Rosemary Kennedy

Rosemary Kennedy was given a lobotomy at twenty-three at her father's direction, without her mother's knowledge, and spent the remaining sixty-four years of her life institutionalised. She was the third of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's nine children and the eldest daughter. Her birth was delayed by a nurse who held her head in the birth canal for two hours waiting for the doctor, which is the likeliest cause of the developmental disability that followed. She was educated at a series of convent schools, was presented at the British court in 1938 with her sister Kathleen while her father was ambassador, and by her twenties was subject to mood swings and occasional violence, and was going out of her convent at night in a way the family considered dangerous to her and to their reputation. In November 1941 Joseph arranged for Walter Freeman and James Watts to perform a prefrontal lobotomy, then an almost untried procedure; she was asked to recite and sing while they cut, and they stopped when she stopped making sense. She was left incontinent, unable to speak intelligibly, and with the use of one arm. She was sent to an institution in New York and then, from 1949, to St Coletta in Wisconsin, and her mother did not visit for twenty years. Her existence was concealed and misdescribed publicly until 1961. Her sister Eunice founded the Special Olympics, her brother John signed the first federal legislation on intellectual disability, and the family has said plainly that Rosemary is why. She died in 2005 at eighty-six.

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