logo
episode-header-image
Oct 2020
50m 37s

Walter Freeman Pt. 1: “Ice Pick Lobotomi...

SPOTIFY STUDIOS
About this episode
Neurologist Walter Freeman was a top doctor in his field. He was on the cutting edge of brain surgery, even going so far as to develop a new procedure called the 'lobotomy'. Unfortunately, it became one of the deadliest medical techniques of the 20th century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices 
Up next
Nov 2022
Thanksgiving Special: Just Add Arsenic
Over the ages, arsenic has had many lives — beauty fad, household product, medical prescription… and weapon of choice wielded by killers everywhere from Alabama to ancient Rome. Brine your turkey, knead your dough, and listen to our Thanksgiving Special on the regime-changing, as ... Show More
42m 41s
Nov 2022
“The Father of Gynecology” J. Marion Sims Pt. 2
By 1848, Dr. J. Marion Sims had gone from just experimenting on enslaved women, to becoming an enslaver himself. His quest for fame while finding a cure for vesico-vaginal fistulas meant performing inhumane surgeries on the women he held captive. Women whose plight would remain u ... Show More
42m 21s
Nov 2022
“The Father of Gynecology” J. Marion Sims Pt. 1
After a failed start to his medical career, Dr. J. Marion Sims settled in Alabama to continue his training. There he found success and started his own practice — specializing in the treatment of enslaved women and their children. But as Sims’ business grew, so did his ego. His de ... Show More
41m 58s
Recommended Episodes
Sep 2020
Lobotomies Pt. 2
With Dr. Walter Freeman’s invention in the 1940s, psychologists could perform a transorbital lobotomy from the comfort of their office… with an ice pick through the eye. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices 
47m 10s
Sep 2020
Lobotomies Pt. 1
In the 1940s, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz received the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking new treatment: the prefrontal lobotomy. His procedure was adopted by hospitals all over the world—but the treatment was controversial, and came to be known as one of medicine’s ... Show More
47m 19s
Aug 2023
Episode 488: Walter Freeman Pt 2
American neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman had refined Moniz’s procedure and developed a non-surgical procedure that could be performed in a doctor’s office, which he called a transorbital lobotomy. Freeman’s procedure involved inserting a medical instrument similar to an icepic ... Show More
1h 10m
Aug 2023
Episode 487: Walter Freeman
When Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz developed the lobotomy in 1935, it was little more than a crude surgery developed as a blanket treatment for mental illness that involved drilling into the skull and scrambling the neural connections in the frontal lobe. Less than a decade l ... Show More
55m 24s
Jul 2020
Phantom Limb Pain Pt. 1
In the mid-1500s, French surgeon Ambroise Paré realized patients who survived an amputation could still feel their missing limbs. Doctors theorized for centuries about the phenomenon, driven by one question: How do you treat a limb that doesn’t exist? Learn more about your ad cho ... Show More
44m 24s
Feb 2018
“Dr. Death” Pt. 2 - Harold Shipman
During his 25-year medical career, Harold Shipman rose to be a respectable family doctor who treated his patients with outstanding care. But behind closed doors, he operated as Dr. Death, and injected his victims with deadly doses of diamorphine. We look into how this man, who ma ... Show More
37m 19s
Jun 2020
Episode 413: Lobotomies Part I - The Cathartic and the Emetic
On the first of a two part series, we cover one of the strangest medical procedures of the 20th century: lobotomies. Join us as we explore the life of the man who popularized the procedure and just how the medical community came to think that it was a good idea in the first place ... Show More
1h 17m
Jul 2019
Welcome to Medical Mysteries!
Parcast's Original Show, Medical Mysteries brings high-stakes story-telling and intrepid investigation to the hospital, in a medical procedural for the podcast space. Every week, we follow desperate patients battling mysterious symptoms--from the bizarre to the terrifying--as det ... Show More
1m 36s