Heat

“If Dr. Good missed the birth of the baby, he could not charge his extremely high fee of $125 for prenatal care and delivery. When holding Rose’s legs together failed to keep the baby from coming, the nurse resorted to another, more dangerous practice: holding the baby’s head and forcing it back into the birth canal for two excruciating hours.”
― Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

“Patients, they wrote, underwent “unnamed tortures when having their hands and feet strapped to the operating table, their heads shaved to the vertex [top of the skull], and the outside world masked from view by the towels and drapes.” Next came the “rattling of the instruments, the noise of the suction apparatus, and the menacing spark of the electro-cautery.” Some patients told them they wanted to die right then and there. Others called for help. These terrifying moments were useful, the doctors assured their colleagues, as the patients’ distress was often so great that the “additional trouble caused by the operation passes almost unnoticed.”
― Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

“Tens of thousands of patients would be forced to undergo lobotomies in the United States over the next two decades, and not until antipsychotic and antidepressant medications appeared in the 1950s was the surgery slowly replaced.”
― Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter

“At that time the Roman Catholic Church routinely refused the sacraments of Holy Communion and Confirmation to intellectually disabled children, especially those with Down syndrome. Even today some local churches still refuse the sacrament to those with intellectual impairments, in spite of a directive from the church during the latter part of the twentieth century that clergy should offer the sacraments to them.”
― Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter