the Kennedy name was a particular concern. John Sr. and Rose also had the concern that all parents of children with intellectual disabilities have. Unfortunately, even for the rich and powerful Kennedy family, actual resources for dealing with these kind of problems were almost nonexistent in the 1940s.

Finally, based on the medical advice provided by the costly specialists they consulted, the Kennedys reached a decision. At that time, Rosemary was living in a convent school in Washington, D.C. though reports of her late-night wandering worried her parents even more. The nuns who ran the school even suggested that she might be picking up men and had become sexually promiscuous; something that terrified both her parents. In the fall of 1941, not long after the incident with her grandfather,Rosemary was admitted to Saint Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. for what her mother would later describe as a "certain form of neurosurgery." In other words, a prefrontal lobotomy.

In 1941, the prospect of curing mental patients with a simple brain operation must have seemed like the answer to the prayers of parents such as Rose and Joseph Kennedy. Unfortunately, the reality was far more horrible than anyone really realized.

Though not the first surgeon to operate on the human brain. it was Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz who first popularized lobotomies as a humane alternative to the often brutal asylums that were used to house the mentally ill in most places. By severing the neural connections between the brain's prefrontal areas and the rest of the brain, Moniz hoped