New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Connecticut man with no memory one of the most studied patients in history
Most of the time, Henry Gustav Molaison was a model patient. He was friendly, with a passion for animals, crossword puzzles and films from the Bogart and Bacall era.
However, when he didn’t want to take his medication, his nurses at the Bickford Health Care Center in Windsor Locks had a sure-fire method for getting him to listen. “Henry,” a nurse would say, “Dr. Scoville insists that you take your meds right now!”
William Beecher Scoville was a famed neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital and Molaison’s doctor. However, as Scoville’s grandson, Luke Dittrich, recounts in his book about Molaison, “Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets,” this technique for compliance was a strange one because Dr. Scoville had been dead for decades.
Molaison, who died on Dec. 2, 2008, is
In 1953, when Molaison was in his late 20s, Dr. Scoville performed an
operation to remove parts of Molaison’s brain in an attempt to cure his drug-resistant epilepsy.
Something went very wrong, however, and for the rest of his life Molaison was unable to form new long-term memories. Though he had above-average intelligence and could converse fluently about most events from his early adulthood and childhood, he was doomed to live on in approximately 30-second loops with the constant feeling that he was, in his own words, “waking
from a dream.” one of the most famous patients in medical history. References to him have appeared in numerous scientific papers and books about the brain, and the 2000 film Memento about a man with memory loss is partially inspired by him.
In 1953, when Molaison was in his late 20s, Dr. Scoville performed an operation to remove parts of Molaison’s brain in an attempt to cure his drug-resistant epilepsy. Something went very wrong, however, and for the rest of his life Molaison was unable to form new long-term memories. Though he had above-average intelligence and could converse fluently about most events from his early adulthood and childhood, he was doomed to live on in approximately 30-second loops with the constant feeling that he was, in his own words, “waking from a dream.”
But the personal tragedy for Molaison proved a windfall for science. “Henry’s case led to this basic, fundamental idea
As a result of a controversial surgical operation, Henry Gustav Molaison lived the rest of his life with a form of amnesia that prevented from developing long-term memories. His experience partially inspired the 2000 film Memento. that we need the hippocampus to create new episodic memories,” Dittrich says. “Although there’s some controversy now about whether or not that’s exactly, precisely true.”
The next major breakthrough that Molaison’s case led to came when a researcher found that Molaison improved at a mirror-tracing task, a difficultto-perform, motor-skill test in which a person draws an object while only looking at their hand as a reflection in a mirror. “It’s something that if you do it repeatedly, you get better at it,” Dittrich says. “In some sort of subconscious way you realize what’s going on and you learn how to do it.”
Molaison got better at the test through practice, even though he couldn’t consciously remember that practice. “He would improve at it as quickly as the control subjects would,” Dittrich says. “This type of task relies on another type of memory called procedural memory, and what we now know because of Henry is that our procedural memory system apparently is pretty much independent of our episodic memory system.”
Molaison, however, paid a price for these revelations. As Dittrich researched the story, he began to look critically at some of those who had worked with Molaison, including his grandfather, Dr. Scoville. “On the one hand, he was a very successful and effective neurosurgeon, who I’m sure, saved the lives of countless people with his operations. But on the other hand, he also has this second kind of parallel career as a researcher, who was actively trying to figure out how the brain worked by destroying little bits of it and seeing what would happen,” Dittrich says.
Scoville was motivated to understand the brain, at least in part, for personal reasons. His wife, Dittrich’s grandmother, suffered from mental illness and was frequently institutionalized. Scoville’s wish to understand her illness and potentially cure her led him to embrace one of the most infamous procedures in medical history and perform it many times on patients institutionalized in Connecticut asylums. “He was the second-most prolific lobotomist in history,” Dittrich says.
Molaison was born on Feb. 26, 1926, in Manchester. An only child, he developed epilepsy as he got older, possibly as a result of a bicycle accident at the age of 7. Genetics may also have played a role. His father had two cousins and a niece who had some form of the disease.
His frequent seizures delayed his graduation from high school and greatly decreased his employment opportunities. When Molaison went to see Scoville, the neurosurgeon was experimenting with treating patients with epilepsy using some of the lobotomy techniques he had honed
When Scoville cut into Molaison’s skull at the start of the operation, he could not find any scars or tumors or any other obvious causes of Molaison’s epilepsy, which meant, in order to continue, Scoville would need to remove pieces of Molaison’s brain without a target.
working at Connecticut mental asylums. Scoville suggested the surgery to Molaison, who, along with his parents, agreed to it.
When Scoville cut into Molaison’s skull at the start of the operation, he could not find any scars or tumors or any other obvious causes of Molaison’s epilepsy, which meant, in order to continue, Scoville would need to remove pieces of Molaison’s brain without a target.
Dittrich writes that a more cautious surgeon would have stopped the operation at that point, or at the very least only operated on one hemisphere of Molaison’s brain, which would be very risky but could perhaps be justified given the severity of Molaison’s seizures.
Scoville chose a third route. “Lacking a specific target in a specific hemisphere of Henry’s medial temporal lobes, my grandfather had decided to destroy both,” Dittrich writes. “This decision was the riskiest possible one for Henry.”
This may not have been the last injustice Molaison suffered.
Ultimately, MIT scientist Suzanne Corkin took over studying Molaison.
Corkin, who died in 2016, was a close friend of Dittrich’s mother, but Dittrich’s reporting has raised questions about Corkin’s treatment of Molaison.
For instance, for many years after Molaison’s parents died, he was the only person providing consent for his participation in experiments, and it’s unlikely his memory issues allowed for truly informed consent.
Later, MIT did get a former caretaker to act as a conservator, but a more appropriate choice would arguably have been one of his surviving cousins.
Corkin always talked about how happy Molaison was, noting that he had attained the state of being truly “present,” long praised by Buddhism and other philosophies, but Dittrich found unpublished questionnaires in which Molaison indicated he was afraid, disappointed, enraged and terrified.
He seemed particularly unsettled when he went to MIT for several days at a time for tests and was constantly unsure where he was.
Despite this, Dittrich says it’s hard to draw clear conclusions from Molaison’s strange and tragic story. “It was a revelatory moment in the history of science and in our understanding of ourselves, and so it’s one of those sorts of episodes that’s extremely hard to judge,” he says. “Motivations are mixed, and it’s unclear where the bad guys are, if there are any.”
Either way, it’s a story worth remembering.