A sad tale that must be told.

I am going to tell you a story; a very sad story of a young woman who lived a very unfortunate life through no fault of her own. It happened to others in the past but what happened to her many years ago, no longer happens to anyone, anymore but in the past, thousands of people suffered the same way this woman did. They suffered through no faults of their own.

The woman I am writing about was born in the United States on September 13, 1918, fifty-nine days before the end of World War One. Her family was quite well off and she had several siblings. Everyone in her immediate family was extremely bright but unfortunately, she was the one member of her family who was not given the gift of extreme intelligence.

Even as a baby, her family knew that something was wrong with her. She was slow to crawl, slower to walk and even much slower to speak than her two brighter brothers.
As she reached adolescence, she exhibited what would now be recognized as symptoms of depression, or even just calculated attention-getting strategies and defence mechanisms: near-catatonic trances, outbursts of harmless violence and inappropriate sexual behaviour.

By the age of 21, she was becoming increasingly irritable and difficult to be with. She has regressed in mental skills, became tense and irritable, upset easily and she unpredictably had tantrums, rages and convulsive episodes. Her younger brother who was 13-and-a-half years her junior, is said to have teased about her ‘empty head’.

The evidence from documents written in her hand, and from contemporaries outside the family, suggests that she was probably not clinically retarded. In actual fact, she appeared to have slightly subnormal cognitive abilities; which didn’t fare well within one of the most competitive and brilliant families that has ever existed.
For example, at the age of nine, she neatly and correctly multiplied: 428 × 32 = 13696, for example. The fact that she could do arithmetic meant that her IQ was well above 75, the cutoff used by most states for purposes of classification in schools to define mental retardation.

And as a teenager, she was able to write endearing letters, dance, and do arithmetic. At age 16 she wrote to her father, "I would do anything to make you so happy. I hate to disapoint [sic] you in anyway [sic]." Her diary reveals an ability to write about and understand various situations around her. She had been described as being a shy child whose I.Q. tests reportedly indicated a moderate mental retardation, but this is a question of some controversy. Diaries written by her in the late 1930s, and published in the 1980s, reveal a young woman whose life was filled with outings to the opera, tea dances, dress fittings, and other social interests. In other words, she was articulate and coherent.

It could be that she had an IQ of 90 in a family where everyone was 130, so it looked like she was suffering from mental retardation, but she did not fall into an IQ of 75 and below, which is the definition of mental retardation. A specialist in mental retardation later said, “There is no way I can picture her at less than a 90 IQ, but in that family, 90 would be considered retarded."

The fact that her father banished her from her home to live with his aide demonstrated his rejection of her. This certainly made matters worse even though the aide treated her well. Her father was obvious a cad who didn’t want his daughter anywhere near him for fear that it would reflect badly on him. The stigma of suffering from mental illness in those days was like having tuberculosis or cancer or worse. Mental retardation was not considered the fault of the person who suffered from it. It would however, reflect back to the parents.

The family’s physicians were unanimous in declaring that the young woman would have to be institutionalized. Her father however was concerned with his family's moral reputation and his daughter’s possible vulnerability to fortune-hunters so he decided that a lobotomy was the answer. He seems to have regarded this as an alternative to institutionalization. Ignoring widespread Catholic and secular opposition, he doctor-shopped until he found a quack willing to perform what was still then a form of experimental psychosurgery.

Let me explain what a lobotomy was. It consisted of cutting the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex of the brain. Lobotomies have now fallen out of use, as doctors use various drugs and psychological therapies to treat mental illnesses. Lobotomies were used mainly from the 1930s to 1950s to treat a wide range of severe disorders, including schizophrenia, clinical depression, and various anxiety disorders, as well as people who were considered a nuisance by demonstrating behavior characterized as, for example, moodiness or youthful defiance. If you ever watched the movie; One flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest, you may recall what the protagonist in the movie looked like after a lobotomy was done to him.

The prefrontal cortex is the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain; lying in front of the motor and premotor areas. This brain region is that part of the brain dealing with planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, decision making and moderating correct social behavior. The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.

As a result, the centers in the prefrontal cortex depend significantly on high levels of alertness and emotional linkages with deeper brain structures related to control of pleasure, pain, anger, rage, panic, aggression (fight-flight-freeze responses), and basic sexual responses. If this is severed, normal thinking and responses are gone for ever.

