Howard Dully

This week I read "My Lobotomy" by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming. Words cannot describe how this book made me feel.

Howard Dully was a seemingly average young boy. His mother passed away when he was young, leaving his distant father to raise Howard and his brother Brian. His father soon after remarried a strong and strict woman with two children of her own. For some reason she decided that Howard had to go. After searching she found what seemed like a solution to her problem, a lobotomy. Mrs. Dully found the father of transorbital lobotomy, Dr. Walter Freeman. He agreed to give twelve year old Howard Dully a lobotomy. It took Howard 40 years to regain his life again.

He takes us from on a journey of discovery, Dully spends the book trying to understand why this was done to him and why no one, not even his father tried to prevent this from happening. He decided to write this memoir after the success of the NPR broadcast featuring him and other lobotomy patients. Everyone should read this and then demand more funding for social services, not child should ever go through what Howard Dully went through.

The NPR broadcast is available at NPR.org. You can fin "My Lobotomy" at your local library or Barnes and Noble.