A 12-Year-Old Got a Lobotomy Because His Stepmother Kept Asking Until a Doctor Said Yes

Howard Dully was 12 years old when a doctor lifted his eyelids and slid long steel picks underneath them. The picks were driven through the thin bone at the back of the eye socket, 5 centimeters deep into his brain, then swept side to side to sever nerve fibers.

The photographs taken afterward show him with black eyes. The bruising came from the picks being forced through the bony orbits to reach his brain. He had first been knocked unconscious with electric shocks. “He came around quickly after the first shock and I eventually gave him 4,” Walter Freeman wrote in his notes.

This is a story about how little it took to order brain surgery in America in the age of the lobotomy. Six psychiatrists had examined Howard and told his stepmother that he was normal. She kept looking until she found one who would operate.

Howard, the son whose mother died giving birth to his younger sibling when he was six, had a stepmother who abused him and denied him basic affection. When she decided something was wrong with him, she went shopping for a diagnosis.

She did not just describe bad behavior. She invented it. She told doctors that Howard soiled himself and hid his waste, that he urinated on walls and left used toilet paper in his closet and bathtub. “Wrapping up a turd and hiding it? Come on!” Howard later wrote. Her worst claim was that at age five he had violently attacked his baby sibling in its crib.

Walter Freeman, the doctor who performed the operation, said Howard had schizophrenia and moved quickly toward surgery. Howard’s father, who was probably pulled in many directions by multiple jobs, did not agree that his son was sick but deferred to his wife and the doctor. He agreed to the operation.

Freeman’s notes record blood stained fluid leaking from each side, and “a considerable amount of vomiting during the night,” for which he prescribed 50 milligrams of Dramamine.

The operation did not make Howard acceptable at home. His stepmother still could not stand having him in the house, even though the surgery had left him more muddled than before. What followed was foster care, a year in juvenile detention, a year in a mental hospital though he was not insane, then jail and homelessness. His family, except his father, cut contact for years. As an adult, Howard described a lifetime of poor judgment and petty trouble, saying he often acted out because he was “bored.”