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El-Hai, Jack. "the lobotomist." 2005. the lobotomist, by El-Hai, Wiley, 2005, pp. 1-312. Reading.

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Walter was born to Corrine and Walter Freeman on November 14, 1895. His grandfather, William W. Keen, had a good career in medicine, and was a role model for Walter growing up. His grandfather was one of the reasons why Walter went into medicine in the first place. Walter was often unwell as a child. For example, he once had his grandfather remove lymph nodes from his neck, which actually resulted in permanent paralysis. To add on, Walter's father was never emotionally there for him. "The elder Freeman never drew close to his sons or shed his formality with them. Walter remembered him as a shy, socially awkward, and humorless father..." (El-Hai 25).

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Walter turned 13 in 1908, and had most of his personality developed. He had grown to be a very intelligent and shy kid. He didn't have much friends to play with, and so he spent most of his time playing on his own. He had one best friend throughout his whole adolescence. He also wasn't interested in girls and relationships at all. Walter also never developed a close relationship with any of his family, and even openly admitted, "...that he had never loved his mother" (El-Hai 26).

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In the year 1912, Walter's family scraped up enough money to send him to Yale. To clarify, Yale is a prestigious college. Walter failed a lot of his classes freshman year, and described it being a miserable experience. He didn't fit in with the people there. Walter loved taking photos with a camera that he was gifted, and said that might be the one thing that got him through that first year. Sophomore year was also bad in education wise for him, but he grew in popularity.

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In the year 1915, Walter contracted a disease called typhoid, which made him very weak and caused him to miss his first semester of senior year. He ended up being hospitalized for a long time, and also had a lot of time to himself. He began wondering about his future, and thinking about aspects such as majors, fields, and different job options. After giving it a lot of thought and multiple trials, Walter decided he wanted to go look into medicine. Returning from typhoid, Walter improved his grades to all A's. When he finished college, he knew that his academic career wasn't going to make the cut for medical school. He enrolled in summer programs at local colleges to gain a better understanding of science and biology. He then enrolled in medical school, with the interest of neurology, and graduated in 1920.

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After a couple of years, Walter decided to move to Washington D.C. to accept a psychiatrist job offer. Walter arrived in July 1924, to St. Elizabeth's Hospital, and became very interested in the neurological field. He worked with a superintendent named William White. This man was a huge success in the hospital and area itself. Walter will work solidly with this man for 12 years. Freeman had been in Washington twice before his move, and said that he, "...wanted to see the sights this time-the sights that would interest a fledgling neuropathologist" (El-Hai 56).

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St. Elizabeths Stories: How The World's Most Notorious Lobotomist Got His Start In D.C.

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Privacy Overview This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

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Around the month of September, in 1924, Walter was not finding friends and companions in Washington. He then received a letter from his college roommate that told him he could visit his family any time. Walter accepted this offer, and shortly arrived at the Franklin's front door, and even met a woman named Marjorie Franklin. As described earlier, Walter had never been interested in girls, and had a hard time creating a connection with this woman. Eventually, Marjorie and Walter became two opposites that attracted, and got married on November 3rd that same year. "Freeman wrote to his sister, 'With a charming and devoted wife, a good job and a car, what else could a man want to make him happy...'" (El-Hai 64).

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In the late 1920's and early 1930's, Freeman became a full-time professor at George Washington University, and maintained a private practice of his own pertaining to neurology and psychiatry. He had finally quit his St. Elizabeth's job, and was quite happy. Walter proved to be very gifted in the neurology/psychiatric field, and he helped found the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. This board was about keeping psychiatry and neurology up to date. There weren't a lot of members a part of this board because it was very exclusive. The members that were on the board held interviews and examinations on doctors who wanted to be a part of this board. Most doctors failed this examination. The people described Walter as being very strict, even though he was a good fifteen years younger than all of the other members. Walter had great joy in participating in a program like this, and later on, "...the perfect partner arrived...a neurosurgeon named James Winston Watts" (El-Hai 88).

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In September 1936, Alice Hammatt, a 63 year old woman, was suffering from severe insomnia, depression, and anxiety. She came to Walter Freeman, a neurosurgeon and psychiatrist at this time, for help with these mental illnesses. Walter Freeman and his partner, James Watts, performed the first ever successful lobotomy in the United States. They had researched this profound idea together for months, and looked up to a popular neurosurgeon by the name of Moniz, who did this operation for the first time ever. The surgery consists of the brain's frontal lobes being cut in an attempt to reduce mental illnesses that are being fought.

