Last night I learned about Rosemary Kennedy, Joe and Rose's third child and first daughter. At an IQ of somewhat less than 100, she was deemed mentally retarded by Kennedy standards. Though her diaries show that she was literate and could do arithmetic and went to dances and worried about such things as disappointing her father, she just couldn't keep up with her siblings. When she was an older teenager, she began having terrible mood swings and would sometimes get violent. After she was sent to a convent, she kept running away. Her father began to worry about her safety and also reportedly that she would become pregnant and cause the family shame. He agreed to a procedure, then experimental, called a prefrontal lobotomy. The expected outcome of this procedure was that his smiling, happy, and docile Rosemary from childhood would be returned.
The procedure was described by one of the surgeons in his notes:
"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, they stopped.[3]
Instead of the hoped-for results, the procedure left Rosemary with an infantile mentality and incontinent. She lived that way in an institution until her death at age 86 in 2005. Her mother and her sister Eunice (who would go on to found the Special Olympics) visited her often. Her brother Ted and sister Jean were by her side when she died.
So very sad.
2 comments:
Very sad.
Beyond imagining.
The things I have heard and read about Rosemary in the past 6 years (since she died).
And one wonders: was she really happy, smiling, docile? Or was this a defence on what some psychoanalysts might call "The Handicapped Smile".
My first encounter with Rosemary was in 1993/1994 when there was a new book about her which suggested she might have been dyslexic.
That is so sad. Makes me think of 'be careful what you wish for' huh?
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