Rosemary
Posted on 08/26/2009 9:04:16 PM PDT by canuck_conservative
.... In the article, Eunice described Rosemary, the third child of Joe Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald, as "slower to crawl, slower to walk and speak than her two bright brothers." As time went by, the supposedly retarded Rosemary "couldn't keep up" in "social competition," and, by the age of 22, "was becoming increasingly irritable and difficult." Physicians, Eunice wrote, were unanimous in declaring that Rosemary would have to be institutionalized, and so, with supposed sighs all around, she was bunged up in a nice Catholic "home." The modern reader is shocked to discover that this "candid" article makes no mention whatsoever of the lobotomy performed on Rosemary in 1941, at age 23.
No one can read Rosemary's story today without horror. The evidence from documents written in Rosemary's hand, and from contemporaries outside the family, suggests that she was probably not clinically retarded. She happened to have slightly subnormal cognitive abilities -- within one of the most competitive and brilliant families that has ever existed. (Young Teddy, 13-and-a-half years her junior, is said to have teased Rosemary about her "empty head.") As she reached adolescence, she exhibited what would now be recognized as symptoms of depression, or even just calculated attention-getting strategies and defence mechanisms: near-catatonic trances, outbursts of harmless violence, inappropriate sexual behaviour.
Joe Sr., concerned with the family's moral reputation and Rosemary's possible vulnerability to fortune-hunters, decided that a lobotomy was the answer. Contrary to the implications of Eunice's story, he seems to have regarded this as an alternative to institutionalization. Ignoring widespread Catholic and secular opposition, he doctor-shopped until he found someone willing to perform the still-experimental psychosurgery.....
(Excerpt) Read more at network.nationalpost.com ...
Wait, you mean not EVERY Kennedy has had a frontal lobotomy?? Huh. Ya learn sumpthin new every day.
Thanks for another reminder - plus this good thread - http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2325305/posts...has given me an education about both Kathleen and Rosemary Kennedy - the two you won’t hear the media discuss during this frenzied coverage of Teddy’s death.....
So I am GLAD to learn this here on Free Republic!
What a sick family!
The Kennedy family pledge is said to include...
If I can't have a bottle in front of me, I'll just have a frontal lobotomy"
Seems to be true for Kennedy family members of every generation.
A family of sociopaths, bordering on evil with the treatment of Rosemary. Joe Sr is the perfect example that money can buy almost anything but not class.
nowadays she would probably be called high functioning autistic or hyper or bipolar....all entities that can be dealt with without a frontal lobotomy....
but we are only taking the Kennedy's word that she was that different...could be that mobster Joe favored sons and didn't want Rosemary.....maybe not cute enough or some such crap...
What seems doubly tragic is that it was then so easy for the rest of the Kennedys to act as though Rosie had never existed. The therapeutic wisdom of the time discouraged family visits to the institutionalized disabled, but either way it is improbable that any would have been made. As Laurence Leamer noted in The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family, from the date of the lobotomy onward, "in all the letters that Rose wrote the family in the next few years, she began 'My darlings' or 'Dear Children.' Then she mentioned Joe and each of her children in turn, Joe Jr., Jack, Kathleen, Eunice, Pat, Jean, Bobby and Ted, everyone but Rosie, her namesake. Rosemary was gone, gone from the family letters, gone from discussions, gone."
And Ted teased her about her "empty head"--what a prince.
I remember reading about Rosemary in the biography of the Kennedy family.
Their father had the lobotomy done while Rose was in Europe, didn’t tell her until she returned.
I hope he’s sitting near the flames.
The Kennedy children were bright and charming, but none was an intellectual. Jack in particular was portrayed as exception bright, but all his records show a man of above average intelligence and no more.
Joe was an evil man.
“Makes me sick to my stomach” ping.
Historians have estimated that Dr. Walter JFreeman II (the father of the transorbital lobotomy) performed somewhere around 3,500 lobotomies - many without any any anesthesia. I watched a special on PBS a couple years ago on him. He was a barbaric man who led the way for tens-of-thousands of poor men and women (mostly women) to be butchered, much the same way Rosemary Kennedy was butchered.
As you indicate, we've come a long way since those days, thank the Lord.
Link wouldn’t work. Old thread?
Yep.
Me too.
Hmmm - no posted today - let me try again:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2325305/posts
See if that works - hopefully that thread has not been pulled - it’s full of info I never knew til now about Rosemary and Kathleen Kennedy.
How funny that this pathetic clan of misfits was the best Democrats could come up with as a family to emulate. Now that the fat bastard is dead perhaps we’ll finally learn the entire truth of how dysfuntional and screwed up this people were.
“Joe Sr., concerned with the family’s moral reputation.....”
Now THAT is good comedy.
Read this, it’s just the tip of the iceberg:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-08-26-kennedylegacy_N.htm?csp=34
LONG CAMPAIGN IS A KENNEDY FAMILY AFFAIR Pay-Per-View - Chicago Tribune - ProQuest Archiver - Jul 14, 1960 Rosemary Kennedy is an exception to the run of the family. She teaches in a Catholic school in Wisconsin, shuns politics, and has beaten no drums for her ... All 10 related - Related web pages
Teddy, alias the “Swimmer”, teased his sister about an “empty head”. The “Swimmer” had no heart and NO conscience. The “Swimmer” is dead. Rest in peace Mary Jo Kopechne!
“one of the most competitive and brilliant families that has ever existed”
Competitive, maybe, but far from brilliant. Unless you are comparing to the average dimwitted liberal who believes any lie that is fed to him.
There are no pain receptors in the brain.
