables used to treat mental illness in the 1940s was sodium amatol known today as Amwell Barbital. Sodium amatol is a barbiturate derivative or a drug known to slow down the nervous system. This drug was used in the 30s and 40s to temporarily reverse the catatonic state of patients with schizophrenia.

Catatonia is a state where people are very rigid in their posturing, and they also have a very muted dialogue. And this is something that we see very frequently with schizophrenia when taking a barbiturate in these situations, these behaviors seem to normalize the downsides of this, where the intense dependence the drug created and the issue of death by overdose. Another example is electroshock therapy, now known as electroconvulsive therapy. This involves electrically inducing seizures to disrupt the brain activity in the 1940s.

This treatment was much harsher than it is today because it was usually conducted without muscle relaxants.

As a result, induced seizures would lead to full scale convulsions and could cause bone fractures and dislocations in the jaw and upper spine.

While these treatments were much less refined in the past, they still exist today as extreme last resort options for dealing with mental health disorders. While these treatments rarely killed any patients, some were left with seizures and permanent brain damage, often in addition to the original symptoms.

But these procedures had mild success, whereas treatments that did not physically affect the brain were frequently ineffective. Freeman was convinced that to fix mental illness, one had to fix the brain itself. So he shifted his research from treating living patients to opening the skulls of dead ones if there was a defect in the brain. Freeman was going to find it. Coming up, Freeman finds a new technique and his first victim. My listeners, Alistair, here with a quick but special announcement, the newest Spotify original from podcast is Unlocking the Mysteries of Superstitions.

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Now back to the story. By the early 1930s, Dr. Walter Freeman considered himself an expert on mental illness as the director of laboratories at St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital. He was the foremost authority over thousands of mental patients, but his research had stalled.

After dozens of autopsies, he could find no physical abnormalities that might explain the mental health conditions of his patients.

Freeman was disheartened. He had hoped to discover a physical cause for mental illness in the brain and perhaps even have it named after him. Instead, his work was far from groundbreaking. He said, I recognized that I'd done nothing important in either explaining mental disorders or treating them. All Freeman had proven with his tedious autopsies was that the brain of a person suffering from mental illness looked just like anyone else's. This meant that such illness came from within the brain's neural network.

Some parts of the cortex was disrupting neurological functions. Freeman began to suspect the frontal lobes.

Freeman had the idea that the frontal lobes were the source of mental health and behavioral conditions. He was on to something located right behind our foreheads. The frontal lobes are in charge of such things as our voluntary movements, language, expression and greater executive functioning. This includes the ability to logically plan ahead and self regulate our emotional responses because of the complex and layered reasoning that takes place in this portion of the brain. The frontal lobes have been deemed responsible for how our personality is manifested.

One famous case study that led to this assertion is the story of Phineas Gage, a construction foreman in 1848 whose left frontal lobe was pierced by a large iron rod during a workplace accident. Despite retaining normal motor skills, speech and memory gauge, his temperament changed significantly as he was more prone to impatience and irritability. This story no doubt had an effect on Freeman's inklings, and Freeman wasn't alone in his suspicions.

While reading a medical journal in the spring of nineteen thirty six, he found an article about a doctor doing revolutionary procedures on frontal lobe tissue.

On March 3rd, 1936, Portuguese neurologist Antonio Mooneys performed a new surgical procedure he called a blue Kotomi. Mooneys believe that misfiring synapses in the frontal lobe were responsible for the symptoms of many mentally ill patients, so he sought to deactivate the synapses.

He did this by drilling two holes, one on either side of the patient's skull, then injecting pure alcohol directly into her frontal lobes and doing this monice hope to destroy clusters of synapses.

He felt that mental illness originated in these synapses. And by removing or destroying white matter in this region of the brain, he could stop the problem at its source. The brain is made up of two different structures gray matter and white matter. In the gray matter, all of the functioning of the brain takes place. Everything from our movements, our emotions, our thinking, our reasoning and judgment.

