The Lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy
Rosemary Kennedy was lobotomized at the age of 23 to calm her violent mood swings and spent the rest of her life incapacitated.
Rosemary Kennedy, the younger sister of John F. Kennedy, was lobotomized at the age of 23. Doctors recommended the procedure to calm her violent mood swings in 1941.
Dr. James W. Watts, who carried out the lobotomy with Dr. Walter Freemen, explained the crude procedure in the book The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty he Founded by Ronald Kessler.
With Rosemary awake, under a mild tranquilizer, Watts made a surgical incision “no more than an inch” in her brain through her skull. He then used an instrument that looked like a butter knife to cut brain tissue. As Watts cut, Freeman asked Rosemary questions, had her recite the Lord’s Prayer, count backwards, etc.
“We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded,” Watts explained.
When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.
Rosemary spent the rest of her life incapacitated, under the care of nuns at an institution in Wisconsin until her death in 2005, at the age of 86.
Absolutely horrific she was 23 years old!
Barbaric and cruel. These things were often done to spare a family the embarrassment of an unruly child or woman. These were heavily guarded secrets.
She was bipolar, but nothing was known about it then. It was easy to send away women and girls back then.
absolutely deplorable.
This speaks volumes of some of the Kennedy clan, willing to destroy a life and pretend it never happened. Both parents were totally responsible even though Rose pretended she had no part in it and both Robert and President John F Kennedy on several occasions lied about their sister to further their political career. Shameful.
this sucks…
what happened to rosemary was all to common back then when so little was known about mental illness , treatments and medications. could the decision made by her father brought upon thenm the family curse??
This nothing has to do with being or not a Kennedy; it only shows how what a culture accepts as truth, is based always more in opinion leaders asseverations than in objetive facts. It shows that even the ones in power, fall in mainstream beliefs.
how awful
This is shocking. Bu then again most of modern medicine is based on cruel and barbaric practices.
This barbaric procedure should never have happened. I am so very sorry for her and all the others who were treated like this
The criminal Kennedys got what they deserve. Who knows how many poor souls Joe Kennedy had murdered in his bootleg days.