A horrendous childhood is bad enough, but how does a child understand being given one of the most frightening operations imaginable. How does he deal with undergoing surgery that was used for the most serious mental cases and frequently caused serious brain damage or death?
Howard Dully wrestled with his lobotomy for most of his life and was still left questioning himself and feeling ashamed.
His search, 30 years later, for answers on why he was subjected to such a procedure, was the basis of a moving National Public Radio broadcast and now a book, “My Lobotomy,” that provides information about one of the most horrific procedures in modern medicine. But it does little to solve the mystery of how anyone could subject a child to such an operation, and even less on how a father could stand by and passively allow it to happen.
Dully’s mother died when he was 4 and his father soon remarried. For Dully, the beloved older son until his mother’s death, things quickly changed. Lou, his stepmother, had rules for everything – “you better do this, you better not do that – and she always knew who broke them.”
Punishment for breaking her rules was harsh. Dully got many spankings, both from his stepmother and his father. A thing as small as taking a piece of fruit between meals could lead to punishment.
For reasons that are never clear, Lou singled out Dully for harsh treatment. Maybe he was more rambunctious, or maybe it was his size – he was quickly growing toward the big man he would become. But what ever the reason, she considered him disruptive and dangerous and contacted Dr. Walter Freeman, a leading proponent of lobotomies, determined to do something about it.
“Freeman was sort of like the Henry Ford of psychosurgery,” Dully writes. “He didn’t invent the procedure, but he turned it into an assembly line process, streamlining it so it could be done efficiently, more cheaply, more quickly, and on more patients.”
Freeman performed what was called an “ice pick” lobotomy on Dully, inserting two instruments that resembled ice picks into the brain on the 12-year-old, through his eyes.
It’s unclear how the operation affected Dully. He was described as quiet and smiling after it. He has gaps in his memory following the surgery, but compared to some of the more horrific results the operation could have, including death, he seems to have had a relatively easy time.
The operation did not solve his problems at home, however. Lou was no more reconciled to having him in her house after the operation and most of the rest of his adolescence was spent in jail or in one institution or another. It was only well into adulthood that Dully began to pull his life together and to try to understand what had happened to him.
He was able to piece together the surgery he underwent from Freeman’s notes and even pictures. Less clear was Lou’s motivation or why his father allowed it to happen. He and his father talked about the operation for the first time as he researched his story for the NPR broadcast. His father refused to take any blame, however, even seeing himself as the victim.
But the search and the book brought him peace, Dully said. He finally understood that he had not done anything to deserve the lobotomy or the cruelty of his stepmother.
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