Customer Reviews

SYMPATHETIC PORTRAIT OF A COMPLEX MAN AND A DIFFICULT SUBJECT - By: Peter Hurst, 17 Jun 2008
'The Lobotomist - a maverick medical genius & his tragic quest to rid the world of mental illness' is a readable biography of Walter Freeman the man who more than most sought to popularise the use of 'psychosurgery,' commonly known as 'lobotomy,'in Americain the mid twentieth century. The author embeds the storyin the worldin which Freeman lived & actually makes sense of what appears to contempory society to be at best medical hubris, at worst iatrogenic atrocities morally equivalent to the work of Josef Mengelein Nazi Germany.

It is easy to forget that as recently as the 1930s no real effective medical treatment for the major mental disorders existed & the best that could be hoped for was to warehouse the mentally ill & hope for spontaneous remission. It isin this context that the author seeks to explicate the emergence of psychosurgery as an attempt to counteract the prevailing sense of therapeutic hopelesness which cast a pall over the many institutions existing at that juncture.

It is clear that without an adequate understanding of the conditions that existedin Psychiatric practice at the time it is impossible to understand why Freeman would seek to promote what seems to be, to the modern mind-set, such an invasive & potentially dangerous procedure. The author conveys well the sense of therapeutic hopelessness that existed at the time & Freeman's desire to re-establish Psychiatric treatment as primarily Medicalin it's ambit, as opposed to Psychoanalytic, & thereby bridge the gap between Neurology & Psychiatry.

In this sense, Freeman is seen to be ahead of his time, a harbinger for the modern Psychiatric preoccupation with the biological origins of mental illness. Walter Freeman is shown as standing at a crossroadsin the history of psychiatry: one foot placedin the future with his therapeutic optimism & emphasis on the 'brain' (as opposed to the 'mind') as the focus for treatment but also with one foot placed firmlyin the past with his casual disregard for the niceties of what would come to be known as 'evidence-based medicine.'

In summary: an interesting, readable & largely sympathetic biography of a man & an erain the history of Psychiatry that presaged the modern era with it's modern treatments.