The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.
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Jack El-Hai is a Minneapolis author of several nonfiction books, including The Lobotomist, The Lost Brothers, and The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, among others. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, Wired, GQ, Discover, Scientific American Mind, and Minnesota Monthly. He has received two Minnesota Book Awards, the June Roth Memorial Award for Medical Journalism, and fellowships and grants from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation.
Peter Lerman is originally from New York City. Peter has narrated over 150 audiobooks and has won an AudioFile Magazine Earphones Award® in 2020 for one of them. His specialty is nonfiction—biography, history, government and politics, business, science, medicine, and technology. In 2023 Peter recorded the first audiobook production of Upton Sinclair’s Boston: the Documentary Novel of Sacco and Vanzetti.