Walter Freeman Research Paper

Walter Freeman was one of seven children born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a family that can trace its roots back to the Mayflower. Freeman’s grandfather was a surgeon, who operated on President Grover Cleveland, and he was also the first person to successfully remove a brain tumor, with only his fingers and no x-rays of the patient’s brain. Freeman’s father was a gifted surgeon as well. Freeman man grew up surrounded by money and he was tutored in dancing and riding and studied languages such as French, German, and Spanish. His nickname as a boy was, “Little Walter Wonder Why” since he was curious about everything. Both of Freeman’s parent were very strict. Freeman often said that he admired his mother, but he never loved her. Freeman attended Yale University and enrolled at …show more content…
Freeman was widely admired as a professor but not has a doctor. In 1935, Freeman read about another doctor’s experiments, where the frontal lobes have been operated on monkey. Egas Moniz found that the monkeys became passive and subdued. He called this procedure, leucotomy. Shortly after Freeman preformed his first leucotomy on a 63 year old Kansas women. His surgery was successful and she lived another five years. Freeman got a mixed reaction from the medical community about his new medical procedure, however the media loved him. Freeman later changed the name from leucotomy to lobotomy. By the 1940s, Freeman became a successful doctor and he was famous for his lobotomies. He married and together they had a total of six kids. Around the same time, a new Italian surgeon tried to refine the prefrontal lobotomy, by entering the eyes sockets. In 1946, Freeman conducted America’s first transorbital lobotomy, where he used an ice pick to drill the skull. With the success of another surgery, Freeman began doing lobotomies in his office. By the 1950, the lobotomies surgeries began to