Posted on 08/03/2021 5:01:40 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
[JFK's father, Joseph Kennedy, had his own daughter Rosemary Kennedy, lobotomized in 1941 when she was 23 years old.
She was a vegetable for the rest of her life.
Good work, Dad.]
Rosemary Kennedy in 1938, ready to be presented at Buckingham Palace.
In November 1941, Joseph Kennedy (without consulting his wife) authorised two surgeons, Dr Walter Jackson Freeman and Dr James W Watts, to perform a lobotomy on Rosemary. She was just 23 years old.
Rosemary Kennedy’s lobotomy
The lobotomy – a new ‘psycho-surgical’ operation that involved separation or removal of pathways between lobes of the brain – was believed to be a cure for a multitude of psychological delinquencies such as alcoholism and ‘nymphomania’ [the term given to uncontrollable and excessive sexual desire]. Up to 5,000 lobotomies a year were performed in the United States during the 1940s, the majority on young women. In total, Dr Freeman was singlehandedly responsible for almost 3,000 of these procedures. An article in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1941 praised Freeman’s “pioneering” work and offered hope that the surgery could make patients who were “problems to their families and nuisances to themselves” into “useful members of society”.
Drilling holes into Rosemary’s skull, Dr Freeman inserted a knife and began cutting away the frontal lobes of her brain. Strapped tightly to the table, she was awake and terrified through the procedure. Suddenly, she fell silent and lapsed into unconsciousness.
What happened to Rosemary Kennedy?
The operation had been a catastrophic failure. Rosemary could no longer walk or talk. Even after years of therapy, she could utter no more than a few words and never fully recovered the use of her limbs. Her autonomy, such as it had been, was effectively over. She was to live for the next 64 years hidden away in institutions, needing full-time care.
Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff records that doctors had ordered Rosemary Kennedy “to have no visitors, because they could disrupt and confuse her”. It’s possible that Joseph also directed there to be no visitors, aiming to avoid the charge by political rivals that there was ‘lunacy’ in the family. Whatever the reasons, writes Koehler-Pentacoff, “Rosemary received no visitors during the bleakest years of her life”.
She occasionally showed tiny signs of progress, but these would vanish again, and for the last years of her life she was huddled in a wheelchair, unrecognisable as the vibrant, beautiful woman who had dazzled the British press in the 1930s. She died in 2005, at the age of 86.
“We have it good compared to what our ancestors went through. I have an antiflexed uterus.”
TMI
She was placed in a Catholic convent type rest home in Wisconsin.
Also that Joe ordered the operation without Rose’s knowledge. He was a horrible man.
Rose was away on a trip when Joe had it done. What a guy.
Nope. Women are often not even told they have the issue..and should be aware that it exists.
A woman’s body is a complex and mysterious thing...even to experienced Doctors. Ovaries do weird things to a woman’s body.
I pointed out that the JFK WWII hero story has some glaring holes and got jumped all over.
Read “A Question of Character: A Like of John F. Kennedy” by Thomas C Reeves. Reeves an academic historian who when writing the book was expecting to write the usual hagiography. In doing the research ( The book is meticulously sourced!) found something different.
Read the book & check the sources ! Don't take my word for it !
I’ve always suspected she had the same libido as the rest of the Kennedys and Joe sought to suppress it.
—”Yeah, Chop out her brains.”
Way worse than you can imagine.
This was an ‘ice pick’ lobotomy.
GRIM STUFF.
” His transorbital lobotomy involved taking a kitchen ice pick, later refined into a more proficient instrument called a leucotome, and hammering it through the thin layer of skull in the corner of each eye socket. The pick would then be scrambled from side to side in order to damage the frontal lobe. The process took about 10 minutes and could be performed anywhere, without the assistance of a surgeon.
“
“ Despite a 14 per cent fatality rate, Freeman performed 3,439 lobotomies in his lifetime.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2008/jan/13/neuroscience.medicalscience
Wish he’d kept up the practice on a few more of his fam, one in particular. How could this woman behave any more scandalously than Ted?
All things being equal, she could not. However, she was female. He was male. That told the tale.
Thanks for the book research. I find a lot of good recommendations in these threads.
“...he was patriotic and pro-American, unlike modern day democrats who hate America first.”
You are entitled to your opinion, but I can’t be that generous. Joseph Kennedy’s lust for self-aggrandizement and glory drove his every move, and he was a destructive crook on top of it. The prisons are full of better people.
Rosemary was just like all her brothers. She liked to f**k. A lot.
Too bad Papa Joe didn’t order the same treatment for his sons as he did his daughter.
Thanks. I thought it was Michigan. If that is the only fact I got wrong, tge point made remains valid.
That’s awful. She was slow due to her birth circumstances. Puberty hormones kick in. She was easily take advantage of. The father was afraid of scandal and did this horrible thing to her.
The doctor and Joe should have been charged with murder.
Here’s the Amazon link !
I find it very interesting that Amazon placed the book image upside down. Is that a backhanded criticism of the book? Or a message it turns the JFK story upside down?
Very strange !
Growing up Rosemary was closest to Eunice and Was the one who could calm her down. Eunice started the Special Olympics.
And didn’t tell the family where she was for 20 years!
Rosemary was beautiful. The best looking if the Kennedy sisters.
Joe made her leave London. She was sent to a convent and the nuns said she was sneaking out to bars. Heaven forbid.
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