Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets

This book was absolutely INCREDIBLE. I cannot praise it enough. Anyone who is interested in bioethics and neuroscience should read this book. It takes a huge amount of bravery from an author to write about something so very close to his own family, and be honest enough to admit his grandfather who performed lobotomies including one on Patient HM (when you are in Neuroscience like I was you never quit hearing about Patient HM). One reviewer said this book was written in anger...I don't think so. If he was angry, it was more about what his grandfather did to his grandmother (they don't know what operation he did on her). And I would agree with Dittrich, that his grandfather's penchant to perform psychiatric surgery was ridiculous. I think one of the best parts of this book was the revelation that his grandmother not only divorced this man, but went on to gain a couple of degrees and work with children the rest of her life. Kudos to her.But I see other emotions about Dittrich's grandfather. Confusion, pride for what Scoville did right, acknowledgement of his foibles, and some love maybe leftover from when Dittrich was a child, and looked up to this man. None of us have absolutely perfect fathers or grandfathers, but we still often have mixed feelings about them when we grow older.What really bothered me was the attitude not just of Scoville towards others, but so many of that generation. I'm boggled at the idea that they were still doing lobotomies in the 1970's, but it didn't surprise me. They were still sterilizing people like me who were disabled (I'm Deaf) in the 1970's. Eugenics was alive and well even then, and what's scary is the powers that be in politics, are working to make eugenics come back. Besides that, all the talk of implants in people for whatever reason, raise all kinds of bioethical flags.This is absolutely required reading if you want to know about HM. I actually think I was less mad about Scoville who gave Henry his condition of memory loss, than I was at the female psychiatrist who destroyed records on what they did to him, and took back his brain from whom they asked to slice his brain into something they could study...because the man obviously had another lesion which Scoville didn't do. All so she could protect her blasted reputation. That isn't science, and if she's still alive, she should be removed from her position, and probably have her license taken away from her. Totally bad behavior on the part of a scientist in the US. We hold our science to a lot higher level...and she broke all the boundaries of decent behavior!

I enjoyed this book very much, despite (or because of?) my complete lack of knowledge concerning lobotomies and epilepsy and the study of memory. The author provided enough medical explanations for me to gain the background necessary to understand and appreciate the book, and he stopped well short of making my eyes glaze over. The twists and turns in the story made it a real page turner and I was sorry when I reached the end. I say "story" but really, there's much more than one "story" in this book, and I appreciated the layers and connections that were slowly revealed.I've seen reviews here saying that the book "isn't about Patient H.M." Those reviews, in my opinion, are both right and wrong at the same time. Patient H.M. IS the central figure that everyone else in the book revolves around, but this is not a book solely about him. Patient H.M. is the one through whom all of the other players are connected, but it's their stories his that give the book its depth and nuance.I admire the work that went into this book-- it seems no stone was left unturned.

The delivery of the item was timely and the condition of the book exceeded my expectations. It turned out to be a first edition which was essentially in like new condition with no markings in the book itself and the book had a pristine cover with no tears or scuffs.Of the many hundreds of books I've read over a great many years, this one happens to stand out as one of the 10 or so best I've ever read. This is partly because the book matches up with my interests and experiences, but most of the credit is due to the talent of the author to deliver the goods on a topic for which he is uniquely qualified to write about. His willingness to reveal and speak honestly about the behavior and decisions of a member of his own family and close friends of the family in how they handled the ethics of treating humans essentially as unwitting lab animals is extraordinary.It seemed obvious to me that the author, Luke Dittrich, was emotionally and intellectually engaged in writing this book.Of special note is Mr. Dittrich's commendable ability to distill relatively complex anatomical and medical topics into understandable layman's terms, while staying true to what those technical representations are actually describing. I myself had a pneumoencephalogram diagnostic test performed on me over 45 years ago to probe the possibility of a suspected brain tumor. Those were the pre-CAT scan and Pre-MRI scan days. The test was a gosh-awful, inhumane, abusive test. None of the people administering the test on me appeared to have a clue as to how it felt for me to undergo that test. I dearly wish that they had the opportunity to read the couple of detailed pages that Mr. Dittrich devotes to relating what that experience is like. Mr. Dittrich does a similarly riveting job of explaining a variety of other technical things and concepts throughout the book.He lays out the facts for the reader and allows the reader to develop his/her own conclusions about what they would have done if faced with the same ethical dilemmas characterizing the patient, H.M., both in life and after that life became a scientific afterlife that - of course - has now taken on a life of its own. The entire story is full of intrigue, justifiable outrage, and leaves room for plenty of speculation about what you would have done in the same circumstances.Get a hold of the book. Read it. But, most importantly, think about what you have read. Digest it. Discuss it. Delight in the experience.

o.k

Very interesting read.

