My Lobotomy: A Memoir

For the category Medical Memoir for the 2022 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE, I read My Lobotomy: A Memoir by Howard Dully, written with Charles Fleming, 2008.

I saw this book while browsing in a bookstore, and the title caught my eye. The idea of lobotomies has fascinated me for quite a while, particularly those called “ice pick lobotomies,” practiced by Walter Freeman from the 1940s to 50s. I first heard about the procedure because of the one performed on Rosemary Kennedy (John F. Kennedy’s sister), which turned her into a vegetable for the rest of her life. I was intrigued by the idea that a lobotomy patient (or victim) could write about it.

The “operation” involves ramming a long, sharp object (the first one really was an ice pick from Freeman’s kitchen) into the upper part of the eye socket, into the frontal lobe of the brain, and wiggling it around a bit. This was to disconnect this part of the brain from the rest because it was considered (or guessed) to be the area that created mental problems. Needless to say, it caused serious brain damage and often death. Patients who survived became quiet and docile, so were considered “cured.”

It’s hard to believe that this was really medical practice for a while – not performed secretly – even though Freeman was not qualified to do brain surgery and did not even treat it like surgery. He performed it in his office, without anesthesia, and without sterile conditions. Truth can really be stranger than fiction.

It’s even harder to believe that this operation was performed on a 12-year-old boy, with the consent of his parents, because he misbehaved. That boy was Howard Dully, who in 1960 underwent the procedure and lived to write a book about it in adulthood.

Or rather, he wrote about whatever he could remember of his life before and after the procedure, with input from those in his life who were still around to talk to him about it.

Dully’s mother died when he was 4 years old, and three years later his father married a woman who turned out to be the stepmother from hell. She was extremely controlling, was not at all kind or loving, and took an extreme dislike to young Howard. The part of the book that describes his life with this woman is heart-wrenching. All of the behaviors that she thought of as abnormal or dangerous sound like the typical behaviors of pre-adolescents: moodiness, belligerence, disobedience. When she found Walter Freeman, and his willingness (almost eagerness) to perform the procedure, she might have thought a lobotomy would either “cure” his behavior or that he would at least be rendered passive. She has no input into the book because it was after she died (when Dully was 54) that he realized if he wanted to learn about why he was lobotomized or about the parts of his life he couldn’t remember, then he had better start soon before other adults from his past died.

As part of his search for his past, he found that Freeman kept extremely detailed notes of all his patients, and he became the first lobotomy patient to read his own files. The excerpts from those notes form a fascinating, yet gruesome, part of the book. Of course, Freeman has long since been discredited, but it’s amazing to see from his writing how little understanding of the human brain or mental illness he had.

One of the things that struck me about Dully’s writing is that he never sounds angry or resentful about his father agreeing to the lobotomy. Many years later, during the writing of the book, he had a chance to question his father about it during a program on the National Public Radio station. His father not only doesn’t offer any kind of apology, he doesn’t feel that he did anything wrong. He says, “Nobody is perfect.” And when Dully asks him directly, “Do you love me?” he cannot answer the question, so instead Dully says that he loves him. His response: “Whatever made you think I didn’t know that?” adding “You shaped up pretty good.” Dully’s feeling about that response is, “It wasn’t ‘I love you, too,’ but it was enough. He was doing the best he could.”

The theme of parents who are unable to love, or at least unable to show love, runs through the book and through Dully’s life. It’s not hard to assume that the lack of love and support he had in his childhood led to some of the behaviors that his parents – and Freeman – considered “abnormal.”

Considering that this memoir relates such painful and disturbing details of Dully’s life, it’s difficult in a review to mention anything negative about the book. But I found the writing to be often simplistic and uneven, with a long series of short, elementary sentences in the sections relating one memory after another – often without any connection. Since a journalist helped Dully write the book, perhaps this style was used to indicate the disjointed nature of Dully’s memories. But sometimes I found the effect annoying.

Eventually Dully finds out why his lobotomy did not destroy his brain. He sees the extent of the damage during an MRI, but because it was done when he was a child, the brain was able to “heal” itself to an extent. He writes,

“I had always thought it was horrible that I underwent a lobotomy at the age of twelve. How could anyone do something so barbaric to a child? I always felt sorry for myself because this terrible thing had been done to me when I was so young. But now I saw that I was actually fortunate to be young when it happened. If I’d had the same lobotomy even five years later, when I was seventeen, I might not have had a life at all.”

I think it shows great strength of character to be able to see any positive aspect in such a negative experience. So even though he lost memories and had serious problems in his life afterward, he grew up to be a ”normal” adult who was able to have a loving relationship with his wife and two sons and was able to be successful in his job as a bus driver for special needs children.

The book is difficult to read at times because of the content, but it also reveals the resiliency and courage that the human spirit is capable of.