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Rosemary Kennedy and Howard Dully were just two of thousands of US citizens in the last century who underwent a new and innovative procedure that often had disastrous effects: the ice-pick lobotomy.

The lobotomy was first introduced by neurologist Egas Moniz as a last resort means to cure severe mental illness, including depression and anxiety. The n eurologist and psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman brought the procedure to the United States.

Freeman-along with his colleague, neurosurgeon James W. Watts-performed the first prefrontal lobotomy on US soil on 63-year-old Alice Hood Hammatt on September 14, 1936, at George Washington University Hospital. Lobotomies subsequently fell out of favor and are generally considered barbaric today; nevertheless, the Nobel Committee has not acted on calls to rescind Moniz's 1949 prize. Freeman was banned from performing operations in 1967 after one of his patients died from a brain hemorrhage.

Here are some photos of Dr. Freeman and his colleague James Watts's lobotomy practices:

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The First Lobotomy in the US Happened at George Washington University | Washingtonian (DC)

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Rosemary Kennedy and Howard Dully were just two of thousands of US citizens in the last century who underwent a new and innovative procedure that often had disastrous effects: the ice-pick lobotomy. The lobotomy was first introduced by neurologist Egas Moniz as a last resort means to cure severe mental illness, including depression and anxiety.

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After Walter Freeman's first lobotomy, he and his partner operated on 6 other patients using the new leucotomy technique. The leucotomy technique was also called a lobotomy procedure. About four out of six of these patients had success from the procedure, one patient was on the road to recovery, but didn't make it there due to failure, and one patient had immediate failure from this procedure. Freeman and Watts received word from Moniz that he implemented new adaptations for the leucotomy technique to be more successful, with which Watts and Freeman responded to by immediately adding these additions to their surgery. With excitement over this new possibility for mental patients, Walter and James flew to Baltimore to a medical conference that happens once every year to explain to the whole medical board about their new procedure that they have introduced to North America. "...Freeman considered his Baltimore report well received" (El-Hai 118).

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Throughout 1937 and 1938, Freeman kept working on lobotomies by improving and changing techniques that he used for it. Walter was invited all over the nation to conferences at different colleges and churches about lobotomy. Most of the time people disagreed with his idea, but he kept pursuing lobotomy and kept operating on patients. A lot of people disagreed with the idea because most patients he operated on rarely went back to normal. Most of the patients suffered from the same mental illnesses with added improvement, but no major, and full, recovery. Half of the psychiatrists Freeman talked to at these conferences obliterated his idea of lobotomy, and refused to make it acceptable. "Over time, he encountered several patients who had apparently been helped by lobotomy but who inexplicably experienced a return of their symptoms several years later" (El-Hai 141).

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With the year 1945 coming to a close, lobotomies were still not being supported around the nation. Walter Freeman desperately wanted every psychiatric hospital in the nation to invest in psychosurgery, and specifically in lobotomies. He operated fewer lobotomies throughout the 1940's because it wasn't receiving any publicity. Lobotomies cost a lot of money to carry out, and if the procedure is not being publicized, then the money to do lobotomies would eventually run out. At this point in time, lobotomies didn't look like they had a bright future.

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Around the year 1946, Walter Freeman had seen that lobotomies were not helping a lot of patients in the long run, and so he thought up of a way to help psychiatric patients for a short amount of time instead. Instead of cutting into the brain, he created the idea of using an instrument to, "drive it further to a depth of 7 cm from the margin of the upper eyelid..." (El-Hai 184). He would hurt less nerves and parts of the brain when using this kind of method. His beloved lobotomy partner of 13 years had officially backed out of this kind of lobotomy. Other than not liking the idea of it, Watts didn't like the way Freeman approached the surgery. Walter would perform this surgery in crazy settings, whereas Watts believed that the hospital was the only proper setting for brain surgery. Freeman considered this procedure quick and easy, but Watts argued that it was brain surgery, and that no brain surgery should be taken lightly.

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Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia

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In the 1940’s, the number of mentally-ill patients in mental hospitals increased drastically, resulting in hundreds of thousands of people in one hospital. Most of these patients were not able to receive any kind of psychiatric care because their diseases didn’t have a cure. Walter had already created the transorbital lobotomy procedure, and that procedure turned out to be a reliever for incurable diseases that a lot of people had. In the summer of 1946, Freeman was officially given permission to operate transorbital lobotomies on patients in other state hospitals. When he traveled to a new state hospital, he operated on about 5 patients. Four out of five of these patients improved after 10 years of suffering from schizophrenia. “...he indicated that he would shoulder the task personally, one hospital at a time, although he readily acknowledged that transorbital lobotomy has not lasting value if only he contain satisfactory results” (El-Hai 238).

