Howard Dully, at just 12 years old, was subjected to a lobotomy by Dr. Walter Freeman, an infamous "icepick surgeon." ...

The process took only a matter of minutes to complete. In September 1936, Freeman performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the U.S. From 1936 onward, tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed.

In the 1940s Dr. Walter Freeman gained fame for perfecting the lobotomy, then hailed as a miracle cure for the severely mentally ill. But within a few years, lobotomy was labeled one of the most ...

The crisis in state mental hospitals motivated Dr. Walter Freeman to devise a simple version of the lobotomy procedure, one that could be used on a mass scale. "All of a sudden America sees these ...