She was there first, before all of them, on the September day in 1918 when the doctor was delayed and the nurse held the baby in place and something happened that changed the course of a single human life.
Whatever that change was — whatever the birth complications did or didn’t do to the developing brain of the girl who would be called Rosemary — she was a person from the beginning. She had a self. She had interests and desires and affections. She worked hard at the things she was asked to learn. She loved swimming. She wrote letters to her father that ache with the desire to be seen and valued.
The surgery in November 1941 did not eliminate that self entirely, though it profoundly damaged the capacities through which that self had expressed itself. What remained afterward was still a person — someone who could respond to care, who had preferences, who had good days and difficult days, who swam in the water of three states and walked the Wisconsin landscape for five decades.
She deserved better than what she got. The evidence for that conclusion is not a moral argument imposed on the historical record; it is what the historical record itself demonstrates. A young woman who had proven she could thrive in the right environment was subjected to experimental brain surgery without her consent, at her father’s direction, based on promises of improvement that the available evidence suggested were unreliable, and the surgery left her permanently disabled in ways she had not been before.