Definitive Therapy

Part Three

 CONFERENCE

          "A pre-frontal lobotomy?" Dr. Hills said.  "You must be joking!"

          The irony of his choice of words was lost in the shocked silence around me.  I'd gone directly from my session with the Joker to the psychiatric conference where I'd blurted out my recommendation.  The rest of the psychiatric staff – Drs. Hills, Miller, and Bolland – were there, and I believe I stunned them all. 

          The solution had occurred to me as I'd entered the room.  A pre-frontal lobotomy – surgical invasion of the frontal lobe of the brain.  It had been used briefly with great success in the 1930s.  Violent, agitated patients had become pussy cats – gentle, placid, physically and emotionally in low gear.  But the procedure had fallen out of favor because it was deemed too extreme.  And because it was irreversible.

          "Yes, I'm aware that it's a radical suggestion," I said, "but you've got to admit that this particular case warrants a radical solution.  Demands it, I should think.  Lobotomy is definitive therapy in the case of a patient as incorrigibly violent as The Joker."

       Dr. Hills said, "We'll come under heavy fire from the patients' right groups merely for suggesting it.  The ACLU, all the–"

          "What about the rights of the people he will harm in the future when he escapes again?" I replied.  "And we all know he will escape again.  Let's be honest, gentlemen: modern psychiatry has failed society in the case of The Joker.  I know.  I've gone through his past records.  The man seems to escape at will.  Then he goes on a rampage of murder and robbery, is caught, is returned to us, only to escape again for another rampage.  No matter how we chain him, drug him, psychoanalyze him, he escapes.  And he never pays a price for the harm he does!  Between rampages, he's given a clean, comfortable cell, three meals a day, and free medical care.  For life!"

          "But a lobotomy–?" Dr. Hills said.

          "We've failed to contain him, we've failed to change him with therapy or control him with drugs, and the courts won't send him to the chair.  As physicians charged with treating the so-called criminally insane, I think we have a duty to consider the definitive therapy for his sort of behavior disorder."

          After a long silence, Dr. Hills said, "I'll take it up with the State Board of Medical Examiners."

         I left the conference room in a state of wild exhilaration.  I might have been the new man on the staff but I was making my presence felt in no uncertain terms.  And beyond that, I knew that my recommendation for lobotomy would prove to The Joker once and for all that Harold Lewis, M.D. was not for sale.

 SESSION NINE-A

       Numb, speechless, I stared across the table at The Joker.  That smile... if only he'd stop smiling.

          "Well?" he said.  "Do you like your engagement gift?"

          "Where–?"  My mouth was dry.  "Where did you get it?"

          I'd come home last night to find an original Colin Whittier hanging on my wall.  An original!  An abstract of swirling blues and greens that made me think of the depths of the ocean... the eternal cycle of birth, life, and death... cold, ghastly, unutterably beautiful.

           The cost of a Whittier had gone through the roof since his death at The Joker's hands.  Each was worth millions now.  I'd never be able to afford a Whittier.  Never.  And The Joker had given me one.