Patient H.M. : a story of memory, madness, and family secrets

The Resource Patient H.M. : a story of memory, madness, and family secrets
Label
Patient H.M. : a story of memory, madness, and family secrets
Title remainder
a story of memory, madness, and family secrets
Statement of responsibility
Luke Dittrich
Title variation
Patient H. M
Creator
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
In the late 1930s, in asylums and hospitals across America, a group of renowned neurosurgeons embarked on a campaign to develop and refine a new class of brain operation—the lobotomy—that they hoped would eradicate everything from schizophrenia to homosexuality. These “psychosurgeons,” as they called themselves, occupied a gray zone between medical research and medical practice, and ended up subjecting untold numbers of people to the types of surgical experiments once limited to chimpanzees. The most important test subject to emerge from this largely untold chapter in American history was a twenty-seven-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison. In 1953, Henry—who suffered from severe epilepsy—received a radical new version of the lobotomy, one that targeted the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have another, unintended effect: Henry left the operating room profoundly amnesic, unable to create new long-term memories. Over the following 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. Journalist Luke 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 the psychosurgeons conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world. Throughout, Dittrich delves into the enduring mysteries of the mind, while exposing troubling stories of just how far we’ve gone in our pursuit of knowledge. It is also, 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
Tone
Writing style
Award
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology, 2016.
Biography type
contains biographical information
Cataloging source
DNLM/DLC
Dewey number
  • 616.85/232
  • 617.481/092
Illustrations
illustrations
Index
index present
LC call number
RC394.A5
LC item number
D58 2016
Literary form
non fiction
Target audience
general

Context

Context of Patient H.M. : a story of memory, madness, and family secrets

Work of

Zepheira Logo
Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Delaware County District Library. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.
Novelist Logo