An abridged life

This is a wonderful article about Howard Dully. I'm not sure why, but they left Psychosurgery.org out (we introduced Howard to Sound Portraits). Oh well - what can you do? I think it communicates Howard's story very well anyway.
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By Glennda Chui
Mercury News

In 1960, Howard Dully's parents took him to a San Jose hospital for what they said would be tests.

Two days later, he woke up with a headache and two black eyes, feeling like a fog had penetrated his mind.

At the age of 12, he had been given a transorbital lobotomy, in which ice-pick-like instruments were hammered through the top of the eye sockets and twirled to destroy brain tissue in an area associated with emotion.

Dully, now 56, never went back to school, never graduated. At the insistence of his stepmother, he was made a ward of the state, drifting from juvenile hall to halfway houses to Agnews State Hospital. He committed petty crimes, drank too much and lived on disability payments. He no longer felt welcome at his parents' Los Altos home.

Yet his intellect, sense of humor and emotions survived. A big, amiable man -- 6 feet 7 inches tall, with laugh lines in the corners of his eyes -- he eventually earned a two-year degree, married and became a tour bus driver in San Jose.
And five years ago he went looking for answers: Who had done this to him, and why?

The result of that quest is a radio documentary, ``My Lobotomy,'' premiering Wednesday on National Public Radio's ``All Things Considered'' program. Dully narrates the tale in his deep, gravelly voice and interviews lobotomy patients and their relatives.

``You'd probably never know what happened to me if I didn't tell you,'' Dully said in an interview. ``But I felt I was not who I was supposed to be anymore. You can't put your finger on it, but something's been taken away. Something's been altered or changed. It's very frustrating.''

In the documentary, he talks to his father for the first time about the procedure that changed his life. And he finds his medical file among the archived papers of Dr. Walter J. Freeman, the doctor who gave him the lobotomy -- years after it had been discarded as a treatment for mental illness.

``My file has everything -- a photo of me with the ice-picks in my eyes, medical bills,'' Dully says on the broadcast. ``But all I care about are the notes. I want to understand why this was done to me.''

He reads one of the entries. It's from his birthday, Nov. 30, 1960: ``Mrs. Dully came in for a talk about Howard. Things have gotten much worse and she can barely endure it. I explained to Mrs. Dully that the family should consider the possibility of changing Howard's personality by means of transorbital lobotomy. Mrs. Dully said it was up to her husband, that I would have to talk with him and make it stick.''

At the archives Dully also found a pair of leucotomes, the instruments that had been driven into his eye sockets.

The lobotomy was introduced in 1936 by a Portuguese physician, Dr. Egas Moniz. It won him the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Some 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s.
The original method, called prefrontal lobotomy, involved boring open the patient's skull to cut the connection between the prefrontal region -- an area concerned with emotion, learning, memory and social behavior -- and the rest of the brain. While it often relieved symptoms of severe mental illness, it also blunted emotion, leaving patients listless, apathetic and childlike.

Freeman invented an easier way, the transorbital or ``jiffy'' lobotomy, which left no obvious scars. It could be done in a few minutes as an outpatient procedure.

He traveled the country promoting the technique, performing up to 25 lobotomies per day -- some 3,400 of them in the course of his career, according to Jack El-Hai, whose biography of Freeman came out this year.

Some of Freeman's patients said they felt better after the procedure, and kept in touch with him until his death in 1972.

But others died or were severely damaged. They included Rosemary Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy, who was mildly impaired before the operation but had to be institutionalized afterward.

In 1954 Freeman moved from the East Coast to Los Altos, where he helped found El Camino Hospital in Mountain View. Dr. Robert Lichtenstein, 77, of Los Altos shared an office with Freeman in Sunnyvale for a few years. A neurosurgeon, he was present for half a dozen or more lobotomies, holding the instruments in position after they'd been thrust into a patient's eye sockets so Freeman could make sure they were properly placed.

In the early days, he said, when there were no effective treatments for the mentally ill, lobotomy seemed plausible.

``In the Santa Clara Valley, Agnews State Hospital was filled with thousands of psychiatric patients, and a lot of them were uncooperative and belligerent and would attack the caretakers,'' Lichtenstein said. ``So the idea of trying to render some of these people more cooperative was one of the major goals of management. Otherwise they would have to be put in a room with sometimes just a mattress on the floor, and sometimes they would destroy the mattress.''
However, by the time Freeman operated on Howard Dully, medications were available for mental illness and lobotomy had fallen out of favor.

For years, Dully told only his wife and a few close friends what had happened. He had no relationship with his stepmother, and never discussed the lobotomy with his father. But he always thought that someday he would talk to them and get some answers.

Then, in 2000, his stepmother died.

``I guess it was a jolt to me,'' he said. ``I realized I wasn't going to be able to talk to her. It was over now.''

His mother had died of cancer when he was 5, and he said he resented the fact that someone was trying to take her place.

``Oh, I hated her,'' Dully said of his stepmother. ``I didn't want any harm to come to her, physical harm. It was more a mental game. She'd tell me go to my room and I'd mutter under my breath. She always said I had a look that scared her.

``I think what happened, if you want the truth, is that when I started to get big like I am, she started to fear me.''

After she died Dully started to surf the Internet, looking for information. Eventually he was put in touch with Sound Portraits Productions, which makes radio documentaries.

``Nobody who had had a transorbital lobotomy had ever talked about it -- not that I knew of,'' said David Isay, co-producer of the radio piece. ``I was curious to know the perspective of patients.''

At first Dully did not want his name used, Isay said; later, he changed his mind.
``Having the courage to really face down his demons and ask those very, very difficult questions of the people in his life was a wonder to behold,'' Isay said.
Dully said he's thought a lot, over the years, about what life would have been like -- what he would have been like -- without the lobotomy. Yet he said he does not feel bitter.

``What good is it going to do to hate somebody?'' he said. ``I'm more about, `Let's get it out in the open and forget about it.' I can sit here and point fingers at 950 people, and it means nothing. I think we all have to live with the part we played in it ourselves.''