Into this knowledge vacuum stepped Walter Freeman, a charismatic American neurologist with a bold solution—the frontal lobotomy. Freeman didn’t invent the procedure, but he made it into a ...

An illustration of the human brain. (American Heart Association/Reuters) Toward the end of his life, Dr. Walter Freeman crisscrossed the United States to seek out his former patients and follow up ...

Walter Freeman died of cancer in 1972 at the age of 76. Despite the dark associations that remain around the operation he pioneered, he believed himself a humanitarian pioneer until the very end.

In the 1940s Dr. Walter Freeman gained fame for perfecting the lobotomy, then hailed as a miracle cure for the severely mentally ill. But within a few years, lobotomy was labeled one of the most ...

The controversial career of Dr. Walter Freeman, a neurologist and a brain doctor who performed over 2,000 lobotomies during his career, began in the 1920s and 1930s.

Patricia Moen was lobotomized by Walter Freeman in 1962 at the age of 36. Wolfhard Baumgartel was a staff physician at the Athens State Hospital in Ohio in the 1950s, where he observed Dr. Walter ...

Before his death in 1972, Dr. Walter Freeman performed transorbital lobotomies on some 2,500 patients in 23 states. Read a brief history of Dr. Walter Freeman and lobotomies. Nov. 14, 1895: Walter ...

Rosemary Kennedy underwent a prefrontal lobotomy at age 23 that was ordered by her father, Joe Kennedy, in an attempt to ease her emotional outbursts.