Oh, it is to barf. None of them seem even above average. If you're smart, why the need to constantly cheat?
One of tonight’s “news” broadcasts referred to the mutilation of Rosemary merely as “botched surgery.” No, Joe intended to remove her personality, and did it without consulting his wife.
The Kennedys are a large corrupt family. Putting any of them on a pedestal is a travesty. Just my opinion.
Bart.
Rosemary
True. Unfortunately, there are plenty of nerve ending surrounding the orbit of the eye, the frontal sinus as well as the bones in the skull that separate the eye socket from the brain. Of course, all of those are pierced with a pick-like instrument to access the brain in an effort to sever the nerves associated with the frontal lobe. Without general anesthesia, it would have been immensely painful - which is why strong doses of electricity were used prior to surgery to render the patient unconscious.
Such was the procedure of the transorbital lobotomy - the same procedure performed on Rose Kennedy all those years ago.
Ted would have been a pre-adolescent at that time, since Rosemary’s lobotomy was performed when she was 23 and Ted was more than 13 years younger. Given that he was growing up in a family where the father thought it made sense to subject his daughter to dangerous experimental brain surgery in hopes of avoiding social embarrassment to the family, and the mother saw fit to react to what was effectively the murder of her daughter by subsequently pretending to the rest of the children that their sister had never existed, I hardly think it’s fair to expect Ted, at age 10 or younger, to have understood that it was wrong to tease Rosemary about her relative lack of intellectual capacity.
The whole thing was incredibly sick and criminal — a 1960s Catholic edition of Muslim “honor” killings. But pre-adolescent Ted can’t be held responsible for the attitudes that were being ingrained in him by his sicko parents.
I had on ABC World News this evening and was watching it only peripherally, but I believe I heard Charlie Gibson say that rose was "born retarded" (he definitely said "retarded", as it was that word that got my attention) - which couldn't be further from the truth, from what I understand.
I'll search for a transcript to get the exact quote.
I’ve seen the sweetness of the eight- and seven-year-old grandchildren here towards their now-dead thirteen-year-old brother, so it’s indeed realistic to teach humanity to the young. Obviously the Kennedy family had no humanity to teach Ted, nor did he manage to acquire any in his adult years.
vaudine
??? The article says that two surgeons made an incision in the top of her head, and that she was conscious throughout (at least until they damaged too much of her brain tissue for her to ever be fully conscious again). The NPR article at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5014565 specifies that Freeman performed a prefrontal (not transorbital) lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy. Freeman did indeed "pioneer" the transorbital lobotomy technique, but I don't believe that was the technique used on Rosemary.
Well, first I went to law school, not medical school. So, I have no medical opinion. My brother however, is an anesthesiologist and doctors in his practice frequently administer anesthesia to patients undergoing either sinus or eye surgery, so their must be some medical necessity for it.
Even without a medical degree, I do have a dose of some common sense. The butchers that performed these operations throughout the mid-part of last century, weren't consulting with the patients as they haphazardly cut through the brain tissue contained in the frontal lobe - which is precisely why so many of the victims ended up intellectually incapacitated.
As I said earlier, there was no topical, general or any other kind of anesthesia other than thousands of volts from an electro-shock machine to render the patient temporarily unconscious.
Since old Joe was a Nazi sympathizer, he wouldn’t have given such a procedure done on his daughter a second thought..
I quite agree that young children can be taught to be humane. I just don’t see where Ted had any opportunity to learn it before he was old enough to be away from his family most of the time. And the teasing, cruel and heartless though it was, certainly pales in the face of what the father (and doctors) did to Rosemary.
I think it may be likely that Rose did receive the more conventional (at the time) prefrontal lobotomy, as the transorbital that Freeman created didn't come en vogue until a few years later. But, I've also seen a few reports that state she received a transorbital lobotomy. The confusion could all stem from the fact that Freeman was the hatchet man and people most readily associate the transorbital with him.
In fact, virtually all ocular procedures are done without administering a general anesthetic.
On tonight's ABC News special, it mentioned that Ted was enrolled in as many as 13 different schools, before he made his way into Harvard - 13. That has to be dysfunctional, all by itself.
But the doctor would still have approached this as a medical procedure, even though in retrospect we know that this was not at all medically beneficial to the patient in any way. What Joe thought, I have no idea. He probably didn’t think about it much at all.
Oh, wasn’t Rosemary beautiful! I hope she’s enjoying the bounties of heaven.
Gibson definitely botched the coverage of Rosemary, astounding since her story is well known. More propaganda from the Ministry of Information.
But, once again I'll direct you to what did happened, not what might have happened. When Freeman performed this surgery, he delivered an incapacitating dose of electricity to the victim, rendering them limp and unconscious. He either did this because he was a sadistic psychopath - not entirely out of the question based on what we now know about Freeman - or, and more likely, it was easier to do on a patient that was limp and unconscious.
I would direct you to PBS, if you'd like to investigate the horror that was Dr. Freeman for yourself...
Terrible what they did to her.
Yeah, and I've looked all over their site for transcript information. He definitely used the word "retarded". I could be thinking about the 10:00 broadcast, and not the World News broadcast. The 10:00 show went more in depth about Kennedy and his brothers and sisters, talking about Joe's death, his older sister dying in the plane crash then they talked about Rosemary before they got to John.
From the pictures they showed, you could tell that she was an attractive young women. Claire Shipmen's (can't stand her) piece pointed out the physical similarity between one of Caroline's girls and Rose - they look remarkably alike.
They lobotomized the wrong Kennedy.
I would think using the term “retarded” is politically incorrect, even for libs....
Charles Gibson, what a RETARD!
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