Insane Asylum Museum
Plus: The secret Kennedy lobotomy hidden away in Wisconsin
The massive, imposing Northern State Hospital for the Insane once held more than 500 patients from across the state. Here, they conducted hydrotherapy, shock therapy, and lobotomies on hundreds of patients.
These “therapies” are no longer practiced today, but the Winnebago Mental Health Institute in Oshkosh has preserved artifacts from it’s past in the Julaine Farrow Museum.
The collection of objects removed from the bodies of patients is worth the visit alone. How many metal spoons do you think someone can swallow?
View more photos in the Fright Club member exclusive right here.
The Lobotomy of Rosemary Kennedy
President John F. Kennedy’s younger sister Rosemary had some developmental delays as a child, and as she became older she became “increasingly irritable and difficult.”
Her father, frustrated by her erratic and often promiscuous behavior, grew concerned about protecting the Kennedy family’s reputation. In 1941, when Rosemary was just 23, he had her lobotomized.
Dr. James W. Watts carried out the lobotomy with Walter Freeman, who invented the transorbital lobotomy and traveled around the country performing some 4,000 lobotomies throughout his life, on patients as young as just four years old.
With Rosemary awake, under a mild tranquilizer, Watts made a surgical incision in her brain through the top of her head. He then used an instrument that looked like a butter knife and “swung it up and down” to cut brain tissue. As Watts cut, Freeman asked Rosemary questions, had her recite the Lord’s Prayer, count backwards, etc.
“We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded,” Watts explained.
They stopped when she became incoherent.
She was never able to speak intelligibly again.
Rosemary lived out the rest of her life hidden away from the public in a small private house at St. Coletta School for Exceptional Children (formerly known as "St. Coletta Institute for Backward Youth”) in Jefferson, WI. She required constant care from the nuns there, as the procedure left her incapacitated with severe mental and physical disabilities until her death in 2005 at Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital.