At the same time, follow-up research on lobotomy patients was producing results that undermined the procedure’s claimed benefits. A 1961 controlled study found no significant difference in outcomes between operated and unoperated patients. The measures of improvement that Freeman and Watts had used — reduced agitation, discharge from hospital, family satisfaction — turned out to reflect more about institutional convenience than about patient wellbeing. When researchers looked at what lobotomized patients were actually able to do, how they actually experienced their lives, the picture was considerably less positive than the procedure’s advocates had claimed.
Freeman continued performing transorbital lobotomies through the 1960s, even as the professional consensus was shifting against him. He believed in what he had done, and he had difficulty accepting that the procedure he had championed was becoming a symbol of medical hubris rather than medical progress. His final surgery, in 1967, killed a patient and led to his being banned from operating. He died in 1972, still defending the lobotomy’s legacy.
The broader history of psychosurgery — the attempt to treat psychiatric conditions through brain surgery — did not end with the lobotomy’s fall from grace. More targeted neurosurgical interventions, performed with much greater precision and under much more stringent ethical oversight, have continued to be investigated for conditions including severe depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder that fail to respond to other treatments. But the ethical framework governing modern psychosurgical research is radically different from the framework under which Freeman and Watts operated: informed consent is required, independent ethical review is required, and the populations on whom procedures are tested are far more carefully selected.