Rosemary was taken to George Washington University Hospital. She was given a local anesthetic — Novocain — to numb her scalp. She was sedated but conscious. James Watts drilled two small holes in her skull, one on each side, near the top. He inserted a narrow instrument into each opening and used a spatula to cut through the white matter of the frontal lobe, making several incisions.
Throughout the procedure, she was asked to recite prayers, to sing songs, to count. The responses she gave helped the surgeons gauge the effects of each cut. When her speech became incoherent — when the words stopped coming — the cutting stopped.
Walter Freeman was present and directing the procedure; he was not the surgeon performing the cuts, as he had no surgical license, but he guided the process. The technique they were using was a prefrontal lobotomy — distinct from the transorbital “ice pick” method that Freeman would later develop and perform without surgical assistance beginning in 1946. In 1941, what was done to Rosemary involved drilling and cutting, not the insertion of an instrument through the eye socket.
The procedure was supposed to reduce her agitation and make her more manageable. It did not do that. It did something far more severe.
When Rosemary Kennedy emerged from surgery, she could not walk. She could not speak clearly. Her mental functioning, by the accounts of those who saw her in the aftermath, had regressed to what witnesses described as infantile — she stared, she mumbled, she was incontinent. The warm, striving, letter-writing young woman who had spent two years finding herself in an English convent school no longer functioned in any of the ways she had before.