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

Luke Dittrich lets us in on the history of neuroscience, the inner workings of our brains, and his own family's interaction with one of the sadder cases of human guinea piggery you will read.

If you are at all interested in any of those subjects, you will likely enjoy this book.  I received an advance copy through NetGalley, so it was not the finished product. That means I can't really speak to what the published book is like, but I hope they fixed a bit of what gave me trouble.  See the spoiler section if you want to hear my complaints.

H.M. was Henry Molaison, a man suffering from severe seizures. In 1953, a surgery performed by the author's grandfather, the brilliant Dr. William Scoville, was intended to alleviate the problem. But it left Henry without the ability to form new long-term memories. This ruined his life, but gave doctors and scientist a remarkable insight into how our minds operate.


~~~~~SPOILER ALERT~~~~~
If you don't want to find out any of the "secrets" of the book, please scroll down past the random picture of someone holding a brain.

Alright, now that it's just us chickens, I will tell you that I was shocked by what I viewed as a huge oversight in the composition of this book.  Up through the middle of the book, we hear a lot about how the author's grandmother had "issues".  When her children were young, she did odd, inappropriate things and seemed to be deteriorating, becoming more erratic.  But when the author knew her in his youth, she always seemed placid, but a bit detached.  Now, this woman's husband was a brain surgeon, one who specialized in LOBOTOMIZING people who had issues very similar to his wife's.  Often his patients had problems less severe than his wife's.

So I just assumed that gramps performed said surgery on his own wife in order to alleviate her strange behavior and that the author had even mentioned this somewhere along the way.  Imagine my surprise and confusion when we are finally told toward the end of the book that hey, MAYYYYYBE Scoville lobotomized his own wife?!  Well, duh.  This was not a man overly concerned with the ill effects of his procedures, and anyone who has read the book up to that point would have no problem believing he would do such a thing.

This means that I was really shocked on two fronts. 1) Did Dittrich honestly not think that his readers wouldn't see the inevitable coming when he described his grandfather's controlling streak and the vastly changed behavior his grandmother exhibited over the years? 2) Did it honestly surprise Dittrich that this spouse-on-spouse lobotomy was a possibility?

Dittrich admits that despite searching for records of such a procedure, he was not able to find any.  But for a man of Scoville's clout, it would not have been difficult to cut into his wife's skull off the books, even if he used the operating room where he normally worked and had multiple witnesses.

And if you do plan to read the book, I don't think that the spoiler section above will ruin it for you.  In fact, maybe it would save you from the same confusion I felt.

Genre: Non-fiction
Rating out of 5 stars: 4