The lobotomy was originally developed in 1936 by a Portuguese physician who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The procedure involved drilling two holes in either side of the patient’s forehead to sever some of the nerve fibers in the frontal lobes of the brain. The hope was to treat intractable mental disorders by reducing the strength of certain emotional signals.

A few years later the procedure gained traction in the United States in a different incarnation called a trans-orbital lobotomy. It was not a precise surgery and simply involved hammering an icepick through the thin layer of skull in the corner of each eye socket and wiggling it about to scramble the white and gray matter located there. It took less than ten minutes to complete, and oftentimes no anesthesia was required (though patients were usually given electroshock treatment first so they were unaware of what was happening).

Around this time a neurologist and Harvard graduate named Dr. Jerome Asper was working as head of laboratories in a sprawling Boston mental institution that housed thousands of patients in abject Victorian conditions. Wanting to make a name for himself as a medical pioneer, he began performing hundreds of these trans-orbital lobotomies at the hospital. Despite his critics decrying that he was doing nothing more than turning his unwitting patients into vegetables, he had his share of successes, published his work in respected journals, and built a reputation for himself as one of the foremost experts in psychiatric science.

For much of the nineteen fifties, he became an evangelist for trans-orbital lobotomies, touring hospitals and asylums across the country, performing the procedure on thousands of individuals to treat a range of illnesses from schizophrenia to depression to compulsion disorders. It became so routine he started prescribing it for symptoms as mild as a headache, and he sometimes brazenly ice-picked both eye sockets simultaneously, one with each hand, to impress the media that usually gathered to cover his “miracle cures.”

Nevertheless, by the end of the decade Asper’s fortunes made an abrupt reversal due to two unforeseen developments. The first was the rise of antipsychotic drugs, which yielded the same pacifying results in the mentally ill as the lobotomy without the invasiveness of an icepick to the brain. The second was the widespread rumor that Joseph Stalin and the Chinese were using lobotomies to control their political enemies, fueling the Red Scare that vilified any activity related to Communism.

Consequently, Asper quickly fell out of favor with the mainstream medical establishment, and it wasn’t long until no state hospital would touch him—not in the US at any rate. So in 1957 he relocated his sideshow to Mexico where he enjoyed revived success.

He had been performing the operation throughout Mexico City for several months when he received the call from Saint Agatha’s School for Lost Children regarding a particularly troublesome ward.