10 Unsettling Details Surrounding Rosemary Kennedy’s Lobotomy

6 /10 Details Of The Procedure

As it suits the daughter of a prominent family, the procedure was conducted by Walter Freeman and James Watts themselves, and it constituted of a few simple steps.

According to Watts: “We went through the top of the head, I think Rosemary was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides.”

Rosemary, docile and wanting to please her father as always, had been strapped to a bed, probably without fully realizing what was happening.

5 /10 Sing, Rosemary, Sing

In what appears today as the height of medical malpractice and absolute senselessness, the procedure went on like this: Rosemary was asked to recite or sing some simple formulae (the Lord’s Prayer, or God Bless America) as they cut, and they stopped when she became incoherent, pronouncing the operation a success.

The worried Kennedy patriarch was ecstatic, a feeling not shared by her mother, to whom the old Kennedy had omitted to inform that he would have her daughter’s brain toyed with.

4 /10 But Why?

It can be impossible to understand nowadays why this sort of procedure was performed, but in its time, it seemed reasonable to a lot of doctors: as the ‘mental illnesses’ that they sought to treat (homosexuality included, for example) must have had some physiological basis in the brain, interrupting the ‘damaged’ connections would stop the behavior.

In a sense, it did, but with the evident and terrible side effects of stopping all usage of that area of the brain. Comparatively, it was like killing someone to cure him or her of a medical condition.

3 /10 A Depressing Aftermath

And the case of Rosemary wasn’t different. After her physical recovery from the operation, it became evident that her mental state had regressed further into early infancy.

At twenty-three years old, she lost the ability to speak or walk and could not control her sphincter.

Her parents had her committed to a mental institution, Craig House, near New York, and later to the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children in Wisconsin.

2 /10 Rosemary, Exiled

She would spend twenty years in a house specially built to locate her, away from the main buildings, without receiving a single visit from her father or mother.

Furthermore, they kept her whereabouts a secret, preventing any other member of the family from visiting.

In this place, under the care of nuns, the once beautiful young woman started becoming a frail old lady who couldn’t keep her hands apart and who looked at the world with a sad, fearful stare.

1 /10 The Last Days Of Rosemary Kennedy

Only after 1961, she started receiving visitors from her family. Only after 1969, with Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s death, she was gradually reintroduced in the family, being taken to visit relatives or her childhood home sometimes.

She slowly learned to walk again (with a limp) but could never talk clearly or move her arms well.

After a life of suffering and still under the care of the nuns of St. Coletta, Rosemary Kennedy died of natural causes in January 2005, at eighty-six years of age. She was buried alongside her father and mother in Holyrood Cemetery, Massachusetts.