Freeman said, 'You can come out a vegetable, or you can come out dead.' And I guess I was miserable enough that I didn't care. I couldn't think of any other decision to make. Glenn: He told me this was the last resort.
Patricia: That's when the doctor decided it was time. Glenn: One night I came home and she said, "Well, I've done it now!" She'd taken a whole bottle full of some kind of pills. We'd been married about 13 years, and it just started. Glenn: I don't talk to her anymore than I have to. Patricia Moen: We have not talked about it, since I had the lobotomy - I don't think ever. This is the first time they have spoken about her lobotomy. Patricia Moen was lobotomized by Walter Freeman in 1962 at the age of 36. Just take all of your emotion out of a conversation with somebody and what's left? You know, if you were to converse with somebody, there's always emotion with it. There was something missing - emotions, I would say. Expression of deep turmoil in their heart or in their soul was subdued. My impression, which I remember still, was that they didn't ask any questions. After the operation I found that they had changed in their personality. I think they were all about 30 or 40 years old. I thought, "How can a man be relaxed just going blindly into a brain ?!" But of course, I didn't have the authority to say, "Stop that!" He wanted to prove that he was right, he was convinced that he was right. I think he had an extremely self-confident personality. Freeman did not leave the operating room after each procedure - the patient went out, the next patient was ready to come in, had his procedure done, went out again, and then the next patient came in… I was just a very, very green beginner here who hardly spoke any English, and he was a big shot at that time.Īs far as I remember, he probably did between 15 or 20 on that particular day. I was neither a psychiatrist nor a neurologist. Walter Freeman perform a series of transorbital lobotomies.
Not long after I started at the hospital, I had the opportunity to watch Dr. I was a staff physician at the Athens State Hospital in Ohio in 1954.