Publisher Description
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.
Download and start listening now!
About Jack El-Hai
Jack El-Hai is the former executive vice president of the American
Society of Journalists and Authors and a winner of the June Roth Memorial Award
for Medical Journalism. A contributor to the Atlantic, the Washington
Post Magazine, American Heritage,
and numerous other publications, he lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two
daughters.
About Peter Lerman
Peter Lerman is originally from New York City where, coincidentally, these stories are set. 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.