My Lobotomy
A memoir
-
-
5.0 • 5 Ratings
-
-
- £7.99
-
- £7.99
Publisher Description
Howard Dully was 12 years old when he was given a lobotomy. He was 56 years old when he found out why. The four decades in between tell a story of profound love and compassion.
In 1960 Howard's father and stepmother delivered him into the hands of the man who had invented the 'ice pick' lobotomy. Expelled from the mainstream medical community, his once-popular procedure now a grisly medical relic, Dr Walter Freeman was eager to turn this temperamental 12-year-old into a submissive boy - especially after hearing the terrible lies his stepmother told about him. Howard, told he was going into the hospital for tests, was instead given electro-shock treatments and a transorbital lobotomy. It took him 40 years to recover.
Howard Dully's escape from that dark place is a voyage of enormous hope and universal appeal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At age 12, in 1960, Dully received a transorbital or "ice pick" lobotomy from Dr. Walter Freeman, who invented the procedure, making Dully an unfortunate statistic in medical history the youngest of the more than 10,000 patients who Freeman lobotomized to cure their supposed mental illness. In this brutally honest memoir, Dully, writing with Fleming (The Ivory Coast), describes how he set out 40 years later to find out why he was lobotomized, since he did not exhibit any signs of mental instability at the time, and why, postoperation, he was bounced between various institutions and then slowly fell into a life of drug and alcohol abuse. His journey first described in a National Public Radio feature in 2005 finds Dully discovering how deeply he was the victim of an unstable stepmother who systematically abused him and who then convinced his distant father that a lobotomy was the answer to Dully's acting out against her psychic torture. He also investigates the strange career of Freeman who wasn't a licensed psychiatrist including early acclaim by the New York Times and cross-country trips hawking the operation from his "Lobotomobile." But what is truly stunning is Dully's description of how he gained strength and a sense of self-worth by understanding how both Freeman and his stepmother were victims of their own family tragedies, and how he managed to somehow forgive them for the wreckage they caused in his life.
Customer Reviews
Great read!
Harrowing and sad story of the aftermath of a lobotomy on a 12 year old helpless child disowned by a crazy stepmother and left for the state to care for, worse still, for one doctor freeman to experiment on...very interesting, heartbreakingly sad. couldn't put this book down, highly recommended.