Robert Foster Kennedy

Robert Foster Kennedy (1884-1952) was an Irish-American neurologist.

Foster Kennedy studied medicine at Belfast University and took his final exams at the Royal University of Ireland/Dublin. After graduating in 1906 he worked at the National Hospital, Queen's Square (London) where he was influenced by brilliant neuroscientists such as Sir William Gowers, John Hughlings Jackson, Sir Victor Horsley and Sir Henry Head. In 1910 Foster Kennedy was invited to come to the recently established New York Neurological Institute. The outbreak of World War I brought him back to Europe where he founded a French Military Hospital and subsequently served with a British unit. In 1915 he visited Chateau d'Annel, another front line hospital run by Julia Catlin Park Taufflieb. Working close to the front line he had several narrow escapes, and was made a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur by France.

After the war he worked in the Bellevue Hospital, New York, where one of his colleagues was Samuel Kinnier Wilson. Foster Kennedy became professor of neurology at Cornell University and in 1940 was elected president of the "American Neurological Association".

Kennedy supported widespread eugenical sterilization and castration.

At the 1941 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, he called for the extermination of incurably severely retarded children over the age of five. His goal was to relieve "the utterly unfit" and "nature's mistakes" of the "agony of living" and to save their parents and the state the cost of caring for them. He concluded, "So the place for euthanasia, I believe, is for the completely hopeless defective; nature's mistake; something we hustle out of sight, which should not have been seen at all" (p. 15).

"Foster Kennedy, while professor of neurology at Cornell University in New York, argued that all children with proven mental retardation ("feeblemindedness") over the age of five should be put to death."