Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy,’til you have gone mad.”
Charles Lamb (Dickens)
The treatment of mental illness underwent nothing short of a revolution with the invention of Thorazine, the much maligned chemical straitjacket known for its trademark zombie shuffle. But the reality is that Thorazine delivered, for the first time, relief from the debilitating psychosis that imprisoned patients as wards of the state. Prior to anything even approaching a medical understanding of these disorders, treatment amounted to no less than a parade of horribles. According to Robert Whitaker’s Mad in America: Bad Science,Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill, Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, theorized that circulatory defects were to blame, his cure? Bloodletting and board spinning. Henry Cotton, a New Jersey doctor, attributed them to tooth decay, so he yanked teeth and then eventually decided to lop off other body parts for a tidy kill rate of 43 percent. John Talbott and Kenneth Tillotson, both Harvard men, favored swaddling patients in freezing blankets until their temperatures dropped ten to twenty degrees below normal; Manfred Sakel induced insulin comas, and Ladislas von Meduna administered metrazol, a convulsant so violent it could crack bones and dislodge teeth. And then came the lobotomy revolution.
Quite simply, a lobotomy is the wholesale destruction of the offending brain lobe through the insertion of an icepick, usually through the eye socket. It succeeded in altering misbehaviors, but they were usually replaced with devastating, debilitating consequences like epilepsy, dementia, intellectual demolition, and often a total obliteration of the humanity of the patient. The sickening thing is that these doctors really believed they were benefiting their patients while committing gross violations of their medical oaths to Do No Harm. The case of Rosemary Kennedy, to whose life this writing is dedicated, still stands as an American lobotomy horror story that haunted the Kennedy clan for over forty years.
Rose suffered a birth injury at the hands of the self-serving hubris of the medical profession. Her progress through the birth canal was obstructed by a nurse because the attending physician was delayed, and her brain was deprived of oxygen for two hours with devastating consequences. Her father Joe, in secret, ordered a lobotomy on Rose when she was 23. The procedure left her unable to walk or talk, which she lived with for the next 63 years. Joe lied to her siblings about her condition, and they did not see Rose or know her actual whereabouts for twenty years. But Rose’s sacrifice was not totally in vain; her father’s guilt led to the creation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. It is Rose’s legacy and her gift to America.
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