Rosemary Kennedy, RIP

Lobotomized and institutionalized, she was 86

Born Rose Marie Kennedy on Sept. 13, 1918, in Boston, she was known as Rosemary or Rosie to friends and family. Her retardation may have stemmed from brain damage at birth.

But in her own diaries before the lobotomy she chronicled a life of tea dances, dress fittings, trips to Europe and a visit to the Roosevelt White House.

Preserved by her mother's secretary, the diaries came to light in 1995, in a book. And while they revealed no great secrets, the three diaries - written between 1936 and 1938 - described people she met and concerts and operas she attended.

...

In 1941, Joseph Kennedy, worried his daughter's mild mental retardation would lead her into situations that could damage the family's reputation, arranged for Rosemary to have a lobotomy at 23, author Laurence Leamer wrote in his book "The Kennedy Women: The Saga of an American Family."

"Rosemary was a woman, and there was a dread fear of pregnancy, disease and disgrace," Leamer wrote, adding that Rosemary, whose retardation possibly stemmed from brain damage at birth, had taken to sneaking out of the convent where she was staying at the time.

Doctors told Joe Kennedy that a lobotomy, a medical procedure in which the frontal lobes of a patient's brain are scraped away, would help his daughter.

Psychosurgery was in its infancy at the time, and only a few hundred lobotomies had been performed. The procedure was believed to be a way to relieve serious mental disorders. Leamer wrote that Rosemary was "probably the first person with mental retardation in America to receive a prefrontal lobotomy."

(Image from this series from the San Bernadino Sun)

I knew, of course, about the lobotomy, but I didn't know she was so functional as to be able to attend dances and keep a diary. Well.

A reader comments:

Some other articles have family members stating that Rosemary "was their inspiration", but it rings rather hollow. They did succeed in ruinously marginalizing a human being who was already at a disadvantage. Although the lobotomy was done at the behest of Joseph Kennedy, Snr., I think the mindset is still at work in his pro-abort son, Senator Ted Kennedy. I find the whole story quite horrifying.

Well, far be it from me to judge such a decision from six decades' distance, especially since it was apparently done against the mother's wishes, and Rosemary's mother and some of her siblings did great work on behalf of the disabled (and the family was with her when she passed away),  and this occurred in an age in which this "treatment" was not stigmatized and institutionalization was the norm for any number of disabilities - but the lobotomizing of an apparently functional young woman remains, as the reader notes..horrifying.