The Lobotomy That Silenced A Kennedy

In November 1941, a twenty-three-year-old woman was strapped into a chair at a hospital in Washington DC and given a mild sedative. She was conscious. She was asked to sing, to recite the months of the year, and to count backwards, while two doctors cut into her brain — because the point of the exercise was to keep going until she stopped making sense. When her words dissolved into nothing, they stopped. Her name was Rosemary Kennedy, and she was the elder sister of a future President of the United States.

She never recovered. She could not walk properly, could not speak intelligibly, was incontinent, and was left with the capacity of a small child. She had gone in as a young woman who had been presented at court in London and had a mild learning difficulty and mood swings her father found embarrassing. She came out needing full-time care for the next sixty-four years.

Her father arranged it. Her mother was not told beforehand. And afterwards Rosemary was moved out of sight, first to New York, then to an institution in Wisconsin, and the Kennedy family told the public — and for a long time some of the family themselves — that she was simply shy, or teaching, or living quietly away.

One of the two doctors was called Walter Freeman. He was about to become the most prolific psychosurgeon in history.

The Horror

Freeman was a neurologist. Not a surgeon. He had no surgical training and, for much of his career, no operating licence — which is precisely why he set out to invent a version of the lobotomy that did not need an operating theatre at all.

In 1946 he found it. He anaesthetised the patient by giving them an electric shock to the head until they lost consciousness. Then he lifted the upper eyelid, placed the point of a steel spike against the thin plate of bone at the top of the eye socket, and drove it through the skull with a surgical mallet. Once it was through, five centimetres into the frontal lobe, he swung the handle from side to side to sever the connections. Then he pulled it out and did the other eye.

The first instrument he used for this was an ice pick from his own kitchen drawer. He later had a purpose-built version made, and called it an orbitoclast. The whole procedure took around ten minutes, needed no sterile theatre, no anaesthetist, and no surgeon. Patients were often walked out afterwards wearing sunglasses to hide the black eyes.

He performed roughly 3,500 of them, in 23 states, over more than twenty years. He travelled between asylums and towns in a van he nicknamed the lobotomobile, carrying his instruments in a case, and operated in state hospital wards, in his office, and in hotel rooms. On one day in West Virginia he lobotomised 25 women. He liked an audience, and would perform in front of press photographers, sometimes working on both eye sockets simultaneously, one instrument in each hand. His original partner, the neurosurgeon James Watts, was so appalled by the transorbital method that he walked out of the practice.

His patients included at least nineteen children. The youngest was four years old.

One of them was a twelve-year-old boy named Howard Dully. His stepmother found him difficult, defiant and untidy — he daydreamed, he objected to going to bed, he was a boy. Freeman interviewed her, agreed with her, and lobotomised the child on 16th December 1960. Dully was told he was going in for tests. He survived, spent decades in institutions, halfway houses and jails, and half a lifetime not knowing what had been done to him. He later obtained his own medical file from Freeman’s archive, found the notes describing him, and read them.

Howard Dully is alive today. He has spoken publicly about it for years. He was twelve.

The Modern Relic

The most disturbing fact in this entire story is not the ice pick. It is the respectability.

The lobotomy was not fringe medicine. It was celebrated. The Portuguese neurologist who developed the original operation, António Egas Moniz, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1949 for it. Newspapers ran admiring features about surgery that cured the troubled mind. Around 40,000 to 50,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States alone, and tens of thousands more across Europe, on people whose actual conditions ranged from schizophrenia to depression to postnatal illness to being an inconvenient wife or a rebellious teenager. Women were lobotomised at markedly higher rates than men.

Freeman’s career finally ended in 1967, when a patient named Helen Mortensen died of a brain haemorrhage during her third transorbital lobotomy. His hospital privileges were revoked. He died in 1972, still defending the procedure, still convinced he had been a benefactor of mankind.

The relics are easy to find. Egas Moniz’s Nobel Prize has never been rescinded, despite repeated public campaigns by patients’ families to have it withdrawn — the Nobel Foundation has consistently declined. Freeman’s orbitoclasts survive in medical museum collections, and his case files and photographs are preserved in the archives at George Washington University. Howard Dully’s account is in print and in his own voice.

And Rosemary Kennedy is buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts, alongside her parents. She died in 2005, aged 86, having lived at St Coletta’s in Wisconsin since 1949 — an institution that is still operating today. Her sister Eunice, who visited her and never stopped being changed by what had been done to her, founded the Special Olympics in 1968. It now involves millions of athletes in more than 170 countries.

That is the strangest part of the whole story. The largest disability-rights movement of the twentieth century grew, in a direct and traceable line, out of one family’s attempt to make a daughter disappear.

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