“Oliver Sacks meets Stephen King”* in this propulsive, haunting journey into the life of the most studied human research subject of all time, the amnesic known as Patient H.M., a man who forever altered our understanding of how memory works-and whose treatment raises deeply unsettling questions about the human cost of scientific progress. Her psychiatrist was saying one symptom of mental illness was her sensitivity to his infidelity, a deeply misogynistic perspective.C.P.

My grandmother’s psychiatrist wrote that my grandfather was “truly devoted and loyal to her, but has upset her by mild promiscuity.” I was enraged when I read that. Men with surly dispositions were not being lobotomized at the same rate as women with similar temperaments. The side-effects - tractability, passivity - overlap with what men of the era believed were ideal feminine characteristics. I don’t have the numbers, but the disproportion is clear and undisputed. You note that women were much more likely to undergo lobotomies. But you also had to have an attitude of “not only can we, but we’re entitled to do this.” “Dominion” might not be the right word, but something allowed them to feel capable of lesioning other people’s brains. Not until modern anesthetics, not until antiseptic operating procedures, was psychosurgery even possible. For most of human history, mucking about would have been fatal. I’m not a doctor, but there seemed to have been a constellation of factors. Until suddenly it wasn’t.” What happened? That was the status quo for thousands of years. You describe the approach to an injured brain as “protect it when possible, keep it clean, don’t muck about inside. I had no reason to disbelieve her, but if it does turn out that what she told me is not true, and she did not in fact shred documents, I don’t know why she would have misled me. She told me what she told me, in her own words, on tape, and I reported the conversation. I want to be completely clear on this: the issue of shredding documents came directly from Sue Corkin.

Might Professor Corkin have told you she shredded her research to stymie your request to see the original records?

(Corkin died in May.)ĭittrich, 43, took questions from Newsday from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. professor and principal investigator into H.M., told Dittrich that she had shredded most of her decades of original research - a shocking assertion that M.I.T officials contest. And the third is that psychologist Suzanne Corkin, an M.I.T. The second: the doctor’s ardor for lobotomy stemmed from his anguish over his wife’s mental illness. The first kicker: Scoville was Dittrich’s grandfather. By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.

Patient hm by luke dittrich