I don’t blame her siblings, but Old Joe Kennedy, the SOB, gave her a lobotomy (no, not personally) and hid her away in institutes all her life so she wouldn’t affect his sons’ political futures.
I remember reading a Kennedy family biography when I was just a little kid, and Joe Kennedy’s story was the first time I realized that “famous” people weren’t automatically nice people.
RIP Rosemary.
It is admirable that as much as Joe was an SOB, the rest of the Kennedys really did seem to treat Rosemary like a “jewel.”
How often were these barbaric “lobotomies” performed back in the old days? My understanding is that a lobotomy is the total severing of nerves to a major part of the brain…what possible benefit doe this procedure bring?
They were performed more often than you’d be comfortable knowing. Mental health “care” was barbaric less than a century ago. Read here for some extensive history. Warning-no graphic images, but descriptions may be disturbing.
Due to the overall genetic damage suffered by babies born with only 21 chromosomes, survival beyond age seven is rare for the severely retarded. Less severly retarded individuals can live as long as non-affected people, into advanced old age. However, the same emotional roller coasters that you and I experienced during puberty are even more traumatic for the developmentally disabled.
So back in the day, when your retarded teen hit puberty, it was a legal slam dunk to have them lobotomized. Schizophrenics were also fodder for the lobotomist’s awl. Thank God lithium was introduced at the same time as lobotomy, or else thousands of manic-depressives would have been made into zombies as well (although many indeed were not spared). Even the severly depressed could be subjected to lobotomy, if their behavior was adequately disturbing.
The patient, his family members and a psychiatrist would go in front of a judge. This could be a heartbreaking scene if the patient was in a lucid state and knew what was at stake. While he or she begged to be spared, the family and the psychiatrist would testify as to his or her acts of dangerous insanity. The judge would make a ruling and off the patient would go. (This is the part in Harvey where Fred Guinn has his cab driver monologue). A pick would be inserted into the eye socket and the frontal lobe detached by rough scraping, after which the patient would no longer be a threat to himself or others (or his family’s standing in the community.)
Some consolation can be had in the knowlege that the neurologist who invented prefrontal lobotomy, Egas Moniz, died after being shot in the spine by one of his patients.
Actually, depending on what was done, lobotomies aren’t always that bad. I remember reading about a woman who had constant pain in her vaginal walls, for no apparent reason, until she had a lobotomy. She wasn’t affected mentally, except for her ability to cope with the pain.
Of course, that’s somebody who underwent one voluntarily. Involuntarily slicing up somebody’s brain is pretty barbaric. And in the case of Rosemary Kennedy, why would they lobotomize somebody whose brain is already damaged? Just to keep her calm and under control?
In any case, a good book about this kind of thing is Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness. I think Cecil mentions it in a column … oh, actually TWO columns, What happens in electroshock therapy? and In medicine, what’s the difference between an -ectomy, an -ostomy, and an -otomy?. Very interesting book.
Are lobotomies still performed? The only remote comparison I can think of would be people with severe seizure disorders who have parts of their brain removed.
I heard that the late, sainted Rose Kennedy, never visited her retarded, lobotomized daughter-is this true?
Guinastasia, that’s what I’m trying to find out right now – if lobotomies are still being performed at all. I believe the woman who had vaginal pain who got a lobotomy was a recent thing, but I can’t remember where I read that case. I’m searching now to see if it really was recent.
Inpatient locked-ward psychiatric treatment was still pretty damn barbaric as of five minutes ago, although substantially less so than in the 1950s.
Rhetoric aside, there’s extremely little of involuntary psychiatric treatment that exists to benefit the people who receive it. It’s a social control apparatus pretending to be a medical practice, with a huge rounded double-tablespoon of doublethink to enable the professional staff to avoid knowing that head-on.
And yeah, families still put their family members into bins to protect the family name and reputation from the damage they might do.
(Although in these days of Guantanamo et al, where indefinite incarceration without due process has been made a much more possible occurrence for the rest of you, I’m not sure the evils of involuntary psychiatric detention and treatment should be at the top of the high-priority list, except maybe as part of the larger issue)
Most likely. Many mentally retarded individuals are very strong willed, and can be difficult to control. They can also be impared in such a way that they are a danger to themselves and others.
I read a biography of the Kennedy family, and according to it, Rosemary was probably a very high functioning individual before her lobotomy. Couple that with an apparent unwillingness for old Joe to accept that she was retarded and the reason for the lobotomy starts to become clear. Supposedly, Rosemary, before she was institutionalized, was quite promiscuous and had been involved in drugs.
You weren’t kidding about it being disturbing. Hard to believe Freeman and Watts were somewhat respected physicians. This page reads more like descriptions of the work of Josef Mengele. Frightful stuff.
Rosemary kept diaries, according to many of the news articles Google turned up. She must have been mildly retarded, not severely. The story of her life is incredibly sad. No evidence that she was disturbed, disruptive, violent or uncontrollable. Apparently she was a nice, ‘mild’ girl who was starting to like boys…then she was gone.
Lobotomy is scary as shit.
Google “transorbital leukotomy” or “psychosurgery”. Short answer: yes.
Names have been changed to protect the professional reputation of the field of psychiatry; you will read, of course, that it is oh so much safer and oh my nowhere near as destructive as those barbaric lobotomies performed back then with ice picks, but they still involve the deliberate destruction of healthy brain tissue for purposes of behavior and personality modification.
To dampen your nightmares: not taking place at anywhere near the rate they were in their heyday, during Freeman’s Reign of Error.
Actually, make that “bilateral cingulotomy” rather than “transorbital leukotomy” The TL is actually the form of lobotomy that Freeman made famous, I guess.
Bullshit.
The incidence of problem behaviors in people with mental retardation isn’t that much higher than the non-retarded. Many problems are due to not being taught ways to communicate. Proper behavior intervention can remove behavior problems for 98% of kids or adults with mental retardation.
Whistlepig, who’s mad his living since 1984 as a behavior specialist for people with mental retardation.
Calm down, I wasn’t implying that all of them had problem behaviors, nor even that Rosemary was such an individual. Nor, is having a strong will a bad thing, it can make things difficult at times, but it is not necessarily a character flaw. My next door neighbor when I was a kid had Down’s Syndrome, and I’ve worked with the mentally handicapped, so I know that it’s quite possible for them to lead normal lives. I’d be more than willing to bet that Rosemary’s problems were more related to her father’s unwillingness to accept that she was mentally handicapped, than her condition.
From the link
The fact that Freeman could say such a thing disturbs me more than anything else in the article. I clicked the link expecting to find no new information. Instead, I find proof the Freeman was an even bigger idiot and butcher than I had previously thought.
Why do I see him in a costume, crying, “Quick, Robin, to the Lobotomobile!”