THE DARK SIDE OF THE HOUSE

by ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 31, 1968

The operation was successful, the patient died (suicide-- although he was riddled with cancer) and the merit of the frontal lobotomy as a curative procedure still remains in doubt. This then is a factual transcript by neurosurgeon Dr. Koskoff of the operation he performed more than twenty years ago on Millard Wright, after Wright's ""three tortuous decades in crime,"" and with his consent and that of a judge. This gives Wright's complete history--from a disturbed background to a still more disturbed record as a professional criminal engaged in burglary, one of the three compulsive crimes. Dr. Koskoff had at that time performed fifty lobotomies (a third of his patients had recovered, another third been improved). This one met with the continuing antagonism of attending psychiatrist Dr. Meyer. It also returned Millard Wright to a further, slightly more skillful, series of thefts before he took his life. . . . Proving, in this particular pilot case, the ""indestructible nature of [Wright's] behavior pattern"" although to and for whom the book is intended is less definable--the doctor has justified the objective rather than the outcome.

Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dial

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION