And shortly after that, he began experiencing seizures. He was walking home from the park late one night, got knocked down by a bicyclist and hit his head. He grew up in the Hartford area in Connecticut, and his story really begins when he was 8 or 9 years old, in the mid-1930s. On Patient H.M.'s backstory and his contributions to medicineīefore he was Patient H.M., he was a man named Henry Molaison. Interview highlights contain web-only extended answers. But it's one of those sort of murky cases that you find in the history of medicine, in the history of science, where his tragedy - it was a boon to science," Dittrich says. "It's hard to argue that it was a good outcome for him. : A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets.ĭittrich, who is also the grandson of William Scoville, the doctor who performed Patient H.M.'s lobotomy, tells NPR's Allison Aubrey that the story is one of both personal tragedy and scientific breakthrough. "A lot of what we know about how memory work came from more than a half-century of experimentation that was conducted on Patient H.M.," says Luke Dittrich, author of the book Patient H.M. His case taught scientists a lot about how the brain creates and stores memories. to the medical community, he lost the ability to create memories after he underwent a lobotomy to treat his seizures. The story of Henry Molaison is a sad one. Book Reviews Counting The Cost Of Medical Advances In 'Patient H.M.'
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