It just floored them.”. He was a firm believer that organic defects were the result of mental illness. Robert Galbraith Heath helped pioneer gay conversion therapy back in the 70’s, when they put steel electrodes in a patient’s skull and let him shock himself until, in their view, he was straight. Her writing pseudonym Robert Galbraith has been linked to Robert Galbraith Heath — a psychologist who helped develop gay conversion therapy, however, Rowling denied the link saying the ghostwriter was named after Robert F Kennedy and a surname she always liked as a child. Our journalists will try to respond by joining the threads when they can to create a true meeting of independent Premium. Rowling wrote The Cuckoo’s Calling, a 2013 detective novel that would be the first in a four-book series known collectively as Cormoran Strike, under a male alias, Robert Galbraith. Yet his 425 papers have left a remarkably small imprint on the wider field. Even before his death in 1999, at the age of 84, his reputation outside Tulane had become tarnished. The momentary spark induced an “almost overwhelming euphoria and elation,” according to a paper published on Heath’s research. A scientist who pioneered, among other things, gay conversion therapy. Please continue to respect all commenters and create constructive debates. Take Elliott Valenstein’s book Brain Control. In it, he did criticise the experiment – but for its method, not its motives. In fact, given New Orleans demographics, African-Americans appear to have been under-represented in Heath’s electrode studies rather than the reverse. Harry Bailey, an Australian doctor who briefly worked with Heath on his electrode studies, accused him of picking out African-Americans for his experiments because, as he put it, they were “everywhere and cheap experimental animals”. Gay conversion therapy is an accusation levelled at the 'services' the Tavistock are 'providing' to would-be transgener children; c.f. Robert Galbraith Heath was a controversial psychiatrist because of his experiments that would now be considered deeply unethical. This was, he dramatically announced in 1956, not a by-product of schizophrenia: rather, it seemed to be its cause. And out of 44 or 45 fellows or residents, he made me his chief resident, and he trusted me until his death. By the time he retired – and, in truth, long before – it was clear that much of his work had been rendered moot by advances in antipsychotic medication; the idea of there being one single, fixable cause for schizophrenia also ended up being simplistic and overly optimistic. You can also choose to be emailed when someone replies to your comment. On Friday, Rowling released Troubled Blood, the latest series in her series of Cormoran Strike novels, under the pen name Robert Galbraith. Certainly, it is easy to cast doubt on the wilder allegations. So, like them, he kept doing it, again and again and again. According to a 2016 profile on Heath published in Mosaic Science, the procedure involved the implantation of “stainless steel, Teflon-coated electrodes into nine separate regions” of patients’ brains, an intensive operation that resulted in “wires leading back out of” an individual’s skull. He used electrical stimulation in an attempt to cure patients with schizophrenia and as a method of conversion therapy in a homosexual man. In 1963, a different group of scientists at Tulane started transplanting chimpanzee kidneys into humans. Author JK Rowling Under … those whose parents would rather they had a trans- child than a gay one. Sign up for our weekly newsletter here. While I spoke to several of Heath’s former colleagues, those still working at Tulane itself refused to comment. First he thought it could “wake up” the brain from a sleep-like state; then that it could be used to compensate for schizophrenics’ defective pleasure centres; or to detect and disrupt epileptic fits; or relieve chronic pain. But it did not change things in Louisiana: Heath continued to be given awards and positions, to be respected and venerated. Mission accomplished, then? I've just found out that her writing pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, is the same name as the creator of gay conversion therapy, Robert Galbraith Heath. The resulting piece, “The mysterious experiments of Dr Heath: in which we wonder who is crazy and who is sane”, was a broadside against Heath’s work. He experimented with dripping drugs deep into the brain down tiny pipes called cannulae, targeting the same regions as his electrodes. Did Heath’s “cure” actually work? Yet this, in an odd way, is precisely what makes Heath so fascinating, and his career so relevant today. He generally used them, he insisted, on incurably sick patients for whom all other treatments had been tried and had failed – although the B-19 case and others suggest that is not entirely true. During that time, her remarks were met with criticism by the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, as well notable LGBTQ+ public figures like poet and activist Alok Vaid-Menon and model Munroe Bergdorf. “It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”. It allows our most engaged readers to debate the big issues, share their own experiences, discuss real-world solutions, and more. Examining blood samples and brain matter from people with schizophrenia, he discovered a mysterious substance he called taraxein, which seemed to be generated in the septal area. We don’t have time to get stuck into the this-and-that of those opinions at the moment, but the Internet Drama Diary 2020 summary is that Rowling is a what-about-the-toilets trans-exclusionary feminist and publishes crime novels under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith – two-thirds of the name Robert Galbraith Heath, a psychiatrist who experimented with gay conversion therapy in the 1950s. All rights reserved. He tested a ‘brainwashing’ drug called bulbocapnine for the CIA, on both animals and (although he denied it for decades) on a human prisoner, as a small part of the vast and largely illegal “MK-Ultra” programme to explore the limits and limitations of the American body. Link to post Share on other sites. Heath then screened heterosexual pornography to rewire the subject’s brain to associate opposite-sex pleasure with arousal. Others were given electric … This excerpt first appeared on mosaicscience.com and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence. Even in old age, he was coming up with new ideas, arguing that transplanting septal tissue from one person to another could enhance brain function and ward off the effects of ageing and Alzheimer’s: he’d already done it in rats, he told a Tulane colleague in an interview in 1986, and they’d tried it out on squirrel monkeys just the day before. them, a next-generation community platform, chronicles and celebrates the stories, people and voices that are emerging and inspiring all of us, ranging in topics from pop culture and style to politics and news, all through the lens of today’s LGBTQ community. Yet what Heath had, ultimately, was a procedure in search of a purpose. The store then claimed that Rowling chose her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith, in honor of Robert Galbraith Heath, “a psychologist who helped develop conversion therapy.” “Hard to imagine that’s a coincidence,” they stated. Yet in terms of his ambitions, and his convictions about the brain, nothing of substance changed. And in a way it makes it more sad and also more dangerous – self-righteousness is something that reason doesn’t address. The connection between Rowling’s pen name and a practice that the United Nations compared to torture is likely an unfortunate bit of happenstance, with several Twitter users noting that Robert Galbraith is a fairly common name. Much of his life was devoted to exploring his theory that he could cure schizophrenia and other mental illnesses by delivering targeted electric pulses to the “septal” region of the brain’s subcortex, by means of electrodes through the skull. Unlike the others, Valenstein – now professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan – was a member of Heath’s own profession. Get the best of what's queer. I myself am gay. 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