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My Lobotomy: A Memoir Kindle Edition
In this heartfelt memoir from one of the youngest recipients of the transorbital lobotamy, Howard Dully shares the story of a painfully dysfunctional childhood, a misspent youth, his struggle to claim the life that was taken from him, and his redemption.
At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital—or ice pick—lobotomy.
Abandoned by his family within a year of the surgery, Howard spent his teen years in mental institutions, his twenties in jail, and his thirties in a bottle. It wasn’t until he was in his forties that Howard began to pull his life together. But even as he began to live the “normal” life he had been denied, Howard struggled with one question: Why?
There were only three people who would know the truth: Freeman, the man who performed the procedure; Lou, his cold and demanding stepmother who brought Howard to the doctor’s attention; and his father, Rodney. Of the three, only Rodney, the man who hadn’t intervened on his son’s behalf, was still living. Time was running out. Stable and happy for the first time in decades, Howard began to search for answers.
Through his research, Howard met other lobotomy patients and their families, talked with one of Freeman’s sons about his father’s controversial life’s work, and confronted Rodney about his complicity. And, in the archive where the doctor’s files are stored, he finally came face to face with the truth.Revealing what happened to a child no one—not his father, not the medical community, not the state—was willing to protect, My Lobotomy exposes a shameful chapter in the history of the treatment of mental illness. Yet, ultimately, this is a powerful and moving chronicle of the life of one man.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateSeptember 4, 2007
- File size2734 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
—William Grimes, The New York Times
"Dully's tale is a heartbreakingly sad story of a life seriously, tragically interrupted. All Howard Dully wanted was to be normal. His entire life has been a search for normality. He did what he had to do to survive. This book is his legacy, and it is a powerful one."
—San Francisco Chronicle
"In My Lobotomy Howard Dully tells more of the story that so many found gripping in a National Public Radio broadcast: how his stepmother joined with a doctor willing to slice into his brain with “ice picks” when he was all of 12 years old."
—New York Daily News
"[Dully's] memoir is vital and almost too disturbing to bear-a piece of recent history that reads like science fiction… Dully, the only patient to ever request his file, speaks eloquently. It’s a voice to crash a server, and to break your heart.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The value of the book is in the indomitable spirit Dully displays throughout his grueling saga…By coming to grips with his past and shining a light into the dark corners of his medical records, Dully shows that regardless of what happened to his brain, his heart and soul are ferociously strong.”
—Chicago-Sun Times
"Plain-spoken, heart wrenching memoir ..."
—San Jose Mercury News
"Gut-wrenching memoir by a man who was lobotomized at the age of 12.
Assisted by journalist/novelist Fleming (After Havana, 2003, etc.), Dully recounts a family
tragedy whose Sophoclean proportions he could only sketch in his powerful 2005 broadcast on NPR’s
All Things Considered.
“In 1960,” he writes, “I was given a transorbital, or ‘ice pick’ lobotomy. My stepmother arranged it. My father agreed to it. Dr. Walter Freeman, the father of the American lobotomy, told me he was going to do some ‘tests.’ It took ten minutes and cost two hundred dollars.” Fellow doctors called Freeman’s technique barbaric: an ice pick—like instrument was inserted about three inches into each eye socket and twirled to sever connections from the frontal lobe to the rest of the brain. The procedure was intended to help curb a variety of psychoses by muting emotional responses, but sometimes it irreversibly reduced patients to a childlike state or (in 15% of the operations Freeman performed) killed them outright. Dully’s ten-minute “test” did neither, but in some ways it had a far crueler result, since it didn’t end the unruly behavior that had set his stepmother against him to begin with.
“I spent the next forty years in and out of insane asylums, jails, and halfway houses,” he tells us. “I was homeless, alcoholic, and drug-addicted. I was lost.” From all accounts, there was no excuse for the lobotomy. Dully had never been “crazy,” and his (not very) bad behavior sounds like the typical acting-up of a child in desperate need of affection. His stepmother responded with unrelenting abuse and neglect, his father allowed her to demonize his son and never admitted his complicity in the lobotomy; Freeman capitalized on their monumental dysfunction. It’s a tale of epic horror, and while Dully’s courage in telling it inspires awe, readers are left to speculate about what drove supposedly responsible adults to such unconscionable acts.
A profoundly disturbing survivor’s tale."
—Kirkus
"...Hard to put down."
