How Did Ice Pick Lobotomies Fade in America?

Andrew Scull says ice pick lobotomies in America died away through generational change, and he is sure the Nobel Prize in medicine that Moniz won in 1949 for lobotomy, after 14 years of experience, is one they would like to retract. Moniz popularized Walter Freeman and the ice pick. After the war, Freeman's specialty became the ice pick lobotomy, and Freeman was convinced the operation was a cure-all.

America's mental hospitals held over half a million patients. Freeman traveled in a camper truck he called the lobotomobile, spent summers at state hospitals, and taught the ice pick operation. He began with an actual ice pick, then a tool driven by a hammer or a mallet. A picture shows him lobotomizing a patient in Washington State, and another shows a naked woman dragged by attendants toward a lobotomy while she resisted with all her might. Ambidextrous, he could draw with both hands at once while teaching neurology, and when his right hand tired during surgery he switched to his left. He sometimes did 20 or 30 lobotomies in an afternoon and boasted he could teach any damn fool, even a psychiatrist, to perform one in 20 minutes. Freeman was a neurologist with contempt for psychiatrists.

Some lobotomists kept operating into the 60s and the early 70s. A younger generation who met the worst failures on the back wards, incontinent people who were basically zombies and had lost all mental power, rebelled. Antipsychotic drugs then offered a treatment closer to ordinary medicine, without the same horrible overtones.