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TWO LOBOTOMIES: UNCLE BENNIE AND ROSEMARY KENNEDY by Janet Sternburg for The Rumpus

30 Nov 2015|

Two new books about Rosemary Kennedy, the lobotomized daughter of the Kennedy family, have been published in recent weeks, one by the niece of Rosemary’s caretaker, the other by an historian. The news they bring had been hidden out of sight, as are so many family secrets about mental illness. As I’ve been writing a book about the two lobotomies in my own family, I’ve been thinking about Rosemary and my Uncle Bennie, a comparison that is revealing about how we treat the mentally ill.

My uncle, Bennie Goldstein, and Rosemary Kennedy were born within nine years of one another—my uncle in 1909, Rosemary in 1918. They came into the world not more than ten miles apart, Rosemary in Brookline, Massachusetts, Bennie in nearby Roxbury. Rosemary was born into an Irish family that would number among them a United States president, Bennie to a modest Jewish family of immigrants from Russia.

They both suffered from mental illness: Bennie from dementia praecox, as schizophrenia was called then; Rosemary from long-debated issues of which minor mental retardation seems a certainty.

The fates of Bennie and Rosemary began to converge at the First Neurological Congress held in London in 1935, where a session on the frontal lobes featured an experiment on two bad-tempered chimpanzees who became docile after removal of their frontal lobes. After the Congress, neurologist Egas Moniz went home to Portugal where he performed an early lobotomy, the first brain surgery to treat mental illness. He would win a Nobel Prize for this discovery. A few years later, the operation reached America, marketed to the public by pathologist and enthusiast Walter Freeman.

To read the entire article, go to The Rumpus.