https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy
Lobotomy
According to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, when Rosemary returned to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1940, she regressed; Shriver later stated that Rosemary became "'increasingly irritable and difficult'" at age 22.[8] Rosemary would often experience convulsions[15] and fly into violent rages in which she would hit and injure others[5] during this period. After being expelled from a summer camp in western Massachusetts and staying only a few months at a Philadelphia boarding school, Rosemary was sent to a convent school in Washington, D.C.[5] Rosemary began sneaking out of the convent school at night.[16] The nuns at the convent thought that Rosemary might be involved with sexual partners, and that she could contract a sexually transmitted disease[6] or become pregnant.[17] Her occasionally erratic behavior frustrated her parents; her father was especially worried that Rosemary's behavior would shame and embarrass the family and damage his and his children's political careers.[18][5]
When Rosemary was 23 years of age, doctors told her father that a form of psychosurgery known as a lobotomy would help calm her mood swings and stop her occasional violent outbursts.[19][20] Joseph Kennedy decided that Rosemary should have a lobotomy; however, he did not inform his wife of this decision until after the procedure was completed.[18][21]
The procedure took place in November 1941.[4][22] In Sins of the Father, a biography of Joseph Kennedy, James W. Watts, who carried out the procedure with Walter Freeman (both of George Washington University School of Medicine), described the procedure to author Ronald Kessler as follows:
After Rosemary was mildly sedated, "We went through the top of the head," Dr. Watts recalled. "I 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 asked Rosemary some questions. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backward... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." When Rosemary began to become incoherent, they stopped.[23]
Dr. Watts told Kessler that in his opinion, Rosemary had suffered not from mental retardation but rather from a form of depression. A review of all of the papers written by the two doctors confirmed Dr. Watts' declaration. All of the patients the two doctors lobotomized were diagnosed as having some form of mental disorder.[24] Dr. Bertram S. Brown, director of the National Institute of Mental Health who was previously an aide to President Kennedy, told Kessler that Joe Kennedy referred to his daughter Rosemary as mentally retarded rather than mentally ill in order to protect John's reputation for a presidential run, and that the family's "lack of support for mental illness is part of a lifelong family denial of what was really so".[25]
It quickly became apparent that the procedure had not been successful. Kennedy's mental capacity diminished to that of a two-year-old child. She could not walk or speak intelligibly and was incontinent.[26]
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