—The Record
About the Author
Johnny Heller, a Golden Voice Lifetime Achievement Award Winner, has recorded over 800 audiobooks spanning every genre. He is a four-time Audie Award winner, an AudioFile Best Voice, and the winner of over thirty Earphones Awards. AudioFile magazine named him one of the top fifty voices of the twentieth century.
Charles Fleming is a former Newsweek correspondent and the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
June
This much I know for sure: I was born in Peralta Hospital in Oakland, California, on November 30, 1948. My parents were Rodney Lloyd Dully and June Louise Pierce Dully. I was their first child, and they named me Howard August Dully, after my father’s father. Rodney was twenty-three. June was thirty-four.
They had been married less than a year. Their wedding was held on Sunday, December 28, 1947, three days after Christmas, at one o’clock in the afternoon, at the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Sacramento, California. The wedding photographs show an eager, nervous couple. He’s in white tie and tails, with a white carnation in his lapel. She’s in white satin, and a veil decorated with white flowers. They are both dark-haired and dark-eyed. Together they are cutting the cake—staring at the cake, not at each other—and smiling.
A reception followed at 917 Forty-fifth Street, at the home of my mother’s uncle Ross and aunt Ruth Pierce. My father’s mother attended. So did his two brothers. One of them, his younger brother, Kenneth, wore a tuxedo all the way up from San Jose on the train.
My father’s relatives were railroad workers and lumberjack types from the area around Chehalis and Centralia, Washington. My dad spent his summers in a lumber camp with one of his uncles. They were logging people.
My father’s father was an immigrant, born in 1899 in a place called Revel, Estonia, in what would later be the Soviet Union. When he left Estonia, his name was August Tulle. When he got to America, where he joined his brothers, Alexander and John— he had two sisters, Marja and Lovisa, whom he left behind in Estonia—he was called August Dully. He later added the first name Howard, because it sounded American to him.
My father’s mother was the child of immigrants from Ireland. She was born Beulah Belle Cowan in Litchfield, Michigan, in 1902. Her family later moved to Portland, Oregon, in time for Beulah to attend high school, where she was so smart she skipped two grades.
August went to Portland, too, because that’s where his brothers were. According to his World War I draft registration card, he was brown-haired, blue-eyed, and of medium height. He got work as a window dresser for the Columbia River Ship Company. He became a mason. He met the redheaded Beulah at a dance. She told her mother that night, “I just met the man I’m going to marry.” She was sixteen. A short while later, they tied the knot and took a freighter to San Francisco for their honeymoon, and stayed. A 1920 U.S. Census survey shows them living in an apartment building on Fourth Street. Howard A. Dully was now a naturalized citizen, working as a laborer in the shipyards.
Sometime after, they moved to Washington, where my grandfather went to work on the railroads. They started having sons—Eugene, Rodney, and Kenneth—before August got sick with tuberculosis. Beulah believed he caught it on that freighter going to San Francisco. He died at home, in bed, on New Year’s Day, 1929. My dad was three years old. His baby brother was only fourteen months old.
Beulah Belle never remarried. She was hardheaded and strong-willed. She said, “I will never again have a man tell me what to do.”
But she had a hard time taking care of her family. She couldn’t keep up payments on the house. When she lost it, the boys went to stay with relatives. My dad was sent to live with an aunt and uncle at age six, and was shuffled from place to place after that. By his own account, he lived in six different cities before he finished high school—born in Centralia, Washington; then shipped around Oregon to Marshfield, Grants Pass, Medford, and Eugene; then to Ryderwood, Washington, where he and his brother Kenneth lived in a logging camp with their former housekeeper Evelyn Townsend and her husband, Orville Black.
At eighteen, Rod left Washington to serve with the U.S. Army, enlisting in San Francisco on December 9, 1943. Though he later was reluctant to talk about it, I know from my uncles that he was sent overseas and stationed in France. He served with the 723rd Railroad Division, laying track in an area near L’Aigle, France, that was surrounded by mines. One of my uncles told me that my father never recovered from the war. He said, “The man who went away to France never came back. He was damaged by what he saw there.”
But another of my uncles told me Rod bragged about having a German girlfriend, so I guess it wasn’t all bad. Not as bad as his brother Gene, who joined the army and got sent to Australia and New Guinea, where he developed malaria and tuberculosis and almost died. He weighed one hundred pounds when he came back to America, and lived at a military hospital in Livermore, California, for a long time after that.
