My Lobotomy: Radio Documentary by Sound Portraits

Sallie Ellen Ionesco. Virginia, May 2004. Photo by Harvey Wang.

“My Lobotomy" contains the first-ever interview with Sallie Ellen Ionesco, the first patient to receive a transorbital lobotomy.

On January 17, 1946 a psychiatrist named Walter J. Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness in this country. On that day he performed the first-ever transorbital or “ice pick” lobotomy in his Washington, D.C. office. His patient was a severely depressed housewife named Sallie Ellen Ionesco.

After rendering her unconscious through electroshock, Freeman inserted an ice pick above her eyeball, banged it through her eye socket into her brain, and then made cuts in her frontal lobes. When he was done, he sent her home in a taxi cab.

Freeman was convinced he’d found the answer to Sallie Ellen Ionesco’s depression. He believed that mental illness was related to overactive emotions, and that by cutting the brain he could cut away those feelings.

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Producers: Dave Isay and Piya Kochhar / With help from: Larry Blood, Eliza Bettinger, Brett Myers, Jessica Tickten, Anna Goldman, Maisie Tivnan, Colin Murphy & Jonah Engle / Narrator: Howard Dully / Editor: Gary Covino / Project Advisor: Jack El-Hai / Executive Producer for All Things Considered: Chris Turpin / Graphic Designer: Andrew McCarthy / Special thanks to: Barbara Dully, Andrew Goldberg, Christine Johnson, Lyle Slovick & David Anderson at the GWU Gelman Library archives / Funding provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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