Walter Freeman and the Visual Culture of Lobotomy

Digital Humanities Seminar, University of Kansas, Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities & Hall Center for the Humanities, January 25th, 2016: http://idrh.ku.edu Miriam Posner is at the University of California Los Angeles.Head-and-Shoulder Hunting in the Americas: Walter Freeman and the Visual Culture of Lobotomy. Between 1936 and 1967, Walter Freeman, a prominent neurologist, lobotomized as many as 3,500 Americans. Freeman was also an obsessive photographer, taking patients’ photographs before their operations and tracking them down years — even decades — later. In this presentation, Miriam Posner details her efforts to understand why Freeman was so devoted to this practice, using computer-assisted image-mining and -analysis techniques to show how these images fit into the larger visual culture of 20th-century psychiatry