For a stretch of the 20th century, doctors treated mental illness by cutting into the brain, and it was considered cutting-edge medicine. These three stories sound like bad fiction, but every one is documented history. The patients were real people, and what happened to them deserves to be told with respect.
1. How did lobotomies ever become normal?
Because the man who developed the procedure won a Nobel Prize for it. Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and that stamp of approval helped the operation spread.
Families of lobotomy patients later campaigned to have the prize taken back, arguing it silenced critics and pushed more doctors to operate. The Nobel Foundation's answer was blunt: "There's no possibility to revoke it. It's a nonstarter."
Not everyone went along. In 1950 the Soviet Union was virtually alone in banning lobotomy, at the very moment the operation was booming in the United States.
2. Could a kid really be lobotomized for acting like a kid?
Yes. In 1960, 12-year-old Howard Dully was lobotomized because his stepmother insisted he was "defiant, daydreamed and even objected to going to bed."
Several doctors had said he was just normal. Then his stepmother found Walter Freeman, the American doctor who championed the procedure. Freeman's own notes say the parents had decided to operate and that he suggested they not tell Howard anything about it.
Dully was 56 years old before he learned why it happened. Anyone who has been a kid, or raised one, knows how ordinary his "symptoms" were.
3. Was a Kennedy really lobotomized in secret?
Yes. In November 1941, Joseph Kennedy decided his 23-year-old daughter Rosemary should have a lobotomy, and he didn't tell his wife until after it was done.
Rosemary spent roughly 56 years of her life in an institution. The family kept the operation hidden, and for about twenty years it was concealed even from her siblings.
Her sister Eunice later founded the Special Olympics in 1968 in Rosemary's honor, turning a painful family secret into a lasting force for good.
