“Scarred Memory” — The Wall Street Journal’s VA Lobotomy Files

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The Wall Street Journal has posted the latest article in its extensive investigation into the US Veterans Administration’s lobotomy program of the 1950s and 60s. This article explores the life of war nurse Dorothy Ludden, and the impacts her lobotomy has had on her and her family.

“When Paul Ludden visits his mother in the nursing home, he sits on her bed and sings with her. Dorothy, 94 years old, remembers words to 1940s ditties. But she struggles to find memories of her days as a Navy nurse during World War II,” reports WSJ. “When she grows quiet, Paul strokes her gray head, passing fingers over divots in her skull—tangible reminders that the war left his mother with profound mental illness and that government doctors treated her by cutting into her brain and giving her a lobotomy.”

Links to the earlier WSJ articles are also included.

Scarred Memory: A World War II Nurse’s VA Lobotomy Takes Toll on Family She Raised (Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2015)

2 COMMENTS

  1. The same sh*y is happening today it’s just done with drugs and ECTs. Thankfully, the damage done by them can sometimes be at least partly reversed but there are so man people who’s brains and bodies get damaged by these so-called “treatments”.

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    • Joe Kennedy decided to have the procedure done on his oldest daughter, Rosemary. It was an utter disaster. He’d made the decision to do so based on what he thought was expert, sound and informed medical advice.

      She had been responding well to regular injections of “Endocrines” recommended by Dr. Charles Lawrence, chief endocrinologist at the New England Medical Center.

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