Doctor Ice Pick

by Claire Prentice

Freeman and Watts used women as their guinea pigs at a time when docility and compliance—both common outcomes of lobotomy—were upheld as feminine virtues. Of their first twenty patients, seventeen were female.

Freeman and Watts diagnosed Rosemary with agitated depression. Joe Kennedy asked them to lobotomize her and insisted the operation be kept a secret. Rosemary was never consulted; not even her mother knew about the planned operation.

Early on, Freeman and Watts had described lobotomy as a surgery of last resort. By the 1950s, Freeman, the undisputed father of lobotomy in America, was promoting it as an effective treatment for everything from chronic pain in cancer patients to headaches and postnatal depression to hyperactivity in children and juvenile delinquency.

A husband described his wife as doing “remarkably well,” adding that she performed “her housework very well and has been an indispensable part of the home . . . [She has] done a very acceptable job in the preparation of meals and the children’s lunches for school which cannot be measured in dollars and cents.”94 These were Freeman’s “success stories.”