Robert Foster Kennedy

Dr Robert Foster Kennedy MD FRSE (7 February 1884 – 1952) was an Irish-born neurologist largely working in America. He gives his name to Foster-Kennedy syndrome, the Kaplan-Kennedy test and Kennedy's Syndrome. He was one of the first medical doctors to use electroconvulsive treatment for mental conditions and one of the first to recognise and define shell shock in the First World War.

Life He was born in Belfast on 7 February 1884. He was the youngest child of William Archer Kennedy and his wife Hester ("Hessie") Dill. Hester was the daughter of Robert Foster Dill, Professor of Midwifery at Queen's College, Belfast and also Belfast City Coroner. Robert's father took the whole family to Poland for business purposes. During this time Hester died. William stayed in Poland and sent the children to live at Fisherwick Place in Belfast with Prof Dill, their grandfather. When he in turn died in 1893 the family moved to Bangor. He was awarded with honorary degree of University of Heidelberg at 550 anniversary in 1936.

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."

Family Kennedy married twice. He divorced his first wife Isabel in 1938. In 1940 he married Katherine Caragol y San Abria.