Rosemary Kennedy flew into rages her father couldn’t control. So in the fall of 1941, Joseph Kennedy had doctors cut into his daughter’s brain to calm her down. The surgery destroyed her. Rosemary Kennedy spent the next 63 years hidden away — and for a long time, her own siblings weren’t even told where she was.
Rosemary was awake on the operating table that November when Drs. Walter Freeman and James Watts drilled into her skull. They asked her to keep reciting out loud as they cut, and they stopped only when her words dissolved into nonsense. She was 23 years old.
Her difficulties traced back to her birth in 1918. A doctor wasn’t available in time, so a nurse held her head in the birth canal for about two hours to delay the delivery, cutting off her oxygen. By the age of 2 she hadn’t hit her developmental milestones, and she grew up struggling in school.
By her early 20s, Rosemary was having violent outbursts. She was expelled from a summer camp and kept sneaking out of her convent school at night. Doctors told her father that a lobotomy would settle her mood swings, and he arranged the procedure without telling her mother.
The operation left her with the capacity of a toddler. She could no longer walk or talk, became incontinent, and could not make herself understood. Her father had her institutionalized and never visited her again. Her mother stayed away for roughly 20 years.
To the public, the family said Rosemary was a recluse by choice, and later that she was intellectually disabled. They never mentioned the surgery at all. Her siblings didn’t learn where she was living until after Joseph suffered a stroke in 1961.
Historians now believe Rosemary was likely dealing with depression — nothing that came close to warranting the operation. Watts himself later admitted that what she had looked more like a form of depression. Rosemary Kennedy died in 2005 at the age of 86.