By the time Rod finished his military service, his mother had left her job with Western Union Telegraph, in the Northwest, and moved to Oakland to work for the Southern Pacific Railroad. She was later made a night supervisor, working in the San Francisco office on Market Street. She would still be working there when I was born.
My mother’s folks came from the other end of the economic spectrum. June was the daughter of Daisy Seulberger and Hubert O. Pierce—German on her mother’s side, English on her father’s. Daisy grew up weatlthy, married Pierce, and had three children: Gordon, June, and Hugh. When Pierce died, Daisy married Delos Patrician, another wealthy Bay Area businessman. She moved her family to Oakland, into a huge, three-story shingled home on Newton Avenue. June spent her childhood there.
After his military service, my father relocated to the Bay Area and started taking classes at San Francisco Junior College, learning to be a teacher and doing his undergraduate work in elementary education.
Over the summers, he got part-time work at a popular high Sierras vacation spot, Tuolumne Meadows, in Yosemite. He met a young woman there, working as a housekeeper, who captured his eye. Her name was June.
She was tall, dark, and athletic, and for Rod she was a real catch. She was a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, where she had been active with the Alpha Xi Delta sorority, and had a certificate to teach nursery school. She was from a well-known Oakland family, and for several years she had been a fixture on the local social scene. During the war she had worked in Washington, D.C., as a private secretary to the U.S. congressman from her district. When she returned to Oakland, she often had her name in the newspapers, hosting luncheons and teas for her society friends.
She had been courted by quite a few young men, but her controlling mother, Daisy, drove all the boyfriends away. When she met Rod, June was still beautiful, but she was no longer what you’d call young, especially not at that time. She was thirty-two. Being unmarried at that age during the 1940s was almost like being a spinster.
Their courtship was sudden and passionate. They fell in love over the summer of 1946, and saw each other in San Francisco and Berkeley through the next year. When June returned to work in Yosemite in the summer of ’47, this time at Glen Aulin Camp, Rod left for the lumberyards of northern California and southern Oregon, where he was determined to make enough money to marry June in style. His letters over that summer were eager and filled with love. He was full of plans and promises—for his career, their wedding, the house he would buy her, the family they would have. He was worried that he was not the man June’s mother wanted, or from the right level of society, but he was determined to prove himself. “I expect to make you happy. I won’t marry you and take you into a life you won’t be happy in,” he wrote. “I’m happy now, much happier than I’ve ever been before in my life, cause you’re my little dream girl and my dream is coming true.”
After a hard summer of logging work, the plans for the wedding were made. The ceremony was held three days after Christmas in Sacramento. According to a newspaper story a week later, the couple was “honeymooning in Carmel” after a ceremony in which “the bride wore a white satin gown with a sweetheart neckline, long sleeves ending in points at the wrists and full skirt with a double peplum pointed at the front. Her full-length veil of silk net was attached to a bandeau of seed pearls and orange blossoms. She also carried a handkerchief which has been in her family for 75 years.”
The bride was given away by her uncle Ross, in whose Sacramento house she had been living. The groom’s best man was his brother Kenneth.
According to family stories, some of June’s family objected. Rod was too young for June, Daisy said, and didn’t have good prospects. June may have been uncomfortable with the relative poverty she was marrying into, too. My dad later told people that he got into a fender bender not long after he met June, and that his feelings were hurt when she said she was embarrassed to be seen driving around in his banged-up car.
With a wife to support, my father left school. He and my mother moved up north, to Medford, Oregon, where Rod returned to the lumber business and went to work as a lumber tallyman with the Southern Oregon Sugar Pine Corporation in Central Point, two miles outside of Medford.
Soon the young married couple had a baby on the way—me. Near the end of her term, my mother left my dad in Medford and moved in with her mother in Oakland, a pattern she would repeat for the births of all her children.
If everything had gone as planned, she probably would have returned to Medford and raised a family.
But my father had some bad luck. One morning on a work break he became incoherent and had to be taken by ambulance to a Medford hospital. He was trea...
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Product details
- ASIN : B000VMHHL2
- Publisher : Crown (September 4, 2007)
- Publication date : September 4, 2007
- Language : English
- File size : 2734 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 306 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #233,896 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Charles Fleming is a veteran entertainment industry journalist and author of the acclaimed Hollywood biography High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess. He is the author of the noir West Coast series of novels -- The Ivory Coast, After Havana, The Studio Kill and North Beach Blue -- and co-author of the New York Times bestsellers My Lobotomy, Three Weeks in October, A Goomba's Guide the Life, and more. His beloved Secret Stairs walking books include Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles and Secret Stairs East Bay: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Berkeley and Oakland. Fleming is the entertainment industry business news editor at The Los Angeles Times, and teaches entertainment reporting at the University of Southern California.
