I'd rather have a bottle in front of me...
... than a frontal lobotomy.
I'm sure Howard Dully would agree. In 1960, Dully, age 12, was given a transorbital lobotomy because, apparently, he was a problem child. From “My Lobotomy“: 45 years later, a man tries to learn why:
Dully 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, a mental hospital in Santa Clara, Calif. He committed petty crimes, drank too much and lived on disability payments. He no longer felt welcome at his parents' 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.
And five years ago he went looking for answers: Who had done this to him, and why?
In Dully's own words (from 'My Lobotomy': Howard Dully's Journey):
"If you saw me you'd never know I'd had a lobotomy," Dully says. "The only thing you'd notice is that I'm very tall and weigh about 350 pounds. But I've always felt different -- wondered if something's missing from my soul. I have no memory of the operation, and never had the courage to ask my family about it. So two years ago I set out on a journey to learn everything I could about my lobotomy."
In his research, he found his medical file, with detailed notes and photographs from early consultations through the actual operation. “As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. [The doctor] would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth. Then he would do the same thing on the other side of the face.” There's even a rather graphic picture of Dully undergoing to operation.
Dully has made his exploration public, recording his journey in a radio series. You can download an MP3 of an NPR story on Dully here. More information about Howard Dully and his procedure here.