Eve
Did you read the bit on Frances Farmer? Star, feminist, communist, lobotomized when she refused to give in.
I noticed it looked like he just punched and said “Next!” without even taking the time to clean the instruments. Imagine the horribly unsanitary conditions!!! Not only are you lobotomized, but then you die of gangrene!!!
This agrees with the story I"ve heard. She was just mildly retarded, perhaps even borderline “normal”–but in the Kennedy family culture, even just normal would not have been good enough. As for lobotomies, they seem to have been used mainly to calm the violently insane; they didn’t usually affect the patients’ IQs but they did tend to make them passive and less likely to put their intelligence to rigorous use. But something went terribly wrong in the case of Rosemary, and she went from being only slightly slow to profoundly handicapped.
Ya know, I was starting to get the impression that all this, “Joe just wanted to protect the family” stuff was just a popular/scadalous way to spin it,
But, dang,
From the NYT
Still, one wonders what the mindset towards lobotomy was at the time. It sounds like it was just common to have one done as modification. I’m just saying, Joe sounds like a monster today, but maybe it wasn’t viewed as any harsher than sending your kid to boarding school.
The impression I always got was that lobotomies were primarily to control violent killers and such. I think that this was one of the popular ways to spin the issue for the pro-surgery crowd. So there seemed to be a certain aura of *punishment * to the procedure. “We’ll fix that killer but good!” So people weren’t as outraged about the practice.
Thanks to the fact that this thread features the Kennedy family, I keep reading the word retarded with a Boston accent: Retahded. I know it’s wrong, but it makes me giggle.
Thankfully, though, if her biopic is to be believed, her lobotomy had only a mild effect and didn’t destroy her intellect.
I think that in some places many years ago lobotomy wasn’t viewed as that drastic a procedure and as one that might help a variety of mental states.
As a kid there was an adult cousin of mine that I loved to be around. She always had time for us children when other adults didn’t. I found out long after I was grown myself that she had been lobotomized because of emotional problems before I knew her. A startling and somewhat creepy revelation to be sure. I was only a child of course but her parents (my grandmother’s sister and her husband) were nice people. I can’t imagine them deliberately doing something they knew to be cruel. In later years, after her parents were gone, I heard that my cousin was put into a facility because of a tendency to wander off.
What I’ve read, that was very much the case. Why, scientists and doctors with degrees and white lab coats endorsed it! “After a few cuts, you’ll be better than ever!” It was another miracle science that was the amazing and perfect answer to our problems. If you had a relative with a condition that couldn’t be treated at the time (OTTOMH) say manic depression or schizophrenia, it was easy to believe the hype.
But, thank OG we learned our lesson and never again trusted our relative’s brains to to an overhyped technique based on biased research and dispensed to any patient they can get.
Yes, we can all be thankful that hard working scientists gave us electroconvulsive therapy. It’s a miracle of science and the answer to all our problems.
What?!
Thank Og I have this Prozac.
Not speaking of Rosemary specifically, but it’s important to remember that at the turn of the last century, people were much more likely to do whatever a doctor recommoended. Especially with a “modern treatment”. I think it’s wrong to unilaterally condemn families for doing what they were told was best for their children. How often were mentally retard/Downs syndrome children institutionalized at birth, or when their conditions were discovered? Parents were told it was best for their families. In our “enlightened” times, people are appalled, but in another 100 years, people will probably consider our treatment of the disabled, the mentally handicapped, the poor - name your group - barbaric. People mostly do the best that they can for their families. The best just changes as time goes by.
StG
That’s a very “Glass Half Full” view of the lobotomy. One of the things that people need to keep in mind is that the doctors who performed lobotomies had very tolerant notions of “success.” Up to a quarter of lobotomy patients were left dysfunctional to the point that they needed institutional care to survive…
If only they stopped at manic depression and schizophrenia! In the salad days of lobotomies, even more benign conditions were “cured” with it: common depression, anxiety, etc. It was even used on children:
In addition to some of the books previously mentioned, I recommend Mad In America. It’s a mildly (heh) biased history of psychiatry in America, and spends a good bit of time on the lobotomy…
Possibly. I’ve read several Kennedy family biographies and I don’t recall a mention of Mrs Kennedy’s visiting her daughter. Rosemary’s sister Eunice did, however, visit her quite frequently.
::giggles (maniacally of course)::
In the link that danceswithcats posted above, it says “optimum results were achieved when the lobotomy induced drowsiness and disorientation.” It made me wonder exactly how Freeman and Watts defined “optimum results.” Curing everything by turning the patient into a zombie? I guess a drowsy and disoriented patient would no longer be a threat to their family’s reputation…
Hey, I found that book a while back at a store that suddenly appeared where a Good Guys electronics store had previously been. The bookstore offered a limited selection (compared to a regular bookstore, that is – they had a lot of titles) of brand new hardback books, for like $5 apiece. I suppose they were surplus copies from printing runs that had failed to sell out, or something along those lines. I’ll have to go find my copy of that book and take a look. Great and Desperate Cures was pretty interesting, so hopefully that one will be too. But what’s the mild bias it has?
