Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson Page B

Brookline:
     
Some years ago when you came down to Hyannis Port we discussed the gland theory as affecting Rosemary. She is . . . still suffering from backwardness. Miss Newton told me yesterday that Dr. Charles H. Lawrence . . . had done wonders for a couple of her pupils, and I wondered if it would be too much trouble to . . . check up to see whether her suggestion is of any value and whether Dr. Lawrence is the one to start with . . . We do not want to leave a stone unturned if there is anything possible to be done.
     
    Three days later, Good cabled Joe that he had “spent [a] very pleasant visit with Rosemary and Miss Newton.” He thought Rosemary was “in excellent hands” with Miss Newton, and that the idea to refer her to Dr. Lawrence was an “excellent” idea. Good reported that Dr. Lawrence’s “standing is one hundred percent” and that he was a “very capable man.” Joe cabled back, directing Good to make an appointment with Lawrence as soon as possible.Dr. Good’s assistance in helping Joe and Rose find a solution to Rosemary’s “backwardness” suggests his culpability in Rosemary’s delayed birth, though its consequences remained unmentioned.
    Good and Lawrence met with Rosemary at Miss Newton’s on October 20. They found her “in pretty good spirits” and kept the visit a “social one.” The doctors and Miss Newton may have felt that a casual introductory visit with Rosemary was the right tack. “We had a very pleasant chat about football, school work, etc.,” Good reported to Joe. Within a couple of days, Rosemary met with Lawrence in his office for a “complete physical examination and was found to be in perfect condition.” Good continued to be impressed by Lawrence. “I am quite hopeful that a systematic treatment with Endocrines will do considerable good,” Good reported, “[and] in fact, I will make it even stronger and say that I am very, very hopeful that within a few years, as a result of these Endocrine treatments, Rosemary will be 100% all right.” He promised to see Rosemary on a regular basis, “to help her to keep up her spirits.”Joe was thrilled, and after a later visit with Rosemary, in mid-November, he believed he was already seeing “considerable improvement,” though he tempered his enthusiasm by noting it may have been his “imagination.”
    Given the state of medical science concerning women’s health at the time, it is not surprising that Lawrence’s methods werewelcomed as potentially pathbreaking insights into the role of the endocrine system and its relation to human developmental abnormalities. But his medications, supplements, and injections proved ineffective, in spite of Joe’s sense that Rosemary was better. No hormone injections were going to “cure” Rosemary of her intellectual disabilities. More important, the injections would not have helped even if she had suffered from more serious mental health problems, like depression or other mood disorders.
    Joe was managing the situation himself that fall of 1934. Rose was away in Europe, celebrating her twentieth wedding anniversary alone, enjoying an extended vacation. Joe wanted Rosemary treated before Rose returned home, and Rosemary, always eager to please her father and to do as he asked, submitted to the thrice-weekly injections without complaint. By late January 1935, Good reported that he had seen Rosemary and that “she is 100% O.K. I am pleased to report, too, that I noticed marked improvement . . . and am quite hopeful that within the next eight to ten months everything will be perfect.”
    During the spring of 1935, with no significant improvement in sight, Rose—focused on educational rather than medical intervention for Rosemary—engaged Walter F. Dearborn, a specialist at the Psycho-Educational Clinic at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, to work with her daughter. Dr. Dearborn’s pioneering work on reading disabilities and human development was