The white matter of the brain is a highway that carries information from the gray matter in the brain to the spinal cord and into the rest of the body. The function of the white matter was to protect the nerves within. And by destroying the white matter, the nerves became exposed and became dysfunctional. Interestingly enough, the patient recovered quickly from a physical standpoint, and after two months she was calmer and her anxiety and paranoia were significantly muted. Mooneys reports. Is that of the 20 patients who underwent the procedure for severe mood swings, 35 percent experienced a complete relief of mental disturbance and another thirty five percent reported consistent benefits.

Though Moniz's procedure didn't help the last third of his patients, Freeman was excited to read about the other results. He immediately wrote to Mooneys, opening up a chain of frequent communication that would continue for years. Freeman was enthralled by the Lou Kotomi, and he wanted to replicate Moniz's procedure in the United States. Normally, doctors might consider more research and trials before attempting a new procedure, but Freeman sought to recommend the operation much sooner than the typical timeline would allow.

He only had one problem. Freeman didn't have a license to perform surgery, so he approached James Watts, a young neurosurgeon who'd been working with him in Washington, DC. Although both neurologists and neurosurgeons treat and diagnose diseases of the nervous system, neurologists aren't licensed to practice surgery.

For example, a neurologist can check on tests for and locate a brain tumor, but a neurosurgeon would have to be the one to remove it. Because of this, Freeman needed what if he wanted his apt experiments to be recognized with any legitimacy, he could still be in control, instructing watch throughout. The operation, but he needed a surgeon to make the actual incisions and move the instruments. Luckily for Freeman, Watts was equally intrigued by Moniz's work and agreed to help perform the first American, Lou Kotomi.

But in keeping with his reputation, Freeman had an unconventional twist. He wanted to add to the procedure. He told Watts that he was going to improve the procedure. Going further, the Mooneys did, rather than just remove cores from the frontal lobe, Freeman intended to manually sever the connecting nerve strands between the frontal lobes and the thalamus.

Freeman and Watts decided this modified surgery wasn't going to be called glucosamine anymore. After all, Freeman might have used Moniz's discovery as a foundation, but this was his own technique. Freeman dubbed his procedure the lobotomies as it essentially separated the frontal lobes.

And on September 4th, 1936, Freeman and Watts performed the first lobotomy on a severely depressed woman named Alice Hamet. These early prefrontal lobotomies were invasive procedures, first two holes were drilled into the skull, one on each side over the right and left frontal lobes, then Alucard tall or a long, thin, sharp like surgical instrument was pushed through the drill hole over the left lobe and into the brain.

This effectively severed the connective tissue between the frontal lobes and the thalamus, modifying and sometimes erasing longstanding behavioral patterns. With prefrontal lobotomy, the side effect of incontinence was not uncommon. The reason for this is that the neural pathways that control our bladder are situated in the very area that these structures were severed in time. After the inflammation from the procedure resolved, patients would regain their continence. It's also important to keep in mind that this operation is inherently very dangerous and subject to possible catastrophic results.

In some instances, lobotomised subjects were left severely brain damaged with horrible mental and physical impairments, while others were able to uphold a seemingly normal life with responsible employment.

However, most people fell somewhere in the middle in terms of results, experiencing some improvements in their original symptoms, along with some sort of emotional or cognitive deficit. Freeman declared the procedure a success.

The surgery had been completed in about an hour when Alice awoke from her anesthesia. She was free from dark thoughts in the weeks afterward.

In fact, she was free from most thoughts at all. The lobotomy had rendered Alice calm and quiet, but also erased much of her personality and emotion.

She had her memories and most cognitive abilities, but it was like Alice herself wasn't there anymore. As Freeman and Watts performed dozens of lobotomies over the next few months, this result was common. There were varying degrees of erasure for patients. Their mental health conditions were often gone, but so were the patient's personalities. Lobotomy patients became more childlike or simply emotional blank slates. They were often incapable of complex thoughts and judgments. Moreover, alleviation from their symptoms was sometimes only temporary, and the patients required second or third operations.

