Savant in the Limelight 1988-2009

Recommendable! Don't you wish you had a memory like that! When will scientists equip humans with such memory capabilities be it via genetics or via human computer interface or both?

"The concept of savant syndrome dates back to 1887, when physician J. Langdon Down coined the term “idiot savant” for persons who showed low IQ but superlative artistic, musical, mathematical, or other skills. ... Nine months after Peek was born in 1951, a doctor told his family “that Kim was retarded, and they should put him in an institution and forget about him,” ... “Another doctor suggested a lobotomy [aka quackery], which fortunately they didn’t carry out.” Instead, his parents raised him at home in Utah where he raced through books, memorizing them. Despite his feats of memory and other abilities, such as performing impressive calculations in his head, Peek never learned to carry out many everyday tasks, such as dressing himself. MRIs would later reveal that Peek had abnormalities in the left hemisphere of his brain and was missing a corpus callosum, which controls communication between the two cerebral hemispheres. ..."



Savant in the Limelight, 1988-2009 | The Scientist Magazine® Kim Peek, the inspiration for the title character in Rain Man, brought public attention to savant syndrome.

Lobotomy Quackery Revisited

Posted: 12/14/2013  Updated: 6/24/2017

Update Of 6/24/2017

Of course lobotomy was not the only quackery applied to mentally ill humans. There were other so called shock therapies like electroconvulsive therapy (made famous in the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest with Jack Nicholson) or insulin coma/shock therapy.

Never Trust Your Doctor!

He or she might be a quack. Academic pedigree is no guarantee for anything.

As they say, if something sounds too good to be true ...

Lobotomy is one of those dark chapters of the annals of medicine and it is only a few decades old. It is a stark reminder of caveat emptor regarding medical professionals.

Nobel Prize In Medicine For Quackery

It happened in 1949 see Wikipedia article on this subject. One of the greatest quacks “ Walter Freeman nominated his mentor António Egas Moniz for a Nobel prize and in 1949 Moniz won the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine.” (source)

New Investigative Journalism On The Subject

The Wall Street Journal (one of the best newspapers in the U.S.) published a three part report of about 2,000 or more lobotomies performed on returning veterans of World War II (here, here, and here). I have not yet read all three installments, but it is a gripping tale.

According to Wikipedia from the early 1940 until 1951 about 20,000 lobotomies were performed in the U.S. alone. Thus, about a whopping 20% were performed on these veteran soldiers.

Why Was One Of The Leading Quacks Never Indicted?

Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman II himself performed lobotomies although he was not trained or licensed as a surgeon. Dr. Freeman apparently had a family history of doctors.

Why was this quack never expelled or disciplined by the medical profession?

Wall Street Journal reported on 12/13/2013 about Dr. Freeman “One patient in Iowa in 1951 died when the doctor [Freeman] chose an inopportune moment to stop for a photo and the surgical instrument penetrated too far into the patient’s brain, Freeman biographer Jack El-Hai wrote in “The Lobotomist.” ” (source). If this is true, why was he not indicted by prosecutors?

Previous, Related Blog Posts

I briefly talked about lobotomy here.