Dully was born on November 30, 1948, in Oakland, California, the eldest son of Rodney and June Louise Pierce Dully. Following the death of his mother from cancer in 1954, Dully's father married single mother Shirley Lucille Hardin (Lou) in 1955.
Neurologist Walter Freeman had diagnosed Dully as suffering from childhood schizophrenia since age 4, although numerous other medical and psychiatric professionals who had seen Dully did not detect a psychiatric disorder. In 1960, at 12 years of age, Dully was submitted by his father and stepmother for a trans-orbital lobotomy, performed by Freeman. During the procedure, a long, sharp instrument called a leucotome was inserted through each of Dully's eye sockets 7 cm (2.75 inches) into his brain.
Dully took decades to recover from the surgery to the point where he could function in society; he was institutionalized for years as a juvenile (in Agnews State Hospital as a minor), transferred to Rancho Linda School in San Jose, CA (a school for children with behavior problems), incarcerated, and was eventually homeless and an alcoholic. After sobering up and getting a college degree in computer information systems, he became a California state certified behind-the-wheel instructor for a school bus company in San Jose, California.
In his 50s, with the assistance of National Public Radio producer David Isay, Dully started to research what had happened to him as a child, speaking with his family, relatives of other lobotomy patients, relatives of Dr. Freeman, and gaining access to Freeman's archives. Dully first related his story on a National Public Radio broadcast in 2005, prior to co-authoring a memoir published in 2007.
National Public Radio
Isay broadcast Dully's search as a Sound Portraits documentary on NPR on November 16, 2005. According to USA Today, the documentary, which The New York Times describes as "celebrated", "created a firestorm". The broadcast, aired on All Things Considered, drew more listener response than any other program that had ever aired, and by May 2006, the Crown Publishing Group had negotiated worldwide rights to publish Dully's story in book form.
Memoir
In 2007, Dully published My Lobotomy, a memoir co-authored by Charles Fleming. The memoir relates Dully's experiences as a child, the impact of the procedure on his life, his efforts as an adult to discover why the medically-unnecessary procedure was performed on him and the effect of the radio broadcast on his life.
The book was critically well-received. The New York Times described it as "harrowing", "one of the saddest stories you'll ever read." USA Today called it "at once horrifying and inspiring". The San Francisco Chronicle critiqued it as "a gruesome but compulsively readable tale, ultimately redemptive". In the United Kingdom, The Observer characterized the book as "a forceful account of his survival" that "sheds light on the man who subjected him to one of the most brutal surgical procedures in medical history". The Times described it as "uncomfortable reading", noting that "it is, given the circumstances, astonishingly free of rancour."
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Howard’s mother died when he was 5 years old. That was where his normal, happy childhood ended. His father was working multiple jobs trying to make ends meet and remarried a woman by the name of Lou who had sons of her own from a previous marriage. She clearly favored them over her new step-children Oddly, this was mostly taken out on Howard and not his brother. No matter what Howard did, he seemed to get punished for it. Generally Lou would spank the boy, then have his father continue the punishment when he got home from working. Nothing Howard ever did was right or good enough for her. Now that isn’t to say he didn’t misbehave, but his behavior certainly wasn’t any worse than that of other children his age.
At some point, Lou sought the advice of no less than 6 psychiatrists as to what was wrong with the boy. Each of them, after listening to her, told her in no uncertain terms that there was nothing wrong with Howard, but that the problem lay with her and thought that she could benefit from therapy. Each time that happened, she would seek the help of another doctor to try and solve the problem of her stepson. That all changed when she met Dr. Freeman.
Dr. Freeman performed hundreds of lobotomies over the course of his career. He believed it cured all sorts of mental problems, from anxiety or depression to emotional problems such as anger or rage. After meeting with Lou several times and hearing about Howards emotional problems, he diagnosed Howard as schizophrenic and suggested that an “icepick” lobotomy could cure him. Howard had just turned 12 when the procedure was performed on him.
Howard was one of the fortunate few who survived the procedure with relatively few side effects, but his home life did not improve. Lou did not want him around and eventually got Dr. Freeman to agree that the boy would be better off elsewhere. Howard spent time in halfway houses and other homes before that option was unavailable to his family.