In 1941, when the young woman was 23, her father was told by her doctors that a cutting edge procedure would help calm her mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home. Her father gave permission for the procedure to be performed by Dr. Walter Freeman, the director of the laboratories at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., together with his partner, James W. Watts, MD, from the University of Virginia.

The two surgeons made an incision in the top of the young woman’s head under local anaesthesia, asking her to sing and talk while they disconnected her frontal lobe from the rest of her brain. But they cut too much tissue, and the temperamental, vivacious youth was left inert and unintelligible, requiring round-the-clock care for the rest of her life. One nurse who witnessed the entire procedure was so horrified that she immediately left the profession, never to return, and spent 50 years suffering flashbacks of that horrible event. At that time, only sixty-five lobotomies had been performed. Dr. Watts, who performed the surgery while Freeman supervised and observed, described the procedure as follows;

“We went through the top of the head, I think she 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. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside," he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When she began to become incoherent, we stopped.”

Instead of producing the hoped-for result, however, the lobotomy reduced the young woman to an infantile mentality that left her incontinent (with no bladder control) and staring blankly at walls for hours. Her verbal skills were reduced to unintelligible babble. Her mother remarked that although the lobotomy stopped her daughter's violent behavior, it left her completely incapacitated for the rest of her life.

In 1949, she was moved to the St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children (formerly known as St. Coletta's Institute for Backward Children) in Jefferson, Wisconsin, a residential institution for people with severe disabilities. Because of the severity of her mental condition, she became largely detached from her family, but she was visited on regular occasions by her sister.

Occasionally, she was taken out of the school to visit relatives in Florida and Washington, D.C. and to visit her childhood home in Massachusetts.

Publicly, she was declared to be mentally handicapped. This was more socially acceptable in a respected family than a failed lobotomy. "Only a few doctors who worked for the family knew the truth about her condition, as did the FBI because of a background check of her father for a position in the government.

The lobotomy the young woman received is sometimes described as ‘botched’ but procedurally, it was much like any other, and from the standpoint of her father who paid the bill, it was successful. As far as that cad was concerned, his daughter’s ‘problem’ got solved. In reality, it was his problem that was solved, not hers.

For ten years after the lobotomy, no one breathed a word to her sister of her other sister’s whereabouts. What seems doubly tragic is that it was then so easy for the rest of her family to act as though she had never existed. The therapeutic wisdom of the time discouraged family visits to the institutionalized disabled, but either way it is improbable that any family visits would have been made. Out of sight, out of mind. Now her family wouldn’t have to explain why one of their own was not right in her head. She was gone, gone from the family letters and even gone from family discussions.

She died from natural causes on January 7, 2005, at the Fort Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, age 86, with her surviving sister, and her only surviving brother by her side. Although news reports indicated that she was buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts, the cemetery will not confirm burial and there is no discernible grave marker to mark where she lies. She is truly gone, gone, gone.

If you haven’t figured out who the family was, it was the Kennedy family. John F. Kennedy one of her older brothers later became the president of the United States. Her next older brother was Bobby Kennedy, later the Attorney General of the United States. Her younger brother Edward (Ted) Kennedy later became a member of the United States Senate. Her sister, Eunice, (who visited Rosemary in the institution on occasion, was the founder of the Special Olympics and an advocate for the disabled on Rosemary's behalf.

Dr. Freeman went on to perform more than 3,000 lobotomies before his license to practice medicine was revoked (because of the death of a patient). Such lobotomy treatments are now discredited by the mental health and medical communities and the procedure is no longer used and hasn’t been for many years but there are still quacks out there like Freeman and Watts trying other ridiculous procedures in hopes that they will find the miracle cure for mental illness and mentally retardation.

That sad aspect of this story is that had they left Rosemary alone, she would have lived a happy life despite her handicap and perhaps the right treatment and medicine would have eventually helped her greatly.

During 1959 and 1960, I was the Senior Boy’s Supervisor of a residential school for mentally retarded children and I can tell you
unequivocally that they were very happy children. They had no worries and life was a ball to them. It is too bad that Rosemary Kennedy had all of that taken from her by two quacks and a father who had his own interests as his preference over that of his daughter.