My Lobotomy

While the book itself wasn’t the best written, I was certainly moved by Howard Dully’s memoir, My Lobotomy.  Dully endured the unbelievable process of an orbital lobotomy at the hands of the infamous Dr. Walter Freeman (he also performed the same procedure on Rose Kennedy).  Freeman is known to have driven around the US in his “lobotomobile” performing the procedure on others across the country.  In total he is believed to have performed 3,500! How was this allowed to happen?!  Dully is courageous in coming forward and sharing his life story, starting from the death of his mother at the age of 3 and then moving in with his father and step-mother, Lou, who is the person who contacted Dr. Freeman based on Howard’s behavior as a child.  Howard, 45+ years after the procedure, begins to use the internet to reconstruct what happened to him and is introduced to some investigative reporters who help him find the history that allude him for his adult life.  The chapters are broken into each part of his life (birth to current day) and chronicle the people and experiences he has had throughout his difficult life.  To think that a person could even survive the traumatic procedure is incredible!  Howard was a energetic kid who had a step-mother who could not control him, so she believed that the lobotomy would do so.  After she realized that a “kid was just a kid” and that she couldn’t control him even after this, he was sent to state homes, juvenile centers, family members, and half-way houses (all at different moments in time).  Howard was left to his own devices to survive.  He had challenging relationships, experimented with drugs, and even became physically abusive at one point in his life.  Dully shares the “therapeutic “ stages of learning his history when the records of Dr. Freeman were released (which he publishes in the book) so that he can better understand why Lou would have chosen this course of action for his life.  What a courageous man to place himself into the mainstream media to uncover a practice that was banned from the medical associations during the time of Freeman.  NPR, the journalists who assisted in the uncovering of Dully’s trauma, are to be lauded for their work and for giving Dully answers to “why."  Dully does confront his father and mends the fences in some ways in the conclusion of the book and we learn that his exposure of lobotomies does much to send a healing connection to others whose family members endured such a horrific procedure.  A quick read and important for those in the medical field who think that humans should be experimented on….