Howard Dully

Eris Society Speaker, 2006

Lobotomy Survivor

Dully's stepmother didn't like her stepson so, to resolve the matter, in 1960, Howard's stepmother took 12-year-old Howard to Dr. Walter Freeman, to change her son's personality via transorbital lobotomy. The 10-minute office procedure comprised of the doctor inserting a sharp ice pick-like instrument above Howard's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, and moving it to and fro, to cut brain fibers.

In a doctor's entry dated Jan. 4, 1961, two and a half weeks after the Howard's lobotomy, Freeman wrote: "I told Howard what I'd done to him... and he took it without a quiver. He sits quietly, grinning most of the time and offering nothing."

Howard says that when his stepmother realized the operation didn't turn him "into a vegetable, she got me out of the house. I was made a ward of the state."

Amazingly, today, Howard is a thriving adult, unlike many of Freeman's former patients. "If you saw me you'd never know I'd had a lobotomy," says Howard Dully.

More: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014080

Before his death in 1972, Dr. Walter Freeman performed transorbital lobotomies on some 2,500 patients in 23 states.

September 2007 update -- Howard's book has been released: My Lobotomy, Crown Publishing Group