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“disorder, chronic pain, and bipolar and other mood disorders. The procedure was also used to treat perceived defective personality traits that included homosexuality, nymphomania, criminal behavior, and marijuana and drug addiction. Freeman would later describe potential patients as society’s “misfits.” Women, in particular, made up the largest group of lobotomy patients. Women who were depressed, had bipolar illness, or were sexually active outside the range of socially and culturally acceptable limits of the day—including single women exhibiting typical sexual desire—were considered candidates.”
― 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

“In subject files labeled as correspondence related to Rosemary Kennedy, withdrawal sheets indicate the removal of hundreds of documents dating between 1923 and the 1970s. This leaves significant gaps in the historical record. A large amount of the withdrawn material is associated with Rosemary’s treatment and care after her lobotomy.”
― Kate Clifford Larson, Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter