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.
That’s what I read too. And that she kept escaping from the convent school where she lived. A pretty girl who could get “in trouble” as they called it back then.
As an interesting historical factoid Lyndon Johnson’s sister was also a - shall we say - a loose cannon - who got up to some weird stuff in Austin. I forget all the details but there’s some interesting theories out there regarding Mac Wallace et al.
I don’t really know much about it, except for that, and that Joe did this while Rose was away on a trip. She had to have known what kind of man he was, after being married for years, but divorce was out of the question, and I suppose keeping up appearances and putting a brave face on it was the rule of the day and their social status. I did read that when Rose found out, she moved into another bedroom and never slept with him again, but who knows if that’s true?
Thanks for the link. I noticed the upside down image, too. Halfway believe it’s no accident, but that your suspicion about Amaz** is correct.
I did buy the hardcover. Seems odd there’s no Kindle version.
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