Walter Freeman and the Visual Culture of Lobotomy
Posner, Miriam
Posner, Miriam
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Abstract
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.
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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.
Date
2016-01-25
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Keywords
Digital Humanities, Lobotomy, Walter Freeman, Medical Humanities, Photography, Data