"Vegetables don't cry"

Psychiatrist Eileen Walkenstein describes a lobotomy she witnessed in 1949:

Yes, sadism in medicine and neurosurgery and psychiatry is, alas, still rearing its ugly head and destroying human heads in its wake.
My own introduction to modern neurosurgery occurred in my second or third year in edical school - occurred, literally, in one fell swoop, cutting its way into my own brain and leaving the scar even now, some twenty years later.
I refer to the transorbital lobotomy, otherwise known as the ice pick operation. Techniques of this wounding were perfected to such a degree that all that was required was an ice pick-like instrument - no sutures, no bandages - internal bleeding and destruction of nerve pathways and irrevocable death of brain cells with just a thrust of the ice pick... and all that's evident on the outside are two black eyes - that clear up in time - and memory loss - that doesn't clear up so well... and a state of docile vegetation - that goes on forever. With a flick of the wrist the animal gets changed into a plant - modern alchemy!
My medical school class was invited to see a demonstration of such a transorbital lobotomy, one of the several type of lobotomies. The neurosurgeon, on the staff of a university medical school, stood before the class strutting in a sedate, self-important manner. I remember how good looking and smooth he appeared, a typical Hollywood symbol of the handsome doctor whose patients go ga-ga over him... and how entirely devoid of character he was. He was meticulously groomed, hair perfectly in place, skin very white and smooth shaven - a perfect representative of White Anglo-Saxon America. He wore a suit and tie and looked as if he were addressing a businessmen's luncheon meeting of the Kiwanis Club. After some introductory remarks he opened the door and the nurse and orderly pushed a stretcher into the room. Walking in with them was an attractive young black man, eighteen years old, looking frightened and bewildered. The neurosurgeon paid no attention to him but continued discussing with us how the operation would be conducted, and he seemed proud of the fact that they didn't even need anesthesia for the operation - that knocking the patient out with "a couple of electric shock treatments would be adequate anesthetization". (I guess when you're contemplating slashing up the brain substance, a little cell damage more or less is not too relevant.)
The young black man in wrinkled hospital garb stood cowering in the corner in sharp contrast with the urbane, smooth, self-possessed, polished physician. Finally the doctor turned to the patient, mentioned his diagnosis... Schizophrenic Reaction...and that he was a recent hospital admission... and told him to get up on the stretcher. The young man backed up, his shoulders hunched like a scared cat being attacked by a growling bulldog, his eyes darting this way and that in a futile attempt to seek some way of escape from the inevitable. The nurse and orderly then held his arms, brought him to the stretcher, and somehow managed to get him to lie down on it, shackling his wrists and ankles. The doctor applied the electrodes to the young man's temples, the current was turned on, and the young man's body jerked convulsively for several seconds. The doctor said smoothly, as though nothing had just happened, that he thought he'd give another dose of electric current to be sure he's knocked out completely. Again the current was turned on, again the captured victim was convulsively responding with his entire body to the electricity searing through his brain cells.
(This patient - if he were not poor, not black, not welfare-experimental-animal material - what treatment would then have been meted out to him?... need one ask such an obvious question? What treatment for this young black man had he been in the doctor's own family, for instance? This is the criterion. If you treat me, no matter who I am, in any way different from the way you would treat your family members and colleagues and peers, then you don't deserve to be in a service profession - get out and get into business! In business you treat everyone with equal contempt, independent of their blood realtionship to you - business is business. So get out of the service and helping professions, you doctors, educators, priests, et al. who would dehumanize us - get into the material world - unadulteratedly corrupt - and practice your corruptions on my pocketbook but not of my flesh, my intellect, my spirit!)
I find it very difficult to get back and face that patient who has just had his second electroconvulsive assault. Since leaving him there I have just now busied myself with phone calls, checking my calendar, eating a homemade milk-and-honey popsicle, and just plain vacating for a while. The subsequent scene is so horrible not only in itself but in all its ramifications that I've been avoiding delving in and confronting it.
Well, back again - that patient was, after the second electric shock, completely limp and "anesthetized". (I have never, neither before nor since tha incident, heard of using electricity for anesthesia!) The surgeon then took an instrument from his pocket in a pointedly and overly nonchalant manner and showed the ice-pick-like tool to the class. He then lifted one eyelid of the patient's an stuck the pick up - he made a point of showing that he was having some trouble getting the pick through the skull and into the brain at the first try and he grimaced at the class and said something about the "thickness of the boy's skull". A few of the more obvious racists in the class gave him his anticipated reply by snickering - some of the students, already uncomfortable, had their discomfort increased at this remark. After the pick penetrated the skull, he flicked his wrist back and forth with the pick slashing into the brain substance, severing forever, in an instant, those connections that nature had labored to achieve over millions of years. The Brain-Killer, named Neurosurgeon, repeated the ceremony via the patient's other eye socket.
I was not the only one who gasped at the outrage I had just witnessed. One girl, Dottie, her head probably full of the sterile operative techniques with sterilization of instruments we'd been taught to observe prior to and during the operation, raised her hand and asked about using an unsterilized instrument, to which the surgeon retorted with a pretty-boy smile: "Well, I didn't wipe it on my bootstrap."
Who was there to raise the bigger question - by what right had this surgeon, knowing almsot nothing about the patient except that he was black, eighteen, on welfare, and a new hospital admission, butchered this young man's brain for the education of a class of young doctors-to-be. Who were all those responsible for all the steps required to bring that patient's brain in contact with that butcher's ice pick?
The show was over - the showman strutted in front of the room, titillated at his own performance - at the suave, nonchalant way he imposed a gruesome spectacle on a class of horrified doctors-to-be.
The young man, never to be whole again, lying stretchered out before us, was wheeled out of the room, out of most of our lives. He will always be a part of mine - seared forever in my brain, in my guts.
May, as Goethe promised, the pain be halved now that I've shared it with you...may the load of it be lighter for me. It will never be lighter for that young man - he is beyond weights and measures - beyond the pain of butcheries - vegetables don't cry.

"Vegetables don't cry" was published in Blue jolts (true stories from the cuckoo's nest), edited by Charles Steir, New Republic Books, Washington DC, 1978.