In Search of Madness by Brendan Kelly

Author:Brendan Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gill Books

Lobotomy

I sit in the Black Box Theatre in Galway, my home town. I was born and grew up here, in the west of Ireland. When I was a child, the Black Box Theatre did not exist. Galway seemed different then, as I completed my schooling and studied medicine at University College Galway, now the National University of Ireland, Galway. The city was demonstrably smaller in the 1980s and 1990s, but it also felt more intimate, more immediate, more knowable. Perhaps that was because I had lived here all my life and knew every street and laneway, every shopping centre and housing estate, every canal and quayside.

Or perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me? Memory can do that.

In 2021, a friend and colleague in Trinity College Dublin, Professor Veronica O’Keane, wrote a brilliant, beautiful book about memory, titled The Rag and Bone Shop: How We Make Memories and Memories Make Us.20 Remembering is a complex, organic process. The act of recollection is linked with thinking, emotion and any number of inner operations. In other words, each moment of recollection is also a moment of re-creation. My childhood memories of Galway are entwined with my experiences here as I grew up, my subsequent life away from Galway, and my emotional state at the moment when the memories flood back to me – like now, in the Black Box Theatre, many years since I lived in Galway.

I settle into my seat. The theatre is full to capacity and there is a pleasant buzz around the auditorium. I love this moment, filled with anticipation and shared experience. Anything can happen.

I am here to see a new piece of experimental music theatre titled Least Like the Other, Searching for Rosemary Kennedy, presented by the Irish National Opera at the Galway International Arts Festival. The story is a sad and deeply moving one, very relevant to my exploration of the history of psychiatry and the wave of biological treatments that defined the discipline during the first half of the twentieth century.

In November 1941, Rosemary Kennedy, the 23-year old sister of John F. Kennedy (later US president) and Bobby Kennedy (later US senator), underwent lobotomy, a controversial surgical procedure involving cutting nerve connections in the front part of the brain. Rosemary was intellectually disabled from birth and experienced seizures and mood swings for most of her life. These problems led her father to agree to the lobotomy operation without consulting her mother. The surgery was a disaster. It left Rosemary even more incapacitated than ever and in need of institutional care for the rest of her life.21

The opera – which is wonderful – raises many questions. Why was this surgery performed on Rosemary Kennedy? What was her father thinking? What were the doctors doing? How could this happen? The answers to these questions are possibly even more distressing than the questions themselves. Lobotomy was without doubt the single greatest mistake in the history of psychiatry and as such merits close examination.22

While brain surgery has a long

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