By SETH MNOOKIN
On Aug. 25, 1953, a Connecticut neurosurgeon named William Beecher Scoville drilled two silver-dollar-size holes into the skull of Henry Molaison, a 27-year-old man with epilepsy so severe he had been prohibited from walking across stage to receive his high school diploma. Scoville then used a suction catheter to slurp up Molaison's medial temporal lobes, the portion of the brain that contains both the hippocampus and the amygdala. The surgeon had no idea if the procedure would work, but Molaison was desperate for help：His seizures had become so frequent that it wasn't clear if he would be able to hold down a job.
As it happened, Scoville's operation did lessen Molaison's seizures. Unfortunately, it also left him with anterograde amnesia：From that may forth, Molaison was unable to form new memories. Over the course of the next half-century, Patient H.M., as Molaison was referred to in the scientific literature, was the subject of hundreds of studies that collectively revolutionized our understanding of how memory, and the human brain, works. Before H.M., scientists thought that memories originated and resided in the brain as a whole rather than in any one discrete area. H.M. proved that to be false. Before H.M., all memories were thought of in more or less the same way. H.M.'s ability to perform dexterous tasks with increasing proficiency, despite having no recollection of having performed the tasks before showed that learning new facts and learning to do new things happened in different places in the brain. It's no exaggeration to say that Molaison is one of the most importan
t patients in the history of neurology；it's likely he was also the most studied experimental subject of all time.
The broad strokes of this story are well known. In 2008, when Molaison died and his name was finally revealed to the public, it was front-page news. Several well-received books have already been written about Molaison, including one published in 2013 by Suzanne Corkin, the M.I.T. neuroscientist who controlled all access to and oversaw all research on Molaison for the last 31 years of his life.
What else, you might wonder, is there to say? According to the National Magazine Award-winning journalist luke Dittrich, plenty. Mr. Dittrich arrived at Molaison's story with a distinctly personal perspective - he is Scoville's grandson, and his mother was Corkin's best friend growing up - and his work reveals a sordid saga that differs markedly from the relatively anodyne one that has become accepted wisdom. “Patient H.M.,” the overstuffed result of Mr. Dittrich's six years of reporting, tries to be many things at once：a lyrical meditation on the nature of memory, an excavation of a disturbing illustration of the consequences of sacrificing ethics in the name of scientific inquiry. The end result is both spellbinding and frustrating, a paradox of a book that is simultaneously conscientious and careless, engrossing and digressive, troubling and troublesome.
This push-pull is present from the opening section, where Mr. Dittrich most obviously (and distractingly) tries to mimic in his narrative the “endless little leaps of time travel during our daily lives” caused by memory. One chapter, which starts and ends atop the George Washington Bridge in 1930 and makes a pit stop at the pyramids in Egypt, includes disgressions on the start of Mr. Dittrich's career, his love of Lawrence Durrell's “Alexandria Quartet” and the record for highest high dive.
Fortunately, Mr. Dittrich hit his stride a few chapters later. The story picks up in 1944, several years before Scoville first meets Molaison, when Scoville；his wife, Emily；and their three young children are living in Washington State. What appears at first to be a cozy picture of suburban life takes a sudden, tragic turn when Emily imagines that her 4-year-old son is sending her coded messages to kill herself.
This is just the first in a string of vertiginous revelations that Mr. Dittrich successfully threads throughout “Patient H.M.” Within a few months of Emily's breakdown, the entire Scoville family had moved to Connecticut, where Emily was institutionalized and subjected to a host of the inhumane treatments used on the mentally ill in mid-20th-century America：At one point, she was submerged in a tub of cold water for hours at a time；at another, she was locked in a “copper coffin and cooked”until her temperature reached 105 degrees.
