In the 1940s Dr. Walter Freeman gained fame for perfecting the lobotomy, then hailed as a miracle cure for the severely mentally ill. But within a few years, lobotomy was labeled one of the most barbaric mistakes of modern medicine.
American Experience: Timeline of Mental Illness Treatments
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/timeline/
Trace mental illness treatments from ancient times to today.
American Experience: Online Forum on Mental Illness
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/sfeature/sf_forum.html
Q&A with a panel of experts about mental illness, schizophrenia, and John Nash.
American Experience: Nellie's Madhouse Memoir
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/world/sfeature/memoir.html
Experience Blackwell's Island, the notorious New York lunatic asylum, in journalist Nellie Bly's haunting 1887 account of her stay there.
Guide to the Walter Freeman and James Watts Papers, 1918-1988
http://www.gwu.edu/gelman/spec/ead/ms0803.xml#id0x077a7870
Find biographical notes and a description of the physical collection of the Freeman-Watts papers at George Washington University.
Sound Portraits: My Lobotomy
http://www.soundportraits.org/on-air/my_lobotomy/
Listen to a radio documentary of Howard Dully's search to learn more about the lobotomy Walter Freeman performed on him when he was 12 years old.
Remembering the Tragedy of Lobotomy
http://www.psychosurgery.org/
Read personal stories by family members of people who were lobotomized.
Abandoned Asylums
http://www.abandonedasylum.com
Explore photographs and postcards of state mental hospitals that have shut their doors.
Overview of Mental Health in New York and the Nation
http://www.archives.nysed.gov/a/research/res_topics_health_mh_timeline.shtml
This site from the New York State Archives presents a timeline of trends in mental health treatment in the U.S. from colonial times to 1992.
Christopher Payne Photography
http://www.chrispaynephoto.com/payne.html
Photographer Chris Payne has photographed former state hospital wards, exteriors, and artifacts. Choose Gallery then Asylums on this site to see some of his work.
Deutsch, Albert. The Shame of the States. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948.
Dully, Howard. My Lobotomy. New York: Crown, 2007.
El-Hai, Jack. The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.
Freeman, Walter. Autobiography. Unpublished.
Freeman, Walter, and James Watts. Psychosurgery in the Treatment of Mental Disorders and Intractable Pain. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1950.
Pressman, Jack D. Last Resort: Psychosurgery and the Limits of Medicine. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge, 1998.
Scull, Andrew. Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine. New Haven: Yale University, 2005.
Shorter, Edward. A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
Shutts, David. Lobotomy: Resort to the Knife. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982.
Valenstein, Elliot S. Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness. New York: Basic Books, 1986.
Whitaker, Robert. Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2002.
The remarkable story of how a railroad was built connecting California to the East.
Robert Noyce's invention of the microchip launched the world into the Information Age.
During the Great Depression, Americans built the Hoover Dam, one of the greatest engineering works in history.
The international race to develop biological weapons during the 20th century.
George Eastman introduced the Kodak and Brownie camera systems and transformed photography into something anybody could do.
Brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright built a flying machine that made its first flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903.
The unusual life of David Vetter, who lived permanently inside a germ-free environment due to severe combined immunodeficiency.
Engineered by William Barclay Parsons, the 21-mile, four-track route of the New York City Subway was the largest public works project in history.
