After finishing midterms and starting the final semester of the school year, I’ve managed to get through 200 pages of the non-fiction book, Al Capone does my shirts, including 100 plus pages of Apush, diving into our countries involvement in the Great Depression and World War II. Al Capone does my Shirts wasn’t my first choice read, and I know my pace is dreadfully slow finishing the book. It’s not that I despise reading, it’s just that I admittingly don’t enjoy it as much as I should. I love the idea of leaping into an interesting story or spending time learning about our nations history, but I should do it more than I do now. For my outside-of-class reading time, I spent 10 hours reading about how Herbert Hoover’s laissez-faire Republican ideals only drove the US into a deeper depression causing him to lose the presidency to Franklin Roosevelt’s radical New Deal policies thus saving the United States’s butt. What made reading the chapters so fascinating was the fact that my grandfather actually lived through part of the war and served in the military around the time of the communism and fascism regimes.
Al Capone does my Shirts addresses a very controversial topic that started to gain light in the 1930’s and continues to be discussed still today; mental illnesses and their treatment methods. What makes this so controversial is during the 1930’s, mental illness was critically misunderstood and many unethical treatments were implemented such as electroshock therapy and at worst, lobotomy or the “hammering of an instrument similar to an icepick through the top of each eye socket severing the nerves connecting the frontal lobes to the emotion-controlling centers of the inner brain.” Treatments like the lobotomy seem like scenes straight from horror movies, but they were actual methods implemented on thousands of patients in the 30’s and 40’s to calm and sedate them. Some patients had lobotomies done simply for pain or depression as they were thought to cure some of the most basic illnesses today. Most modern medicines for mental illness were not marketed until the 50’s, allowing the treatment to spread to nearly forty thousand people. In Al Capone does my shirts the main character, Moose, has a sister, Natalie, who suffers from autism and their family has tried “a million things.. Aluminum treatments, the voodoo dolls, UCLA, the psychiatrist, the Bible readings, Mrs. Kelly,” and although she isn’t treated with a lobotomy, it could be the next prescribed method of treatment considering the book and the treatment were set both in the 1930’s(268). Luckily Natalie was able to gain help from the special education teacher, Mrs. Kelly, and had not “had a fit since the day [they] got in trouble with the warden more than two months ago.”(173)
While learning about the extreme abuse many patients of the 30’s experienced, I came across an article about the missing Kennedy; Rosemary. Like Natalie, she had a mental illness under 1930’s doctor’s definitions, however it seemed to be mild. Considering she was apart of the prestigious Kennedy family, members thought Rosemary would shame the family, (even though she could still hold conversation and perform in activities) so they institutionalized her eventually lobotomizing her with hope it would help her. There is a link to her story where you can also find dairy entries which only prove her ability to read and write and enjoy life. However, after her lobotomy, (at the age of 21) Rosemary spent the rest of her life in an institution unable to do the activities she was once able to.
Book Blog 2016 