GenuineSuccess4You

In the spring of 1952 the most powerful woman in South America was given a lobotomy in secret, in a makeshift operating theatre in her own residence with an armed guard on the door, and it stayed a state secret for almost sixty years. Eva Perón was 33. She had come from nothing, the illegitimate daughter of a village on the pampas, a radio actress who married the colonel who became president and made herself the voice of Argentina's poor. Millions worshipped her. The generals loathed her. In 1951 she was dying of cervical cancer, and nobody told her. Not even about the surgery. That November an American cancer surgeon, George Pack, was flown in and brought into the theatre only once she was under anaesthetic, so she would never know a foreigner had operated on her. The cancer came back anyway and spread. By the next spring she was in constant agony, sleepless, raging at the people around her, and her speeches had turned savage. She was talking about arming workers' militias. Juan Perón sent to Boston for James Poppen of the Lahey Clinic, a neurosurgeon who used the lobotomy on patients in intractable pain. According to Poppen's scrub nurse, interviewed decades later, he first practised the operation on prisoners in Buenos Aires, at Perón's request, before he went to work on her. Two holes were drilled in her skull and the front of her brain was cut. On 4 June Perón was sworn in for his second term, and Evita rode beside him in the open car, waving to the crowds. She weighed almost nothing. A frame hidden under her long fur coat held her upright. She grew quiet, then stopped eating. She died on 26 July 1952, and Argentina queued for days to file past her body. Even the body was given no peace. After the army overthrew Perón in 1955 it was stolen, smuggled to Italy and buried in a Milan cemetery under another woman's name, where it lay for fourteen years. In 2011 an Argentine neurosurgeon at Yale, Daniel Nijensohn, went back to the X-rays the military had taken of her skull. There were the burr holes, exactly where a lobotomy goes in. He later argued in a neurosurgery journal that the operation was meant to change her behaviour as much as her pain. The woman who had spoken for millions was quietened by her husband and a visiting surgeon, in her own house, and nobody asked her. Joseph Kennedy did it to an inconvenient daughter. Juan Perón did it to an inconvenient wife. Both times it was called care.