Over the years Howard spent time in an insane asylum, in juvenile detention centers, homeless, in jail, and in just about any situation you can imagine. Eventually, he met a woman he fell in love with and after they both got completely off of drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, they were married. He continued to have ups and downs in his life, but for the most part his life improved. He found and held a stable job and also had a happy family of his own. He was one of the lucky ones who survived having had a lobotomy at some point in their lives. Yet still one thing haunted him... Why had it been done to him?
There is so much more to his story. I won’t tell you the rest of it as you may want to read it for yourself. I have only included the barest of details in this review. As I said above, this was a very difficult book for me to read. My own child is the same age as Howard was when the (in my opinion unnecessary) lobotomy was performed on him. I couldn’t help but compare my own child’s worst day to his, and still believe he was simply a normal boy who was too often and too harshly punished. He was a just a normal pre-teen who deserved far better than he received.
The book continues to tell about Howard’s life well into his 50s. If you are at all curious about him or what happened to him, you should take a look at it. The book was told from his perspective, as well as having been written by him. While it is a very emotional read, he did live an extraordinary life despite everything he went through. While I may have had to put it down a few times, I also had to pick it back up again each time so that I could find out how it ended. I just couldn’t give up on the book without knowing how it all turned out.
I will begin by saying I am likely biased in Mr. Sully's favour and my experiences in life have certainly coloured my view of this book. I grew up with a mother who was abusive both mentally/emotionally and physically and my father was at work too often to either know what was happening or investigate when I would tell him anything. Had I lived in Dr. Freeman's heyday, this story could have been me.
This book covers Mr. Dully's early life before his step-mother arranged for his lobotomy and follows him to the point of the NPR broadcast about his experience to the publishing of this book. As the description implies, he had a rather wild and checkered life. He was often in trouble with the law and had problems with drugs and alcohol. This book does NOT become a chronicle of his wild behaviour. It does go into some of his exploits, but it is rather a matter-of-fact statement rather than a sensational retelling. He was able to walk away from it all. He is married and has essentially two children. (One is a step-son from a former marriage.)
I love the writing style of this book. Some say it is simplistic and it is in a sense. It isn't filled with flowery language, but it doesn't need to be to keep bone's interest. The story speaks for itself and draws you in. I sat in the food court of a mall for an unknown amount of time unable to draw myself out of its spell. Ive seen a lot of people in these reviews make a subtle insinuation that his mind was damaged by the lobotomy and thus he was unable to write as well as he could have otherwise (shame on all of you who think that.) But this man is clearly intelligent. In the book he talks about being able to understand how engines work in trains and cars. This is no simpleton. He found it difficult to get work in the computer field and so decided to drive buses. This wasn't because he was unqualified to do anything else, but it was work he enjoyed.
Towards the end of the book when he goes into the work involved in putting together the NPR broadcast, I couldn't help but cry. It ripped my very soul to feel what he went through while interviewing bis father, who refused to accept any blame for what happened. He blamed everyone else involved but himself.
Some people have mentioned that he seems not to accept any responsibility for his behaviour. Some have mentioned that this is only one side of the story. As far as it only being one side of the story, the step-mother in question is dead, but Dully's father refuted one of the worst claims made against young Howard and there are notes from Dr. Freeman that seem to suggest that up u tip a certain point, he was thought to be a normal boy. There is also the fact that several others have said his step-mother was shopping doctors trying to find one who would side with her before she found Freeman. All of the previous doctors had said that the step-mother was the problem. That seems to support the theory presented. As for his behaviour, this procedure was intended to change personality, but in doing so I suspect it also can have an effect on how someone perceives right and wrong or perhaps create a disconnect between knowing and doing what's right. Severing the connections between the two halves of the brain could cause so many emotional and moral problems. This man is fortunate to be alive and a productive human being.
Bottom line: this is an amazing look at how a man turned his life around. It brought me to tears and it is a book anyone should read.
Top reviews from other countries
But, the author's skills as a writer don't matter at all, compared to the rich historical record, in the shape of a living person, that he brings to the table. Lobotomies rarely leave people capable of doing the most basic tasks, let alone care for themselves. Yet, he survived - and the aftermath was horrible, and now he's seeking answers for all of this. This book is a wonderful resource if you want to understand the gruesome story behind psychiatry and why it failed, and continues to fail, patients around the world and more often than not, acts as a tool of violence against the most vulnerable of people.
Well written easy to read boy.