My Lobotomy

My Lobotomy is Howard Dully's harrowing memoir and investigative reckoning with one of the twentieth century's most notorious medical atrocities: the transorbital or 'ice pick' lobotomy. In 1960, at the age of twelve, Dully became the youngest patient of Dr. Walter Freeman, the traveling evangelist of psychosurgery who performed the crude, minutes-long procedure in his office, often to catastrophic effect. The book is not merely a personal history but a dual narrative, chronicling both the immediate aftermath of the lobotomy and Dully's dogged, middle-aged quest to uncover the medical and familial motivations behind it.

Dully reconstructs a childhood marked by profound maternal loss and the subsequent arrival of a stepmother, Lou, whose relentless hostility framed his normal boyish behavior as pathological. The core of the narrative follows his pilgrimage through the wreckage of his post-operative life—decades spent shuttling between mental institutions, jails, and alcoholism—before finding stability. This hard-won equilibrium propels his central mission: to confront the surviving architect of his ruin, his father Rodney, and to unearth Freeman's clinical records, which were donated to a university archive.

The investigation leads him to a community of fellow lobotomy survivors and to Freeman's own son, painting a portrait of a doctor driven by messianic zeal rather than scientific rigor. The discovery of his own case file is a pivotal moment, revealing the chillingly casual clinical language that justified the destruction of a child's frontal lobes based on a stepmother's complaints and a father's acquiescence.

Ultimately, the book serves as a crucial document in the history of psychiatry, exposing the dangerous confluence of medical hubris, societal desperation for quick fixes, and familial failure. It transcends mere victim testimony to become a profound meditation on memory, identity, and the relentless human need for answers. Dully's story is targeted at readers of narrative nonfiction, medical history, and trauma memoirs, standing as a permanent indictment of a medical profession that failed its most fundamental duty: first, do no harm.

Readers are unanimously gripped by the narrative's raw, tragic power and Dully's remarkable resilience, describing it as a devastating yet essential read. The primary praise centers on the book's success as both a deeply personal memoir and a shocking exposé of medical ethics. A consistent critique, however, notes that the prose itself is straightforward and journalistic, lacking the literary polish some expect from the genre, which can make the horrific events feel reported rather than fully evoked. The story's momentum, driven by the central mystery of 'why,' is universally acknowledged as compelling.