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Rose Marie Kennedy (September 13, 1918 – January 7, 2005) was the third child and first daughter of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, born a year after the U.S. President John F. Kennedy. She underwent a lobotomy at the age of 23, after which she was mentally incapacitated for the rest of her life.
Placid and easygoing as a child and teenager, the maturing Rosemary became increasingly assertive in her personality. She was subject to violent mood swings. Some observers have since attributed this behavior to her difficulties in keeping up with her active siblings as well as the hormonal surges associated with sexual maturation. In any case, the family had difficulty dealing with the often stormy Rosemary, who had begun to sneak out at night from the convent where she was being educated and cared for.
In 1941, when Rosemary was 23, her father was told by doctors that a lobotomy would help calm her "mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home". Joseph Kennedy had the procedure performed by neurosurgeon Walter Freeman, director of the laboratories at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., together with his partner, James W. Watts, MD, from the University of Virginia. Watts performed his neurosurgery training at Massachusetts General Hospital and later became chief of neurosurgery at George Washington University Hospital. Highly regarded, Dr. Watts became the 91st president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia.
At the time of the surgery the procedure was in its infancy. Freeman and Watts had only performed 65 previous lobotomies. Freeman had no formal training in surgery and did not believe in the practice of aseptic surgical procedures.
The following are the details of this particular case:
Dr. Watts performed the surgery while Dr. Freeman supervised. In an interview with investigative reporter Ronald Kessler, Dr. Watts described the procedure:
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.
—James W. Watts [2]
Instead of producing the desired result, however, the lobotomy reduced Rosemary to an infantile mentality that left her incontinent and staring blankly at walls for hours. Her verbal skills were reduced to unintelligible babble. Rose Kennedy remarked that although the lobotomy stopped her daughter's violent behavior, it left her completely incapacitated. "Rose was devastated; she considered it the first of the Kennedy family tragedies".
Although Freeman performed more than 3,000 lobotomies on individuals with mental illness during his career, today, his lobotomy treatments are viewed as discredited by the mental health community.
In 1949, Rosemary 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 disabilities. Due to the severity of her mental condition, Rosemary became largely detached from the Kennedy clan, but she was visited on regular occasions by her sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics and an advocate for the disabled on Rosemary's behalf. Joe Kennedy also made donations to philanthropic agencies that he founded to help people with developmental disabilities.
Publicly, she was declared to be mentally handicapped. This was more socially acceptable in a political family than a failed lobotomy. "Only a few doctors who worked for the Kennedys knew the truth about Rosemary's condition, as did the FBI", due to a background check of Joe. Joe's attorney told them she had a "mental illness".
Rosemary died from natural causes on January 7, 2005 at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin at the age of 86, with her three surviving sisters Eunice Kennedy, Shriver, Patricia Kennedy Lawford and Jean Kennedy Smith, and her only surviving brother Senator Ted Kennedy by her side. Rosemary's death was the only natural death among the deceased children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy until the death of Patricia Kennedy Lawford from pneumonia on September 17, 2006. She is buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.
