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NEW BOOK ADDS TO CONTROVERSY SURROUNDING USE OF LOBOTOMY TO TREAT MENTALLY ILL PATIENTS
Dateline: July 28, 2005 ... Minneapolis, MN
Contact Name: Laurie Brickley, book publicist
Contact Phone: 612-823-0724
E-mail: brickley@goldengate.net
Web Address: http://lobotomist.com
MINNEAPOLIS, MN - July 28, 2005 - The July 14th issue of The New England
Journal of Medicine features an article about "The Lobotomist: A
Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of
Mental Illness" (Wiley, 2005), a new biography of lobotomy pioneer and
advocate Walter Freeman, M.D. The book has startled readers with its
revelations about the history and practice of psychosurgery in the
U.S. Author Jack El-Hai, who spent years digging into Freeman's
records and papers, has made many discoveries about the man behind
America's lobotomization of 50,000 people between 1936 and 1978.
"I began my research for The Lobotomist thinking that Walter Freeman
must have been a monster," El-Hai explains. "But I soon began to see
that his story was far more complex than I originally imagined. During
the 1930's and 1940's, psychiatric patients desperately needed help, and
Freeman appeared to offer an answer to their problems. I came to
regard him not as a monster, but as a fascinating, flawed, and tragic
figure who started out on a reasonable path and took several wrong
turns."
Freeman, a controversial figure who died in 1972, has recently
returned to the news because of a campaign by patient-rights advocates
to strip his mentor, a Portuguese neurologist who first performed
psychosurgeries in 1935, of his Nobel Prize in medicine.
The following are among the revelations El-Hai presents in "The Lobotomist":
- Accounts of the eighty lobotomy patients Freeman kept conscious
as he operated on them, and details of the actual transcripts
of their conversations during surgery
- An explanation of the motivations that led Freeman, an
undeniably gifted physician working in the mainstream of
medicine, to begin experimenting with lobotomy, which damages
healthy brain tissue
- Descriptions of the unusual side-effects of lobotomy, which
usually did NOT include drooling, loss of intelligence, or the
inability of patients to live with their families
- Surprising conclusions about the alleged lobotomy of the
actress Frances Farmer
- Details of Freeman's lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy, JFK's
sister, in 1941
- The stories behind the hundreds of letters in Freeman's
archives from patients who thanked him and believed he had
saved their lives
- The reasons behind Freeman's frantic race late in his life
to follow-up on the remaining survivors among his 3,400
lobotomy patients
"The Lobotomist" has received a great deal of media attention in recent
months, including rave reviews and feature coverage in The New York
Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New England Journal of Medicine,
Scientific American Mind, Playboy, Nature Neuroscience, The New York
Review of Books, the British Journal of Medicine, Discover, and many
other publications.
About the Author
Jack El-Hai is a winner of the June Roth Memorial Award for Medical
Journalism and a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, American
Heritage, The History Channel Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine,
and many other publications. Although "The Lobotomist" is his first
biography, he has written seven previous books. He serves as the
president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and lives
in Minneapolis.
For an interview or more information, please contact publicist Laurie
Brickley at 612-823-0724 or brickley@goldengate.net. You may also
contact author Jack El-Hai at 612-870-3488 or jack@lobotomist.com. The
Lobotomist has a website at http://lobotomist.com
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