But Freeman was unconcerned by these developments. His goal had been to eliminate mental health conditions, and the lobotomy was doing this effectively and quickly. His patients were alive, healthy and free from mood swings and to him. This was worth a bit of personality loss. Freeman was convinced that lobotomy was less barbaric than other treatments, so he surged ahead in the next step of his research. He and Watts started doing lobotomies on patients while they were still awake.

As what's cut through their brain tissue, Freeman asked them to do simple mental tasks like count backward or recite presidents names or sing a song, he monitored their actions and facial expressions to learn the results of different depths of cuts. What would cut brain tissue at two centimeters, then four centimeters? Then Freeman would have him move the instrument at a 20 degree angle and repeat the cuts. Since each slice was permanent, there was only so much Freeman could observe with each individual procedure.

So to learn more, he simply performed more lobotomies with overwhelming numbers of mentally ill patients in the psychiatry wards of surrounding hospitals.

There was no shortage of opportunities for practice, and since the notion of informed consent was not yet a reality. Patients may not have known exactly what they were getting into. Freeman and Watts were essentially able to dig around their patients brains at their leisure.

By the end of 1941, Freeman and Watts had standardized the lobotomy, making it faster and more efficient. In doing so, they made the procedure seem like an easy, non-invasive alternative to otherwise barbaric treatments. This new miracle technique dramatically increased Freeman's reputation with a little help. Freeman was very savvy in matters of public relations, and he made sure that successful operations were featured in newspapers and medical journals. He invited science reporters to sit in on prefrontal lobotomies to impress them.

After seeing the change in one the bottom in patient, a Saturday Evening Post reporter wrote that a world that once seemed the abode of misery, cruelty and hate is now radiant with sunshine and kindness.

Freeman's PR push was working, people were coming to him for his miracle cure, and nothing proved how highly the public regarded him, like his 66 patient who was by far his most famous and one of his most disastrous.

In November 1941, the dynastic Kennedy family brought in twenty three year old Rosemary, the youngest sister of future President John F. Kennedy. She was suffering from violent outbursts and alleged wild behavior. She had been kicked out of summer camps and run away from school. Above all, her father, Joseph, was concerned that she would get pregnant and cause a scandal. The politically minded family was desperate for a quick, safe and surreptitious procedure, and they found that Dr.

Freeman was more than willing to provide one.

Twenty three year old Rosemary Kennedy was suffering from possible seizures and mood swings. Upon seeing her doctor, Freeman diagnosed her with agitated depression, which was likely a correct interpretation given what we know about her symptoms. He immediately suggested a lobotomy to correct her behavior and quickly got to work.

However, something went wrong during the procedure, as Rosemary was left with the mental capacity of a toddler and the inability to speak. This was likely the result of a too deep or too long of a cut into the brain tissue, a cut that goes to deep during one of these procedures cuts into the limbic system. That's the part of the brain that controls our emotions. Following the operation, Rosemary was institutionalized and she never regained her mental faculties, nor the ability to speak coherently.

Rosemary not only lost her personality, but she lost the ability to live independently. She became incontinent and wholly reliant on caregivers. Rosemary was institutionalized for the rest of her life.

But the botched lobotomy didn't stop Freeman. It's possible he believed that if there was a post-operative problem, it was because of the patient, not the procedure. Of the nearly 200 lobotomies Freeman and Watson performed by the end of 1942, a reported 63 percent had successfully eliminated many of the patient's symptoms. Freeman likely believed Rosemary was just one of the few patients who suffered severe cognitive loss in the weeks after their lobotomy. But he wasn't dwelling on those patients. His successful lobotomies were what mattered.

The dire outcome of Rosemary's case was a risk Freeman was willing to take to achieve a cure for mental illness.

Besides, he and what still had dozens of patients waiting for them to work their medical magic. But as the public's recognition of lobotomy increased, so did Freeman's frustration. He developed this procedure but couldn't perform it himself. Freeman wanted to find an easier method of entering the skull and severing the frontal lobes. If he discovered a non-surgical path into the brain, he could perform lobotomies and then trained other neurologists to do than to his procedure could become the primary treatment for mental illness in the United States.

