Split Decision
I heard a voice from the past today while fighting traffic on I-280 into San Francisco. Minnesota author Jack El-Hai was interviewed by Terry Gross about his new book, The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness. The book is a profile of Dr. Walter Freeman, the controversial psychiatrist who developed the procedure and performed more than 3,500 lobotomies during the 40s and 50s.
I met Jack several times when I was a college student at Macalester College during the late 80s. His wife worked with me in the College Relations office, and he occasionally stopped in to file freelance stories for various college publications. I once earned a few bucks helping him move out of a dingy one-bedroom apartment into a picture-perfect home in the burbs with his wife. They later split up.
Which brings me back to lobotomies. Grizzly subject, especially the bit about ice picks. Jack's interview with Terry is ghoulishly fascinating, especially as he recounts the tragic story of Rosemary Kennedy. Cutting the brain in an effort to cure the brain. Or at least to modify behavior to make it more acceptable.
This, in turn, led me to think about another NPR piece the previous day. Wardens in California "super max" prisons were struggling with the increasing sophistication and influence of prison gangs. Even solitary confinement couldn't prevent drug dealing and "hits" being ordered. There were even underground rap records being produced and recorded behind the bars of some of the most secure prisons in the world.
Brain surgery. Psychiatrists. Violence. Power. Prisons. Music. Hard not to think about Clockwork Orange when you hear stories like that.
As the interview with Jack wrapped up I was nearly home, waiting for the light to change in the left turn lane to get through a rush-hour clogged intersection. A police car idled beside me. A homeless man on one crutch, bearded and dirty, shuffled between rows of impatient cars. On the distant hill, Laguna Honda Hospital, the City's century old 2,000 bed mental health and rehabilitation center, looked down upon us all.
