A team of surgeons perform an operation on a violent paranoid man in an attempt to electronically control his behavior.

At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody, messy, rambunctious, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital--or ice pick--lobotomy. Abandoned by his family within a year of the surgery, Howard spent his teen years in mental institutions, his twenties in jail, and his thirties in...