#rosemary kennedy

[animentality]

[thesickhistory]

She Was Awake When They Cut Into Her Brain

This is Rosemary Kennedy. She's about twenty years old in this photo. Three years before this picture was taken, she attended her first formal dance. Three years after it was taken, a neurologist who had never held a scalpel in his life sat beside her in an operating room and asked her to sing "God Bless America" while a surgeon pushed a blade into her brain.

She sang it.

Then she stopped singing. She stopped talking. She stopped being Rosemary.

She was twenty-three.

Her name was Rose Marie Kennedy. Third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Sister to a future president, a future senator, and the future founder of the Special Olympics. She had a mild intellectual disability. She could read and write at about a fourth-grade level, keep a diary, do multiplication, hold conversations, and travel across Europe. In May 1938 she curtsied before King George VI at Buckingham Palace. She tripped slightly. The family called it a triumph.

She wrote to her father in 1940: "Darling Daddy... I am so fond of you. And I love you so very much."

By her early twenties, Rosemary was having seizures and mood swings. Rages that scared the nuns at her convent school. She was sneaking out at night. Her father, Joe Kennedy, wasn't worried about her health. He was worried about headlines. He had sons to put in office. A daughter who might get pregnant or cause a scandal was a threat to the brand he was building.

So Joe found Walter Freeman.

Freeman was the most famous lobotomy advocate in America. Yale-trained neurologist. No surgical credentials. He'd read about a Portuguese doctor named Egas Moniz who was cutting nerve fibers in patients' brains, and Freeman had decided to bring the technique to America and turn it into a mass operation. He renamed it "lobotomy." By 1941, he and his partner Dr. James Watts had performed about two hundred of them.

In November 1941, Joe Kennedy brought Rosemary to George Washington University Hospital. He didn't tell his wife.

Here is what happened next, according to Watts's own account given to journalist Ronald Kessler and published in The Sins of the Father (1996).

Rosemary was awake. Mildly sedated but conscious. Watts cut through the top of her skull. Small incisions, about an inch on each side. He pushed an instrument into her frontal lobes. He described it later as looking like a butter knife. He swept it back and forth, severing white matter.

While Watts cut, Freeman talked to her. He asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer. She recited it. He asked her to sing. She sang. He asked her to count backward.

They decided how deep to cut based on how she responded.

When her words turned to mumbling, they kept going. When the mumbling collapsed into silence, they stopped. That was the endpoint. The moment her voice disappeared was the moment they decided they'd cut enough.

She came out of that room unable to speak. Unable to walk without help. Incontinent. Her left arm paralyzed. The cognitive capacity of a two-year-old. She was twenty-three years old and she would stay that way for sixty-three more years.

The family told people she'd gone to become a kindergarten teacher.

Her father built a private cottage on the grounds of a Catholic care facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin, called St. Coletta. Two nuns, Sister Margaret Ann and Sister Leona, became her world. They cared for her every single day for decades while the Kennedy dynasty played out on television screens across America.

Joe Kennedy never visited her. Not once. He died in 1969 without ever going to Wisconsin.

Rose Kennedy didn't see her daughter for twenty years.

The family kept the lobotomy secret for forty-six years. In 1962, Rosemary's sister Eunice published an article admitting Rosemary had an intellectual disability. She didn't mention the surgery. That didn't come out until 1987, when historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys.

But Eunice didn't just break the silence. She built something.

Camp Shriver, 1962. Her Maryland farm. Kids with intellectual disabilities swimming and running and competing because Eunice remembered what her sister was like before that operating room.

July 20, 1968. Soldier Field. Chicago. One thousand athletes. The first Special Olympics.

Today it serves six million athletes in over 200 countries.

JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act on October 31, 1963. It was the last law he ever signed. Twenty-two days later he was dead.

Walter Freeman performed about 3,500 lobotomies across 23 states. An estimated 490 of his patients died. He was banned from operating in 1967 after a woman died during her third lobotomy at his hands. Egas Moniz still has his Nobel Prize. Every petition to revoke it has been denied.

Rosemary Kennedy died on January 7, 2005. She was eighty-six. She spent sixty-three years in that cottage in Wisconsin because her father wanted a quiet daughter and a doctor promised him one.

Nobody asked her. The Sick History. Medicine. Monsters. Death. Full story with complete sourcing

She Was Awake When They Cut Into Her Brain. She Was Reciting Poems. Then She Stopped.

The instrument looked like a butter knife. That’s not a metaphor or a storytelling flourish that’s the description the surgeon himself…

[lilisheart]

during the two summers that joseph p. kennedy serves as the ambassador to great britain, the family convenes at the hotel du cap in the south of france. for the nine children, separated by 17 years in age, it is a rare moment when everyone is together. maintaining a close family bond matters deeply to both joe & rose.

[freakslullaby]

I wanna make a connection for anyone who hasn't made it yet that President John F. Kennedy had a sister named Rosemary. She showed issues with speech and motor skills from a young age. Because of this, JFK's father had her lobotomized against her will, leaving her incapacitated for the rest of her life. JFK also had a brother named Robert F Kennedy (Sr.). RFK Sr. was this man's father.

THAT is what we are dealing with concerning the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services. More specifically the legacy of the Kennedy family and their history with disabilities and autism even in their own family.

'There weren't this many autistic people when I was young'. Yeah, there weren't in public.

Autism, disability, deformity, etc. until the 1960's often meant 'automatic institutionalization'.

Autistic people only seem more prevalent now because we have had laws in place keeping autistic people safe from neglect, from being kept in harmful/abusive institutions, from being lobotomized, from being dehumanized and degraded.

Point blank. Period.

Autism is a genetic neurodevelopmental disorder. It's the way someone's brain works. And it isn't something that can be or needs to be fixed. And because it cannot be 'cured', the only way RFK Jr. can 'end autism' in America is through disappearing/incarceration/sterilization/murder.

Wake up.

[camelotobsessed]

Marching on..

[strryhaze]

jean, rosemary, and jack kennedy walking together, 1930s.

their demeanor with rosemary is everything. jean and rosemary holding hands, slightly swinging them. jack and rosemary’s arms interlocked, gently, not forcefully, not evoking some type of control or possessiveness. jack is letting rosemary hold onto him, his fist casually enclosed unto himself. they’re not gripping her or holding onto her lest she cause some trouble. she’s holding onto them like a sister, they’re following her lead.

[bunnygirl021]

John F. Kennedy photographed by Stan Shields while in Ireland during his historic visit c. June 1963

[indulginginterests]

Rose Marie “Rosemary” Kennedy during her presentation as a debutante at the Court of St. James's, 1938