THE MEMORY STEALER
How a botched brain operation led to a tragic story of memory loss – and betrayal
Patient HM Luke Dittrich Chatto & Windus €24.99
‘Living in the present’ sounds like a recipe for Zen-like serenity. But imagine what it would be like if you really couldn’t remember anything that happened more than 30 seconds ago, let alone 30 days, weeks or months ago.
Far from being ‘mindful’, chances are you would feel as if you were losing your marbles. Humans, as Luke Dittrich reminds us in this riveting book, are story-making animals. And without a story to tell ourselves about who we are and where we’ve been, everything, including the future, becomes a terrifying blank.
Patient HM tells the extraordinary story of Henry Molaison, the most studied human guinea pig in the history of neuroscience.
In 1953, the 27-year-old underwent brain surgery to ease his severe epilepsy.
The surgeon, a dashing, arrogant star of the operating theatre called William Beecher Scoville, decided to suck out the hippocampi on both sides of Henry’s brain, an experimental procedure and far more radical than was necessary.
Although Henry’s epilepsy improved, his memory was all but destroyed. From now on, every person he met, every conversation he had, vanished into thin air. If someone left the room to go to the lavatory, Henry would greet them on their return as a complete stranger.
This was a tragedy for him, although he seemed not to mind – Scoville had also removed his amygdalae, part of the brain that controls anxiety and aggression – but it was wonderfully lucky for neuroscience.
By bombarding ‘Patient HM’, as he now became, with endless questions such as ‘how old are you?’ and ‘who is the President?’, and noting every stumble and silence, doctors hoped it might be possible to tease out how a fully functioning brain makes memory.
So far, so straightforward, yet there are several twists to this tale that turn it from a competent science biography into something darker and much more compelling.
For one thing, Dr Scoville was Luke Dittrich’s grandfather. And as Dittrich burrows deeper into the archives, he discovers some disturbing things about this suave, larger-than-life character who practised medicine at a time when surgeons behaved like gods, answerable only to their own ambitions and desires.
It isn’t simply that Scoville emerges as one of the most prolific performers of lobotomies in the mid-20th Century. This was a time, after all, when many medical men thought the quickest way to ‘cure’ someone of depression or anxiety or homosexuality was to open their skulls and fiddle with their brains.
No, what really appals Dittrich is the revelation, by an elderly colleague of his grandfather’s, that Scoville may have performed a lobotomy on his own wife, the author’s much-loved grandmother.
Indeed, Dittrich theorises that his grandfather’s obsessive pursuit of lobotomies at the very asylum where his wife was incarcerated in the Forties was an attempt to find a cure for her nervous breakdown. Whether Scoville did operate on Emily is not something Dittrich has been able to confirm. Emily was certainly much quieter after her stay in the Institute of Living but she had not become some sort of Stepford wife, for she eventually left her surgeon husband and set up as a single woman in New York. If you want someone to root for in this unedifying tale, it has to be ‘Bambam’, who lived until she was 101, a fixture in Dittrich’s family life: calm, purposeful and no pushover. All of which takes us a long way from ‘Patient HM’, goodhumouredly answering the psychologists’ endless questions about whether Elvis Presley is still alive and the name of the first man on the Moon. This doesn’t feel like a detour, though, thanks to Dittrich’s great skill in weaving the several strands of his sprawling narrative together. As a result, when the final twist comes, it doesn’t feel gratuitous, but rather a natural part of the seamless storytelling. Dittrich claims that during the past 30 years of Henry Molaison’s life – he died in 2008 – he was not provided with an appropriate legal representative to make sure that he consented to the endless psychological testing.
He maintains that the scientist in charge of ‘Patient HM’, Dr Sue Corkin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made sure that no-one could have access to Henry.
Dittrich also hints that Corkin consistently played down the fact that, far from being a happy, co-operative subject, Henry was often distressed and depressed.
What’s more, after his death in 2008, Corkin fought to keep control of his brain, which was carefully removed within hours of his death, its dissection livestreamed over the internet.
Corkin herself died earlier this year, so is not able to defend herself. Her colleagues, however, rebuff Dittrich’s suggestion that the mishandling of ‘Patient HM’ did not end with Dr Scoville’s over-enthusiastic slicing and dicing 60 years earlier. What starts out as an account of one of neuroscience’s most famous case histories ends as a moral enquiry into how far people are willing to go in their pursuit of knowledge and professional advancement – and whether the human costs can ever be justified.