Popular Science Review - The Lobotomist

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Review - The Lobotomist - Jack El-Hai

This isn't an easy book to read, if only because the subject is now so unpleasant. The idea of slicing pieces out of a functional brain to improve a patient's demeanour is quite simply horrifying. But when the subject of the book, Walter Freeman, began what would be literally thousands of operations (at one point he managed 200 in just two weeks) it seemed to promise a miracle cure.

Overcome the revulsion, and there's a certain amount of fascination. Freeman was a strange, cold, rather creepy individual (the subtitle a maverick medical genius and his tragic quest to rid the world of mental illness is perhaps a little generous), but no one could accuse him of being ordinary. It is a story that deserves to be told.

There are some flaws in Jack El-Hai's telling of it. The relatively short section dealing with Freeman's ancestors is tedious in the extreme, though things do warm up when we get onto the man himself, particularly once he is launched into his medical career with a European excursion that saw him moving from country to country, becoming fluent in French then Italian. El-Hai doesn't comment, but it seems Freeman went out of his way to make things difficult for himself - in going to Europe, arriving in a country where he didn't speak the language, then moving on once he was starting to fit in - overcoming difficulty was the sort of challenge that motivated the man.

Alongside the rise and fall of Freeman's careering series of lobotomies we see the all-too gradual development of psychiatric medicine, from the early use of intentional infection with malaria to quell neurosyphilis through to analysis, electric shocks and heavy duty chemicals. At times, Freeman's approach takes on a kind of logic, only for the reader to realise once again how horrible the process was.

I have really agonized over the star rating. Elements of the book certainly deserve four stars, but it was a bit too much hard work for the reader and in the end borderline as popular science. It doesn't stop it from being a significant medical biography, though.

Only in hardback.

Reviewed by Jo Reed

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