And ECT is still in use. Although at least nowadays they anesthetize you and give you a muscle relaxant first, so you won’t have such dangerous spasms. What really sounds barbaric is when good old Freeman gave patients the double-whammy with his lobotomies, “anesthetizing” them with ECT before slashing up the brain.
Maybe some of the old attitudes towards the lobotomy had something to do with the perception of what it actually did.
I mean, how many even semi-detailed reports on the behavior of lobotomized patients do you remember reading? In my searches, I’ve only seen maybe two, in Great and Desperate Cures. (An excellent book, BTW. Really gives some insight of Freeman. Pathetic little jackass, he was.) Other than that, we have the general impression of “miracle cure…patient improved!” from way back, and then later the “evil butchery…turns people into zombies” impression.
Hell, consider the state that neurology and the treatment of mental illness were at at the time. While the rest of medicine was crossing into the atomic age, brain science was practically just crossing over from “alchemy” to the “barber-dentist-sawbones” stage. How many other treatments for mental illness were even around, until psychiatric medications started coming around?
I guess I’m saying that most of the doctors back then probably were trying their best to help people, but in the end, their grasp just exceeded their reach. They were trying to do too much with not enough knowledge and insufficient tools. (And then you have guys like Freeman, who believed his own hype without bothering to see if he was actually accomplishing anything or improving his patients’ conditions.)
That’s usually the problem with scientific progress, I guess. Mistakes get made, and when it’s something like medical science, human lives pay the price. We just have to learn from our mistakes, and do better in the future.
And expanding on Ranchoth’s theme, not only was there little in the way of treatment options, there was a huge stigma around having a “mentally deficient” family member. Essentially the family, and often specifically the biological mother, was blamed for the status of the child. Families were told by medical personnel to put the child in an institution and forget they existed. It was a huge black mark on the family.
This was at a time when “idiot” and “moron” were clinical desginations for differing levels of functional abilities. People with developmental disabilities were warehoused and left to sit all day with no stimulation because no one thought it mattered. And at the time, there wasn’t widespread communication or education on the subject. For the most part, families relied solely on their family physician for advice and didn’t question it. If a physician had heard of the miraculous cure a lobotomy could provide and then recommended it to a family, the family would likely just trust his judgement and go with it. If you look at the timeline provided in danceswithcats’ link, Rosemary’s lobotomy was done shortly after the procedure became known in the States and years before any bad publicity circulated. At that time, it was new and highly touted.
I worked for years, starting in 1979, at a MA state residential facility for the retarded. The Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center was/is on the grounds of the facility and our clients were serviced there for most of their medical needs. As a Clinical Team Manager, I had access to all of the records and archived information and it was unbelievable reading. In talking to the parents and family members of the older residents, the stories I heard of what families were told when faced with decisions regarding their child were, by today’s standards, incredible.
Well, I’m not sure if “bias” is the right word, but the author has very little good to say about psychiatry in general. What interested me about the book wasn’t so much the descriptions of the barbaric treatments of of many years ago (like, 40…) but that he’s equally critical of “modern” treatments, especially the anti-psychotic drugs used to treat schizophrenia. He argues (persuasively) that psychiatry is held to lower standards then other branches of medicine. One of his more interesting arguments was that schizophrenics who have a psychotic break and aren’t shot full of modern drugs often have better long-term outcomes then those who do get drugged–as a result, he says, the mentally ill often have better long-term outcomes in third-world countries (and Western countries that aren’t as pharmophillic as we are) then in the US.
I already had a pretty jaundiced view of the mental health care system, and I found Mad in America pretty disturbing–I desperately wanted to hear a rebuttal that was as well written and documented as it was. I even started a GD thread on it, but it didn’t get a single reply…
I’m aware that ECT is still in use. However, it is now a rare treatment and one of last resort. There was a period when it was given to any patient, for any disorder, regardless of whether their symptoms and behavior matched the diagnosis in their file.
Bipolar columnist Liz Spikol, wrote a series on her experience with ECT. She and her therapist decided that it was either ECT, or she’d attempt suicide again. Besides the days of nausea following the treatment, there was also memory loss. Spikol improved dramatically, but was back to being suicidal a year later.
Re ‘There were no other treatments at the time’
IIRC The Hipocratic oath begins “First, to do no harm.” If the only available treatment is poorly documented, and has a potential to permanently damage the patient, then any doctor with ethics is obligated to choose no treatment at all.
Are you referring to current treatments with ECT or back to the OP?
Please take the “current” out of the question since you clearly wrote “at the time”. My eyes seem to have crossed that out the first read through!
So my question stands, “Are you referring to ECT or lobotomy?”