Patient H.M.
A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
In the summer of 1953, maverick neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville performed a groundbreaking operation on an epileptic patient named Henry Molaison. But it was a catastrophic failure, leaving Henry unable to create long-term memories.
Scoville's grandson, Luke Dittrich, takes us on an astonishing journey through the history of neuroscience, from the first brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the New England asylum where his grandfather developed a taste for human experimentation. Dittrich's investigation confronts unsettling family secrets and reveals the dark roots of modern neuroscience, raising troubling questions that echo into the present day.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this courageous mix of scientific investigation and memoir, journalist Dittrich recounts the life of Henry Molaison (1926 2008), an epileptic man hailed by many as the most important human research subject in the history of neuroscience. A 1953 operation by Yale neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville (1906 1984), Dittrich's grandfather, on Molaison's hippocampus left the 27-year-old without memory, in a world where "every day is alone in itself." The story of "what led my grandfather to make those devastating, enlightening cuts," Dittrich writes, "is a dark one, full of the sort of emotional and physical pain, and fierce desires, that Patient H.M. himself couldn't experience." And he unravels it by documenting the decades-long studies Molaison's extraordinary amnesia spawned and the researchers he would inspire and confound. Those threads are woven around the history of neurosurgery including the professional infighting that can obscure the legacy of scientific advances and failures, the torturous mid-20th-century treatment of the mentally ill, and the rise and fall of lobotomies. At the heart of this breathtaking work, however, is Dittrich's story of his complicated grandfather, his mentally ill grandmother, and a long-held family secret, with Molaison stranded "where the past and the future were nothing but indistinct blurs."