It would be a legacy befitting his family name and his career. So Freeman found a way to perform brain surgery that didn't require a surgeon, and he started in his own kitchen.

Up next, Freeman finds an alarming new tool for his lobotomies. Now back to the story. By the early 1940s, Dr. Walter Freeman had become a polarizing figure in medicine after leveraging his position as director of laboratories at St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Hospital. Freeman was now the chairman of the neurology department at George Washington University. He was an infamous member of the faculty, always dressed in a dapper outfit and known for his dramatics, especially during autopsies. He also ran a practice at the university with James Watts, where they conducted the majority of all lobotomies.

Freeman's career was exactly what he had hoped. It would be full of fame and respect to much of the public. He was a hero that cured the most difficult ailments, the mysterious ones in the brain. But to other doctors, he was a reckless and underqualified professor masquerading as a neurosurgeon. When Freeman and Watts presented their early case findings on lobotomy to a medical conference in Baltimore. They were met with outrage. Freeman had announced the prefrontal lobotomy as a revolutionary new cure for mental illness.

But the other doctors had immediate questions. Some were so enraged that they shouted at him from the audience, How dare he try this untested procedure on unwilling patients? How could he possibly assure them they wouldn't die on the operating table? Freeman calmed his contemporaries by assuring them that lobotomy was a last resort procedure. He claimed he was well aware that it would take years to properly study the long term effects of lobotomy. But Freeman also knew that the criticism would likely never reach the public.

At the time, it was rare for doctors to publicly criticize other doctors. No matter the criticisms he faced, Freeman wasn't concerned with winning over other doctors, he saw himself as one of the best among them. He was on the cutting edge of medicine. And besides, while some doctors may have doubted him, the public was enthralled by lobotomy to the newspapers.

His credibility was beyond question, and Freeman knew it.

So he focused his attention on the public opinion and the public returned the favor.

As World War Two drew to an end, thousands of veterans were returning home with troubling behaviors and mental states, many were put into psychiatric hospitals that were woefully underfunded. Soon, the public turned its attention to mental illness in a way it never had before. Exposed stories about the disgusting conditions in mental wards and the suffering of vets caused endless public outcry. Freeman had seen this before, 20 years ago at St. Elizabeth's. He recalled the hopelessness he felt facing the overwhelming number of patients and their terrible circumstances.

But now he had a secret weapon. The lobotomy lobotomies had stopped suicidal thoughts, addictions, obsessions, behavioral impulses. They had allowed patients to go home. The public yearned for a quick solution to overcrowded hospitals, and Walter Freeman was ready to provide it. Contrary to what he had told the outraged doctors, he imagined that lobotomy could be the premier treatment for mental illness, the procedure would not only solidify his reputation in medicine, but put him in the history books.

Freeman didn't appear to be overly concerned about the well-being of his patients. He saw that America was suffering from a budgeting problem in psychiatry.

Too many patients, not enough wards.

The lobotomies could solve the financial problems facing hospitals and give patients a chance to live a life outside of institutions.

But to convince the widespread American medical community to adopt a lobotomy as the best treatment, the procedure would need to be faster, easier and cheaper.

While it's a reality that price is something worth considering, it's secondary to good treatment outcomes. Nevertheless, affordable solutions are always preferable over expensive ones if proven effective. And the managed care model is founded on this very principle of watching the piggy bank.

Managed care is a health care system that's designed through algorithms to control costs with diagnostic and treatment options that ensure the most cost effective way of treating patients.

If Freeman could somehow make his procedure less expensive, it would superficially be a more attractive and viable treatment option.

Freeman saw an opportunity for his procedure to make medical history, but he still couldn't perform a lobotomy without wants. His ego simply wouldn't allow him to be a kind of doctor who touted a cure that he couldn't provide himself. Since the university hospital wouldn't license Freeman to perform surgery, Freeman set about circumventing the system just like he had at Yale.

