I guess but sometimes things are not that easy.....like poor Rosemary Kennedy
She was born at her parents' home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and christened Rose Marie Kennedy but commonly called Rosemary. To her family, she was known as Rosie. Rosie Kennedy has been described as being a shy child whose I.Q. tests reportedly indicated a moderate mental retardation, but this is a question of some controversy. Diaries written by her in the late 1930s, and published in the 1980s, reveal a young woman whose life was filled with outings to the opera, tea dances, dress fittings, and other social interests
In 1941, when Rosemary was 23, doctors told her father that a new neurosurgical procedure, Lobotomy, would help calm her mood swings. At the time, relatively few lobotomies had been performed; James W. Watts, who carried out the procedure with Walter Freeman, described what happened:
"We went through the top of the head, I think she was awake. She had a mild tranquilizer. I made a surgical incision in the brain through the skull. It was near the front. It was on both sides. We just made a small incision, no more than an inch." The instrument Dr. Watts used looked like a butter knife. He swung it up and down to cut brain tissue. "We put an instrument inside," he said. As Dr. Watts cut, Dr. Freeman put questions to Rosemary. For example, he asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer or sing "God Bless America" or count backwards. ... "We made an estimate on how far to cut based on how she responded." ... When she began to become incoherent, they stopped.
Instead of the hoped-for result, Rosemary was left with urinary incontinence and an infantile mentality — staring blankly at walls for hours. Her speech became unintelligible......