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The Nobel Prize was creeping up in October of 1949, and Moniz politely asked Freeman to vote for him for an award. Freeman gladly voted for Moniz, and Moniz won an award for his creation of lobotomies. About four years after winning this award, twenty thousand people underwent lobotomy, and "one-third of the total were transorbital operations" (El-Hai 227). To repeat, Freeman created the transorbital operation all on his own, so this was a major accomplishment for him, even though he didn't win the award himself. Freeman proceeded to travel around the globe to conferences, meetings, and universities to promote lobotomies. He tried to get the country of Germany on board with lobotomies, but he wasn't successful.

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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1949

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The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1949 was divided equally between Walter Rudolf Hess “for his discovery of the functional organization of the interbrain as a coordinator of the activities of the internal organs” and António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz “for his discovery of the therap…

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In early spring of 1954, Walter Freeman had reached his peak with transorbital lobotomies and was very famous for it. Walter's dreams of becoming something similar to his grandfather were officially coming true. Sadly, the fame quickly dropped because a new drug called chlorpromazine was introduced. This drug was responsible for doing the same things as a lobotomy was capable of doing. Later on, the amount of mental patients in hospitals started to decline. It had also been noticed that, “...state hospitals abandoned their psychosurgery programs and stopped inviting Walter Freeman to come demonstrate transorbital lobotomy” (El-Hai 253).

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In June of 1954, Marjorie and Walter Freeman gathered up their things and moved from Washington D.C. to California. Walter wanted to move to California because he thought he would be able to get more medical opportunities and he also wanted to move there to experience the nice weather. Unfortunately, only one of his desires came to be true. He didn’t get many opportunities to practice any psychosurgery, and his fame and ideas died down very quickly. After a few years, he eventually got invited to be a chairman for a new facility that was being built. The name of this facility was El Camino Hospital. He planned out most of the psychiatric department of this hospital because he believed that general hospitals were one of the best places to turn to for mental problems.

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When you choose El Camino Health for your care, you can count on:

Distinguished hospitals. Our fully accredited hospitals, Los Gatos and Mountain View, have received numerous awards and honors for high-quality healthcare.

Exceptional talent. Our reputation attracts high-caliber doctors who are approachable and friendly, a nursing culture exceptional for its highly personalized patient and family care, and leadership with a deeply personal commitment.

Innovative approaches to care. We seek new treatments and techniques, and contribute to the medical community through clinical trials.

A focus on health. Our regional Men's Health Program offers a team approach to care and has a variety of specialists who are focused on men's health issues, including heart and vascular, urology, sleep disorders, sexual dysfunction and healthy weight. We created the South Asian Heart Center and the Chinese Health Initiative to address unique health disparities in our patient population.

A healing environment. Our spaces were specially designed for tranquility and comfort, such as our labyrinth walk.

Our Legacy: In the Beginning

In the mid-1950s, when orchards and fields in the Los Altos and Mountain View area were quickly turning into suburbs and commercial enclaves, a group of physicians and concerned citizens banded together to establish a much-needed community hospital. The few existing local hospitals were at capacity; hospitals to the north and south were badly overcrowded. The best and fairest way, they decided, was to form a hospital district and levy a tax so the cost would be shared among the population of the entire area.

Voters approved the formation of the district in 1956 by a 12-to-1 margin. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors appointed a five-member board. Its first decision was the selection of a 20-acre orchard on Grant Road in Mountain View as the site for the new hospital. The name "El Camino Hospital" was also chosen. In 1957, voters approved a $7.3 million bond issue, again by a large margin, to finance the building and operation of the hospital.

Construction of the four-story hospital began in 1958. Overseeing the building was the hospital's first administrator R. Edwin Hawkins, who went on to lead the hospital for 25 years. "The building of El Camino Hospital was the biggest thing in town," the late Mr. Hawkins said in a 1999 interview. "People were willing to do anything to support the hospital. There was real electricity in the air."

Proof of this was the formation in 1958 of the El Camino Hospital Auxiliary with 1,000 members. This was three years before the hospital opened. The first medical staff, 21 members strong, was established in 1960. By 1961, all necessary preparations had been made and the hospital admitted its first patients on September 1, 1961.

Growth and Progress

With the population in the area expanding, the hospital soon outgrew its original building, adding a fifth and sixth floor to the main building just a few years after opening. The hospital's identity with the valley's innovative spirit and technology expertise started as early as 1971. In partnership with Lockheed, El Camino Hospital implemented the world's first computer-aided medical information system, drawing visitors from all over the world.

Continuing a steady pace of growth over the next decades, the hospital added an array of community need-based services, including an outpatient surgery center, family birthing center, emergency, radiology and intensive care facilities, a psychiatric unit, and senior resource center. During the hospital's third decade in the community, the El Camino Hospital Foundation, now known as El Camino Health Foundation, was established to raise charitable contributions in support of the hospital.

In 2006, after the second groundbreaking event in El Camino Health's history, construction began on the Mountain View campus on the new seismically compliant main hospital building. Three years later, after a festive ribbon cutting and community day with more than 8,000 people taking tours of the new facilities, the new state-of-the-art hospital in Mountain View opened on November 15, 2009.

Expanding to Serve More Communities

In 2008, the hospital acquired the assets of the former Community Hospital of Los Gatos. The former owners closed the hospital in April 2009, but within 90 days, the fully renovated and staffed Los Gatos Hospital reopened that July. Located at 815 Pollard Road in Los Gatos, the 143-bed hospital continues to offer full service, acute care to residents of Los Gatos and surrounding communities, just as it had been doing since it first opened in 1962.

El Camino Health Medical Network elevates the healthcare experience - beyond healing - for the communities we serve. Through physician partnerships, we provide our patients with healthcare options that fit their lifestyle. Urgent care, primary care and specialty care services are provided at 13 locations across Santa Clara County.

In addition to delivering healthcare services across Santa Clara County, El Camino Health's employee assistance and mental health program, Concern, offers employers across the country an optimized blend of human connection, compassion, and technology to help employees build resilience and achieve emotional well-being. Services include resources for employees and their families to stay creative, calm and effective even when dealing with setbacks, change and/or pressure. Concern has been affiliated with the hospital corporation since 1981.

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When you choose El Camino Health for your care, you can count on: Distinguished hospitals. Our fully accredited hospitals, Los Gatos and Mountain View, have received numerous awards and honors for high-quality healthcare. Exceptional talent. Our reputation attracts high-caliber doctors who are approachable and friendly, a nursing culture exceptional for its highly personalized patient and family care, and leadership with a deeply personal commitment.

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Around the year 1955, lobotomy began to be inspected for other kinds of uses. Some psychosurgeons believed that lobotomy could relieve a person’s impulse to commit any type of crime. Freeman operated on different murderers in state hospitals. For only one of these patients, Walter attended their criminal trial and told the judge that he didn’t try to take away the criminal’s mindset of crime. Walter told the judge that all he came to do was relieve the patient of psychiatric illness. Both Walter and the judge agreed that the crime the murderer committed still stood, even with his psychiatric problems.

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During the early 1960’s, Walter Freeman was not getting enough work to satisfy him in California. People were convinced that the only reason he hadn’t become depressed at this point was because he was taking medication to prevent an illness like insomnia. He started to spend most of his time traveling around the United States to visit some of his old lobotomy patients. Freeman cared about the results of his patients, and conducted many in-person interviews with them. Sometimes, he wasn’t able to find some of his patients, but he was very determined and searched for them. He searched for them until he found who he was looking for. After interviewing some patients, he saw that a ton of his lobotomies were successful and also noticed that, “Among the 2,454 prefrontal and transorbital cases he had handled through 1956, he knew of twenty-eight marriages and sixty-two children born” (El-Hai 280).

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It was around the year 1965 when Walter Freeman had reached the ripe age of 72. He still believed that he was capable of performing transorbital lobotomies, and performed around thirty five lobotomies from the early 60’s to the late 1960’s. For his old age, he was quite healthy. He had diabetes, but was able to control it with medication. He had gone through a few surgeries, and some of these surgeries included the removal of small skin cancer spots on his shoulders. Freeman still loved the outdoors, and especially loved to hike at his age. "He regularly walked the beaches of the West Coast, where he loved catching abalone, and professed an interest in learning how to surf” (El-Hai 292). Walter finally performed his last lobotomy in February of 1967.

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Starting in 1968, Freeman bought a camper van and drove all over the United States visiting more of his lobotomy patients. During the end of the year, his youngest son Randy died of a brain tumor that ruptured when surgeons were operating on it. Walter didn’t drive back across the country for his funeral because he was so hurt over his loss. Shortly after the funeral, he drove back to Washington to visit his grandchildren, and in 1969 decided to do another trip around the country visiting even more lobotomy patients he still hadn't interviewed. He traveled for a couple of more years and even flew to different medical conferences. By this time, Freeman began to get new kinds of cancers, and became very weak. He fell into a coma late spring of 1972. On May 31st, the lobotomy activist died at the age of 76.