Me pareció una lectura exquisita. Al principio no me gusto porque me daba la impresion que el autor debrayaba mucho para llenar hojas. Al principio del libro se la pasaba hablando de su bisabuelo y sus viajes y los adornos de su casa y demas cosas demasiado personales que daban la impresion de desviar del texto sobre H.M. De repente me di cuenta que el bisabuelo de quien tanto hablaba era nada mas que William Scoville (quien removió el hipocampo a H.M.) y la cosa cambia. A lo largo de la lectura, el autor tambien nos deja claro que Brenda Milner fue la gran científica detras de H.M. y Suzzane Corkin la vivales que se aprovecho de H.M. hasta despues de su muerte.... O al menos esa es la impresion que me dejo esta maravillosa lectura.Muy buen libro para quien pertenece al mundo de las neurociencias

I considered & researched several books on patient H.M before choosing this book. In one read, I acquired more understanding of neurological workings than the online undergraduate neurobiology course I had taken prior. If your into understanding neurology and more importantly it’s practitioners, then choose & read this book.

This is a remarkable book, part personal account, part scientific detective story, and overall a riveting description of a revolutionary discovery in the neurobiology of memory.The author’s relationship to William Scoville, the neurosurgeon who performed the temporal-lobe resection on H.M. – Dittrich is Scoville’s grandson – is explored via intimate details of his family’s history. The book provides some important insights into what led to the surgery on H.M., although some mysteries and enigmas still remain (e.g., did Scovile perform a lobotomy on his own wife, Dittrich’s grandmother?). And it presents a fascinating and in some ways disturbing history of the events and players in this medical/scientific drama. For example, Dittrich describes at length a scientific dispute between the neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese, who performed the exquisite postmortem dissection of H.M.’s brain, and Suzanne Corkin, the MIT neuropsychologist who had studied H.M. for many decades. According to Dittrich, Corkin was extremely reluctant to share information about H.M., and he describes how Corkin and Annese were collaborators and then antagonists over the analysis and interpretation of Annese’s anatomical work on H.M.’s brain. Corkin had even managed to secure ownership of H.M.’s brain for MIT, and Dittrich documents the questionable justification for this. Corkin also told the author that she had destroyed decade’s worth of records of interviews with and unpublished studies of H.M., a disturbing revelation of behavior that, to me at least, is unethical and borders on scholarly misconduct. In any case, in its description of the lobotomizing crusader Scoville, who really was a cowboy as far as adhering to medical ethics is concerned, and of the unbridled competitiveness and wrangles that occurred around access to and testing of H.M. in subsequent years, the book illustrates how ego and excessive ambition can adversely affect scientific progress.An excerpt from the book published in the Magazine of the Sunday NY Times was centered primarily on the dispute between Corkin and Annese, and this led me to the concern that sufficient recognition had not been given to Brenda Milner, who was Corkin’s graduate supervisor at McGill University and who initially performed the seminal and revolutionary research characterizing and exploring H.M.’s memory deficits. Upon reading the whole book, however, I was relieved to find that Dittrich gives full credit to Milner’s insight, ingenuity, and brilliance in first alerting neuroscience to H.M.’s profound deficit in memory. Incidentally, Milner’s research transformed the field by identifying a critical role for the hippocampus and other nearby structures in the formation of long-term memories, and it set the stage for research performed by O’Keefe, Moser, and Moser that identified the participation of the hippocampus in forming spatial memories and led to those researchers receiving Nobel prizes in 2014. It is therefore puzzling to me that Milner’s fundamental contributions have not also been recognized by the Nobel Academy.Some readers have objected to the style of the book, in which Dittrich employs flashbacks and personal vignettes to tell his story. But these devices enhance the readability and the suspense of the book, in my opinion, and make it more accessible to the non-specialist. My reservations about the book are different. For one, Dittrich offers an extended discussion of the gruesome experiments performed by the Nazis on human subjects, resulting in the development of the Nuremberg code for ethical research after WW II. The implication seems to be that the neurosurgeons who performed lobotomies (presumably including temporal lobe resections, as in H.M.’s case) were conducting unethical research on their patients, research akin to the activities of the Nazis. However, neurosurgeons are of course operating on people as a clinical intervention intended to benefit them, with research as a secondary purpose. There was no such clinical or therapeutic purpose in the activities on the Nazis. For another, at one point Dittrich also seems to dismiss the relevance of brain research on animals, with the erroneous justification that what we learn from animals cannot be applied to human beings (who are of course animals, but animals of a different stripe). In contrast, there are numerous examples of findings about the brain in animals being confirmed in human beings. See for example O’Keefe’s discovery of place cells in the hippocampus of rats and the subsequent observation of increased volume of the hippocampus in people who have undergone spatial training to become London cabbies. But these are really minor quibbles and do not detract from the value of the book.Altogether, the book is a must read for anyone interested in the neurobiology of memory and the history of modern neuroscience.