Lobotomy has become a cautionary tale, and most typical folks view it as an appalling spectre and grave miscarriage of everything right & decent. It’s true, though, that depression too-often leads to suicide, which is fatal; real/serious mental illness is often a living hell, for both the victim and especially the family. Society itself can be strained by unmanageable mental illnesses, and there can be a great deal for a great many hanging in the balance. Taking extreme steps to address extreme problems is sometimes thought to be justifiable. But overall, lobotomy quickly became reviled as a shocking apparition, and the default reaction to its former widespread application has become deep dismay and chagrin.
Lobotomy as a social narrative looks like an example of Better Living Through Chemistry. Though received rather unenthusiastically by professional medicine or science (and often condemned in the strongest terms), it was of interest in the halls of power & authority … and it has remained so. Today, lobotomy is not as risky and unpredictable as at the mid-20th C; we have better scanners to show the individual structure of a given brain, and reliance on hand-held slicing-motions is better augmented with devices (although better helping devices would have been practical options centuries ago).
‘Inconvenient’ forms of behavior and conduct have been a problem for society, since larger-scale societies emerged from the bushes. Ancient Biblical motifs are rooted in the goal to raise the standards of human conduct … and of humans, period. As civilization becomes larger, denser and seeks higher compliance and greater uniformity, behavior-based difficulties have, if anything, proliferated and exacerbated, rather than abating. Everything would be so much better if we could smooth out behavioral variations and aberrations, with a pill or the flick of a knife. Novel suggestions to achieve Better Living Through Chemistry may now come in electronic forms, or as software applications. It’s the role, purpose or context that identifies a tool or policy as BLTC.
Today, the hazards of lobotomy are mainly a reflection of the severety of the cases for which it is held in reserve. It is nowadays a treatment of last resort, hopefully the more promising of limited & unfortunate options. But in 1941, Pres. John F. Kennedy’s father had JFK’s sister Rosemary lobotomized, sealing her destiny as a long-term warning, making her emblematic of the themes explored in Brave New World and 1984 … and turning her into a cooperative vegetable.
Papa Joseph concealed from mama Rose that the procedure was to be done. Although cynical at first glance, with a little more subtlety this can suggest that Mr. Kennedy assumed the modification would preserve the basic relationship-status of wife and their daughter; that it would be for the good overall and the mother would come around to appreciate her husband’s fairly diabolical heavy-handedness. This is of course a close approximation for the more general hubris that is a leading occupational hazard of Power & Authority.
It has long been a matter of contention, whether the issues with Rosemary merited invasive intervention due to (mental) disability, or whether her misbehavior was merely that of many other people who want to do things their own way, and are recalcitrant in the face of authority. It is repeated that she was tested and shown to have an IQ of between 60 and 70, yet her diaries were preserved and it is seen that she displayed quite-normal, average literacy.
Rosemary Kennedy was a genuinely striking girl-next-door beauty of the First Order. Reactions to her photographs tend to start with “Wow!“, and rave-on from there. It arises in discussion sometimes, that she might be regarded as the most attractive of all the Kennedy females. She physically showed none of the symptoms or signs associated with mental retardation or related disabilities, and her non-physical affect & deportment was a picture of normality & delight … except perhaps sometimes in relation to her father, family-expectations, and those assigned to ride-herd on her.
There are sometimes intimations that her emerging sexuality, and possible sexualization were an important factor in the downward trend of her status with family & other authority. There is no documentation, but it would be consistent that an otherwise normal pattern of this nature could have placed her in a bad & deteriorating position with family & professional decision-makers.
Although it remains conventional to nominally accept the general Kennedy-family presentation of Rosemary as “disabled”, and therefore at the time at least arguably justifying the newfangled surgical intervention, there are many problems & weaknesses with this assertion. It is common and prevalent to assume that she was most likely not disabled in any medically-valid sense, but that she became rebellious, defiant and uncooperative.
And that is the bugaboo that receives priority attention from Better Living Through Chemistry initiatives. People just won’t behave the way we believe they should; they won’t cooperate satisfactorily with norms & lifestyle-patterns that we have decided are the ‘right way’. We conclude that something must be done about this, and them.
Science annointed the new lobotomy-proceedure with a Nobel Prize in 1949, 14 years after its initial publication. In the early 21st C there is some level & degree of scientific activism, pressuring the Nobel Committee rescind this Prize.
