Patient H.M.: A Story Of Memory, Madness, And Family Secrets
by Luke Dittrich
Buy on Amazon"In the summer of 1953, a renowned Yale neurosurgeon named William Beecher Scoville performed a novel operation on a 27-year-old epileptic patient named Henry Molaison, drilling two silver-dollar sized holes in his forehead and suctioning out a few teaspoons of tissue from a mysterious region deep inside his brain. The operation helped control Molaison's intractable seizures, but it also did something else: it left Molaison amnesic for the rest of his life, with a short term memory of just thirty seconds. Patient H.M., as he came to be known, would emerge as the most important human research subject in history"--Provided by publisher.
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"In 1953, Luke Dittrich’s grandfather performed a lobotomy on a man who was having seizures. Those “devastating and enlightening cuts” destroyed Patient H.M.’s ability to form new memories — and subsequent studies of H.M. illuminated much of what we know about how memory works. Luke Dittrich’s new book asks: How many lives does a medical breakthrough cost? Dittrich writes a vivid and painful story of the dark tension between desire for knowledge and that most basic tenet: First, do no harm."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org