As those who watched the procedure described it, a patient would be rendered unconscious by electroshock. Freeman would then take a sharp ice pick-like instrument, insert it above the patient's eyeball through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving the instrument back and forth
lobotomies have always been controversial, but were widely performed for more than two decades as treatment for schizophrenia, manic depression and bipolar disorder, among other mental illnesses
The surgery consisted of drilling two holes in the patient's head and then injecting pure ethyl alcohol into the prefrontal cortex. Alcohol was used to disrupt the neuronal tracts that were believed to give rise to and reinforce the recurrent patterns of thought observed in mentally ill patients
about a third of the lobotomies were considered successful