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The Case of the Missing Faces
As I’ve often mentioned, I’ve been working for quite some time on a study of the photographs of Walter Freeman. Freeman, a Washington, D.C., based physician, was the world’s foremost lobotomist; it’s estimated that he lobotomized some 3,500 people. He was also a prolific and dedicated photographer. He almost invariably took photos of his patients…
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Frequently asked questions about lobotomy
Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time investigating the history of lobotomy, and particularly the kinds of visual evidence doctors used to support this practice. It’s part of the book I’m finishing, Depth Perception, which is broadly about the ways doctors have used film and photography during the twentieth century. In one of my…
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Head and Shoulder Hunting in the Americas
I’ve posted a number of times about Walter Freeman, the lobotomist, and his photographs of his patients. I presented on the subject for a Film Studies colloquium here at Emory, and you can view a recording of that presentation here. (See this bibliography for sources.) I’ve noticed some distortion in this Flash video; you can…
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Walter Freeman’s photographic forebears
Walter Freeman, the psychiatrist who popularized lobotomy, called photography his “magnificent obsession.” There’s no doubt that Freeman loved to shock, and his lobotomy photographs and films were part of Freeman’s arsenal of attention-getters. But Freeman was also part of a long tradition of looking at a patient’s face and body in order to deduce the…
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Writing about lobotomy photographs
It often seems to me that writing history is an exercise in hubris. I never felt that more than when trying to write about Walter Freeman’s photographs of the people he lobotomized. These are really difficult photographs: difficult to see, difficult to analyze, and difficult to talk about. Lobotomy has become a kind of joke…