There’s an interesting article in the Observer on one of the youngest ever lobotomy patients, Howard Dully, who was operated on at the age of 12.  His biography has been published in the US, and is coming out in the UK in March:

“At 1.30pm on 16 December 1960, he was wheeled into an operating theatre and given a series of electric shocks to sedate him. That much he remembers. The rest is murky.

When Dully woke the next day, his eyes were swollen and bruised and he was running a high fever. He recalls a severe pain in his head and the discomfort of his hospital gown, which gaped open at the back. He had no idea what had happened. ‘I was in a mental fog,’ Dully says. ‘I was like a zombie; I had no awareness of what Freeman had done…

The hospital report stated that he had been given a ‘transorbital lobotomy. A sharp instrument was thrust through the orbital roof on both sides and moved so as to sever the brain pathways in the frontal lobes’. Dr Freeman’s bill came to $200…

Originally developed by Portuguese physician Antonio Egas Moniz in 1936, the lobotomy involved drilling two small holes in either side of the forehead and severing the connecting tissue around the frontal lobes…

Dr Walter Freeman, a neurologist and Yale graduate, brought the procedure to America in the late 1930s … Freeman developed a version of Moniz’s procedure that reached the frontal lobe tissue through the tear ducts. His transorbital lobotomy involved taking a kitchen ice pick, later refined into a more proficient instrument called a leucotome, and hammering it through the thin layer of skull in the corner of each eye socket. The pick would then be scrambled from side to side in order to damage the frontal lobe. The process took about 10 minutes and could be performed anywhere, without the assistance of a surgeon.”

Leucotomes