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Mical Raz has written a history of a psychiatric surgical intervention, lobotomy. She recognizes and builds on two of the best books in the whole field of the history of psychiatry, Jack Pressman (1998) and Joel Braslow (1997). Pressman and Braslow describe the lobotomy episode in the hospital setting. Raz has based her work on the extensive correspondence and case reports of the leading proponent of the procedure in the United States, Walter Freeman . Her book therefore deals with mostly outpatient, private patients. It shows an exemplary mastery of the literature on the history of medicine, the history of psychiatry, and relevant American social history. Many will find the book engrossing reading, not least because, as is revealed at the end, this research finally decided the author, a practicing physician, not to specialize in psychiatry. Raz offers the reader her reflections on the records she found. Freeman, it turns out, was deeply influenced by the style of practice that he learned from the French clinical neurologists in Paris in the 1920s, namely, bold experimentation on each individual patient, modified by Freeman to include great attention to the concerns of patients and