One of the most pressing issues separating surgery from other medical procedures was general anesthesia. Freeman, however, knew he could knock out patients with a portable electroshock machine. In fact, he kept one in his office for occasional shock treatments. Now all he had to do was find a way to get into the brain without drilling through the skull, which required a surgical auger in his research. He discovered an obscure technique first outlined by an Italian psychiatrist named Americium, Betty Fembot.

He knew that the skull was extremely thin in the orbital cavity just above the eyeball, using a long, thin metal rod with the pointed end fee. And Betty was able to break through the skull with a simple tap. Just as he had with Moniz's work, Freeman decided to replicate the procedure, but added a twist to make it his own. That night, he went home and took a pair of ice picks from a drawer in his family's kitchen.

They were slender metal rods about eight inches long, with sharp metal points at one end and small handles at the other. To Freeman, they were the perfect tool for the job.

One morning when James Watts arrived at their shared medical office at the university campus, he found Freeman standing over a patient on the operating table. The ice picks was stuck through both of the patient's eye sockets.

Freeman had one thing right. The eye sockets are the most efficient route to the brain. This is because they're the nearest natural point of entry to the frontal lobes and the eyeballs themselves have a natural give to them. In other words, eyeballs and their surrounding tissues are very elastic, meaning they can be stretched and move to an extent without causing real damage. As such, it would be easy to slip an icepick past the eyeball, allowing for unhindered penetration into the socket.

Remember, he wanted a more cost effective way to do this. And also as a non surgeon, he had the ability to do this procedure on his own. He didn't have to open the skull. He didn't have to drill a bone into the skull. He could just enter the frontal lobes through the eye socket. And it was the same tissue that was destroyed. While Freeman found the icepick technique to be convenient and effective, it was utterly alarming to a trained neurosurgeon like what Watts couldn't believe what he was seeing.

But Freeman gave him a smile and casually said, Jim, can you come here and hold the pics while I take a photo? What was alarmed at Freeman's callous lack of care in the procedure, he was performing it in their outpatient office, which was hardly a sterile environment. Freeman seems unfazed by what's criticism, he didn't need an operating room. He was being safe. Since the ice picks touched the eyeball, he used different ones for each side. In fact, this patient was fine and would be heading home in an hour.

Freeman claimed the procedure was as safe as any simple injection. Without saying a word, what's walked out after that morning, the two no longer shared an office. But Freeman didn't care, he was just getting started. He didn't need what's with this new transorbital technique, he could perform a lobotomy by himself in just a few minutes, a patient could come in after lunch and be home by supper. Freeman knew there were thousands of patients waiting for him in crowded hospitals across the country, thanks to the extensive newspaper coverage he had inspired, the public was already familiar with the lobotomy.

Since Freeman was its most popular champion. He was certain this new and improved version would be celebrated and happily welcomed everywhere. So he packed up his ice picks and did what any celebrity does. He went on a national tour. Next time on medical murders, Dr. Walter Freeman surges ahead with his alleged miracle cure. Despite knowing the dire results for his patients personalities and emotional capability, Freeman performs thousands of lobotomies across the United States and invites his own downfall as his patients begin to die on the operating table.

Thanks for listening to medical matters, and thanks again to Dr. Kipa for joining me today. Thank you very much.

For more information on Walter Freeman, among the many sources we used, we found the Journal of Neurosurgery article Psychosurgery, Ethics and Media A History of Walter Freeman and the Lobotomy, as well as the PBS 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 small speaker to stream medical murders on Spotify. Just open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. We'll see you next time. Medical murders was created by Max Cutler and his apartment studio's original.

It is executive produced by Max Cutler Sound designed by Trent Williamson with production assistance by Carly Madden, Kristen Acevedo, Jonathan Cohen, Jonathan Ratliff and Erin Larson. This episode of Medical Murders was written by Andrew Messa with writing Insistence by Maggie Admire and Stars David Kipa and Alistair Murdered.

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