Staci

The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure. The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe. The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table. The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties. The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in. The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior. The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right. The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house. The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse. The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it. Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help. You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time. The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody. The next one is being drafted now.

On the sixteenth of December 1960 a twelve-year-old boy was put on a table in a San Jose hospital, given electric shocks until he was unconscious, and had an ice pick hammered through the thin bone above each eye and swept from side to side through the front of his brain, because his stepmother had told the doctor he was defiant. The doctor's fee was two hundred dollars. Howard Dully was a big, clumsy, daydreaming boy whose mother had died when he was five, and his father had married a woman called Lou who could not stand him. She took him to six psychiatrists. All six told her the problem was not the boy. The seventh was Walter Freeman, who had performed more lobotomies than any man alive, who drove between state hospitals in a van he called the lobotomobile doing them by the dozen in an afternoon, with no gloves and no surgical training, and who had once done twenty-five in a day. Freeman's notes on Howard, which Howard did not read for forty-four years, record the symptoms. He objects to going to bed. He turns the lights on when there is broad daylight. He does not react to love or to punishment. He has a savage streak. On that evidence, and Lou's signature, and two hundred dollars, Freeman wrote that the boy would benefit from a transorbital lobotomy and did it four days later. Howard remembers the table. He remembers waking with two black eyes and a fever and no idea what had been done to him, because nobody told him, then or ever. His father never spoke of it. Lou put him into a state institution the following year, and the boy with the holes in his brain spent the next forty years in and out of asylums, juvenile halls, a jail, halfway houses and the street, drinking, drifting, never quite able to say why he was the way he was, with a photograph that existed somewhere of a doctor in a suit standing over a child with a steel spike in each eye socket. At fifty-six, driving a school bus, he went to find out. He found his file in Freeman's archive at a university in Washington, in the doctor's own handwriting, and read for the first time what his stepmother had said and what the doctor had agreed to. He went to see his father, who was eighty, and asked him why he had let it happen, and his father said he had been bullied into it. Howard told the story on the radio in 2005 and five million people listened to a man weep over a piece of paper. Walter Freeman was not a quack. He was a professor of neurology, the man who had brought the lobotomy to America, and the operation had won its inventor the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949. The journals published him. The hospitals booked him. The newspapers called it a miracle. He did it to three and a half thousand people, nineteen of them children, and he kept doing it until 1967, when a patient died on the table and the hospital took his privileges away, and he spent his last years driving the country in the van looking up his old patients to prove it had worked. That is what settled science looked like from inside, to a twelve-year-old. A mother's complaint, an expert's confidence, a procedure with a prize behind it, two hundred dollars, and a lifetime nobody could give back. The same institutions now tell you what your child should eat, in the same voice, with the same certainty, and the leaflet has a logo on it. Howard Dully is in his seventies and still cannot say what was taken. Nobody ever apologised.