Two very unpleasant subjects—frontal lobotomies and maternal infanticide—each very important in its own way. Thinking and writing about it from today’s perspective, it is impossible to understand how it could have happened that a physician could develop, market, and teach a procedure as crude, brutal, and horrific as the frontal lobotomy. This is what Dr. Freeman did: He took ice picks out of his kitchen, punched them through the patient’s eye sockets and into his/her brain, and then “like a windshield wiper,” waved the ice pick through the brain tissue, back and forth, destroying much of the frontal lobes. You can see an excellent documentary about this here. Warning: some of the footage includes the actual procedure, and it is very distressing to watch.
No less distressing, of course, are the seemingly inexplicable actions of a very few mothers like Andrea Yates, those who become psychotic and kill their own children. Mind Hacks blog has a couple of good links, one for a podcast (soon to be transcribed and freely available) of an excellent discussion about this phenomenon; and also a link at which you can download the pdf of a very good paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
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