08-26-2009, 08:52 AM
Jesus Christ. I hope Joe's burning in hell, that fucking asshole.
Quote:In 1941, when Kennedy was 23, her father was told by her doctors that a cutting edge procedure would help calm her "mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home".[2] Her father gave permission for the procedure to be performed by Dr. Walter Freeman, the director of the laboratories at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., together with his partner, James W. Watts, MD, from the University of Virginia. Watts received his neurosurgical training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and later he became the Chief of Neurosurgery at the George Washington University Hospital. Highly regarded, Dr. Watts later became the 91st president of the Medical Society of the District of Columbia. The procedure in question was a lobotomy.
At the time, only sixty-five lobotomies had been performed. The procedure was described as follows:
"We went through the top of the head, I [Watts] think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside," he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." ... When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.[3]
Instead of producing the hoped-for result, however, the lobotomy reduced Rosemary to an infantile mentality that left her incontinent and staring blankly at walls for hours. Her verbal skills were reduced to unintelligible babble. Her mother remarked that although the lobotomy stopped her daughter's violent behavior, it left her completely incapacitated. "Rose was devastated; she considered it the first of the Kennedy family tragedies."[4]
Freeman went on to perform more than 3,000 lobotomies[5] before his license to practice medicine was revoked (because of the death of a patient). Such lobotomy treatments are now discredited by the mental health and medical communities, and the procedure is no longer used.