In recent decades, scientists have made great advances in understanding
how and where the human brain makes and stores memories, a key part of forming our identities.
A man who unwittingly helped them do it, Henry Molson, who underwent Lobotomy in 1953
intended to relieve his epileptic seizures.
A large part of his hippocampus was removed.
As soon as he came out of the operating room it became clear that he was no longer
able to create new memories.
And so, this gave scientists, for the first time really,
a clear sense of how important these structures were to the creation of new memories.
And that was sort of the first and, in many ways,
most fundamental thing that he taught us about how memory works.
In his new book, Luke Dittrich tells the story of the man known for decades as patient H.M.
Considered the most important research subject in the history of brain science.
I spoke to Luke Dittrich at Washington's Lincoln theater.
I personally found it to be a very shocking story, you know, during the course of my reporting.
This came to be during an era when the lines between medical practice and medical research
were fairly blurry and, know, people crossed some lines that they most likely shouldn't have crossed.
And this is the era of lobotomies?
That's correct.
And one of the things that my research, you know,
led me deep into was the history of the lobotomy, and of this whole field known as psychosurgery
that came out of desperate times.
The mentally ill at the time, in the sort of 1930’s and 1940’s there were no,
you know, there were no real good effective treatments for a lot of the things that they suffered from.
And the lobotomy rose up as a sort of, you know, a quick fix.
But it had serious consequences.
We live in an age now of neuroscience, right?
Where it's sort of everywhere.
Yeah. With a lot of new technology, but this is a period not so long ago in the twentieth century
where very little was known about the brain.
Two millennia ago, you know, doctors really thought nothing of performing vivisections
on live prisoners in order to understand anatomy.
You know, thankfully our standards of medical ethics have evolved quite a bit.
But I do think that readers will be shocked to see kind of how bad things were,
you know, back in the middle of the twentieth century.
It's a very personal story for you because the doctor who performed the surgery on patient, H.M.
was your grandfather.
My grandfather was a neurosurgeon.
He was by all accounts, a brilliant neurosurgeon, and a renowned one.
He was the, you know, he founded, and was the director for many years of the department
of neurosurgery at Hartford hospital.
He was a Yale professor.
He did a lot of good, I mean, he saved a lot of lives.
He also was one of the world's most sort of zealous proponents of psychosurgery
and one of the world's most prolific lobotomists.
And he’s sort of driving passion for the lobotomy and for psychosurgery.
Grew in large part out of the fact that his own wife, my grandmother, was mentally ill.
She was institutionalized in one of the same asylums that he that he practiced in.
And he was, you know on a kind of on a crusade, on a sort of,
on a quest to develop a cure for his own wife's madness.
One of the things that struck me in sort of looking at the history of psychosurgery is how often, you know,
how often the lobotomized individuals were women.
There are a number of possible answers for why that may be,
but I think perhaps the most compelling one is
that a lot of the symptoms of the lobotomy the, you know, passivity, tractability,
these were symptoms that at the time were viewed as kind of, you know, ideal elements,
according to men of, you know, of feminine traits.
And that in some senses, you know, a lobotomized woman could be viewed as almost an ideal wife.
Which was one of the sorts of horrifying things that I was kind of grappling
with as I was looking at this story.
And Henry himself, how much was he aware of his own role in scientific history?
He certainly didn't have a clear awareness of his own role.
He would be told many times that he that he was famous in a certain sense.
As the studies on him went on, you know, certain things would stick.
And so, he may have, by the end of his life had this, you know, vague sense of his importance.
But he certainly didn't have any sort of clear sense, like we do,
of how deeply and fundamentally important he was.
Part of this story goes on past Henry's life,
because you raised some questions at the end about the extent of how much he sort of controlled,
how much research on him was controlled.
How much we really know the story in the end.
Some of the more fascinating chapters in Henry's history really happened, you know,
quite a few years after his death.
Just recently, I mean, the story is in some sense, it's still unfolding.
The ethical questions surrounding Henry's story to me begin in that operating room
where my grandfather made that decision to operate.
And I think that was a decision that deserves close scrutiny.
Afterwards, there are a number of other questions that follow throughout the six decades of experimentation
that was done on him.
And, you know, even after his death what was done.
Including who owned…
who owned his brain, exactly.
A custody war basically broke out over the possession of Henry's brain.
The book is Patient H.M. Luke Dittrich, thank you very much.
Thank you so much for having me.