SANTA CRUZ — He is a big man with a sweep of white hair who lives in a small apartment by the sea, not far from the San Jose hospital where a doctor gouged his brain with a steel wand more than 40 years ago.
The doctor had recommended the operation, and Howard's parents agreed to it. They thought it was the only way to relieve their 12-year-old son's "adolescent anxiety," to subdue his anger, to set his life straight.
It didn't work out that way. Howard made far more mischief after the operation than he had before. He has struggled with anxiety, fits of anger and moodiness for much of his life. Eventually, he found a kind of peace. Today, at 55, he has a job, a wife who loves him, a sense of humor and a view of Monterey Bay from his easy chair.
Yet the operation still haunts him. He fears that discussing it publicly could jeopardize his job at a transportation company, and with it the small comforts that have taken a lifetime to find. He agreed to be interviewed only if his last name would not be published.
"It horrifies people when I tell them what happened," he said.
More than half a century after a Portuguese neurologist won the Nobel Prize for inventing the lobotomy, doctors view the procedure as little more than misguided butchery. About 50,000 Americans had the surgery between 1936 and 1960. An estimated several hundred, perhaps several thousand, are still alive.
Silenced for decades by fear or shame, a handful have begun to speak out. Their children and grandchildren are speaking out too, as they struggle to understand the operation's effects on their own upbringings.
"It's like we were all supposed to slink into the shadows, as if it never happened, as if doctors never cut into the brains of people we loved," said Christine Johnson, 34, a medical librarian in Levittown, N.Y. She is writing a book about her late grandmother, who was lobotomized in 1954. Johnson also hosts a website, www.psychosurgery.org, devoted to memorializing people who underwent the procedure.
A new film, "A Hole in One," offers a fictionalized exploration of the lobotomy era, inspired by a patient's account. A book-length treatment of the subject by poet Penelope Scambly Schott, based on a relative's experience, is due out this year.
Some psychiatrists say it is important for the profession to confront this chapter of medical history because doctors today are pursuing increasingly aggressive, brain-altering treatments, from implantable electrodes to powerful drug combinations.
