“Oliver Sacks meets Stephen King”* in this propulsive, haunting journey into the life of the most studied human research subject of all time, the amnesic known as Patient H.M. For readers of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes a story that has much to teach us about our relentless pursuit of knowledge.Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award • Los Angeles Times Book … • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
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In 1953, a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison—who suffered from severe epilepsy—received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next sixty years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today.
Patient H.M. is, at times, a deeply personal journey. Dittrich’s grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison—and thousands of other patients. The author’s investigation into the dark roots of modern memory science ultimately forces him to confront unsettling secrets in his own family history, and to reveal the tragedy that fueled his grandfather’s relentless experimentation—experimentation that would revolutionize our understanding of ourselves.
Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. He takes readers inside the old asylums and operating theaters where psychosurgeons, as they called themselves, conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world.
Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide.
“An exciting, artful blend of family and medical history.”—The New York Times
*Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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“The broken have always illuminated the unbroken, and throughout history that breaking was often intentional.” The quote sums it up nicely – this is the story of how one broken brain informed the actions of generations of doctors and patients, a brain that was broken with deliberation and intent.
To make a very complex story very short and over-simplified, Henry Molaison received what would today be called a traumatic brain injury in childhood; afterward he suffered from multiple types of seizures over the course of years, rendering him incapable of living what most would consider a normal life. After years of therapy and treatment, he winds up in the hands of Dr. William Scoville and in the snip of a scalpel he is transformed from Henry Molaison into Patient H.M. From there, his “story” becomes world-renowned – the procedure effectively rendered him incapable of generating memories. Why the quotation marks around story, you ask? Simple: the word really no longer applies to Henry after his lobotomy, since his inability to create memories basically removes the concept of story from his life. Imagine that – a life without story, without narrative. No connections, past to present; no “aha!” moments because everything you encountered was always new, always all you knew. You can imagine it. Henry couldn’t…
For the rest of my review visit http://blog.jill-elizabeth.com/2016/07/27/book-review-patient-h-m-by-luke-dittrich/. (My review copy was provided by the publisher.)
Excellent treatment of brain damage and the tragedy of memory loss, plus the horrors of old-fashioned (?) neurosurgery…
In Patient H.M. the dissection of the evolution of brain science and surgery was well-written, so it was both informative and touching. That said, at times the unending introductions of scientists, surgeons and therapists weighing in on all the experimental procedures often became more tedious than moving. Yes, the story of poor H.M., the purported main character, quickly took a back seat to the story of The Lobotomy, which becomes the true main character of the book, and people, this story is NOT pretty.
By reading other reviews, I see people complaining that the author recounts historical events only a niche group of people will find compelling. I am happy to admit I am one of those people.
I received a free copy of this eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Lots of background information about H.M. and the researchers who studied his memory loss that was unknown to me.
This book is even more interesting than I thought it would be. A good read for anyone interested in how the brain works as well as how researchers of brain function work or have worked. It also has interesting side stories that keep the book interesting to read and not dull.
A tragic story that shows how science can be misused, and the scientific community can be taken in.
I used to teach about this man, H. M., when I taught college Anatomy and Physiology, explaining that this surgery and its aftermath was how we know that the medial temporal lobe of the brain, especially the hippocampus, is necessary for memory consolidation. Henry was the first person who did not have a known brain lesion who was operated on with a type of lobotomy, where this part of his brain was vacuumed out on both sides, and after his surgery he had profound memory loss. Not only was he unable to form new memories lasting more than a minute or so, but he also lost memories backward as long as seven years before the surgery. He survived about 55 years after his surgery and always thought of himself as being in his twenties, the age at which he had the surgery. He could not learn new material, and had to be reintroduced to people he’d been working with for years every time they came into his room, because he couldn’t remember them. This was a fascinating history of a sad case of medicine gone wrong, written by the grandson of the surgeon who performed the operation on H. M.
The book spends too much time on back story and only rarely discusses the patient the book is supposed to be about.
Written for lay people, this book takes you inside the quest for discovery of the function of the various parts of the brain, while also sparking some controversy in the brain research community. It looks at the history of neuropsychiatric surgery.