Do You Have a Lobotomy?

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Don't stake your reputation on it, which is something that Freeman did. He became like the face of lobotomy in the United States. The press had no way to assess this. It was totally uncritical. There were some critical pieces later, but early on, miracle medicine, which was a very common genre in our own day. And then the third thing is, and I think this goes back to Semmelweis, is how at the, in extremis, you just have to say to yourself, "I got to move"

When physician Walter Freeman died in 1972, he still believed that lobotomies were the best treatment for mental illness. A pioneer in the method, he was a deeply confident and charismatic man who eagerly spread the technique in America, long after the rise of alternative treatments that were less destructive. Listen as journalist Megan McArdle and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss what McArdle calls the "Oedipus Trap": mistakes that no one can live with, even if they were innocently made, and how admitting such mistakes to ourselves is nearly impossible. They also discuss the complexity of the credo, "follow the science."