Rosemary Kennedy and Lobotomy

When the subject of lobotomy is raised one of the first people mentioned is Rosemary Kennedy. She has stood as proof that one did not need to be poor to be a victim of psychosurgery - any mentally disabled person was vulnerable.

According to the Associated Press,"Doctors told Joseph Kennedy that a lobotomy, a medical procedure in which the frontal lobes of a patient's brain are scraped away, would help his daughter and calm her mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home." This story doesn't exactly match the stereotype that lobotomies were only performed in the most dire circumstances on the most seriously disturbed minds, does it?

The article goes on to say, "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.' "

Sadly, she would not be the last. One man in our group was lobotomized for juvenile delinquency when he was only 13-years-old; another woman's mother was lobotomized to "cure" her of headaches. In all, over 50,000 people would be lobotomized in the United States alone.

Much of the blame lies with the Nobel Prize Committee who awarded the Nobel in Medicine to Egas Moniz for inventing the prefrontal leucotomy, a psychosurgery closely related to lobotomy. We have been fighting hard to have Moniz stripped of the Prize, but the Committee will not relent. This despite the fact that the operation is illegal in Moniz's own country, Portugal.

But damn, the doctors back then were so sure they were on the cutting edge of medicine (no pun intended). Kind of reminds you of ... right now.

By the way, you do know that still do psychosurgery, don't you? They just like to call it by a euphemistic name - "neurosurgery for mental disorder" to be exact.