Sad story.
However, I think it is fair to point out that for at least 20 years the procedure was considered a “miracle treatment,” with its developer receiving a Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1951.
IOW, the VA wasn’t performing shady or improper treatments, they were treating patients in compliance with state of the art medical consensus of the day.
Which should, but probably won’t, cause us to look skeptically at popular trends of our own time.
In the late 1930's, Dr. Freeman was one of the first Americans to perform a transorbital lobotomy, in which holes are drilled in the patient's head. In 1946 he devised a faster and more efficient procedure, the prefrontal, or "ice pick," lobotomy, in which a spike is driven beneath the lids of both eyes and then swirled around in a sort of eggbeater motion to scramble the neural connections. ..he sometimes used a carpenter's mallet instead of a surgical hammer and sometimes wielded two hammers at once, cracking both eye sockets simultaneously. The whole process took less than 10 minutes...
His most famous patient was President John F. Kennedy's sister Rosemary, whom he lobotomized in 1941 when she was 23 and who required full-time care until her death this year. - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/16/arts/16lobo.html?_r=0