A dark mystery about the inner workings of the mind, PATIENT H.M. is a reminder of how we used to treat people with mental illness in the last century, before chemistry took precedence over mechanics. It is also a personal look at the author’s grandparents and how mental illness affected them.

Luke Dittrich’s grandfather, William Beecher Scoville, was a rich kid with a good scientific understanding and a bent for tinkering with cars. He combined these interests when he entered the relatively new field of neurosurgery. The trend was away from such time-consuming treatments for mental patients as days-long soaking in water hot enough to induce fevers, isolation in chambers cold enough to radically reduce body temperature, and repeated electroshocks. Many scientists believed that the removal of brain tissue, called lobotomy, "cuts away sick parts of the human personality" --- only none knew exactly what tissue to remove or precisely what result would be achieved. Surgeries could be as crude as boring into the brain with a hand-held drill.

"In constructing this disturbing but realistic recollection, Dittrich observes how medical science marches on and treatment trends change, hopefully for the better."

The zealous Scoville developed tools and techniques for "psycho-surgery" that put him at the forefront of his profession. Thus even the horrific, permanent after-effects of his operation in 1953 on Henry Molaison, a man in his prime incapacitated by a severe seizure disorder, was deemed a success. The patient, who would come to be known as H.M, entirely lost all memories except those of his childhood, but regained a semblance of a life by becoming one of the most studied subjects in medical history. The same experiments could be repeated multiple times on H.M., and he would never remember having done them before. As the author puts it, “From the day of his operation until the day of his death, Henry’s brain could no longer follow its own natural inclinations.” Interviews with H.M. comprise some of the most fascinating and poignant portions of Dittrich’s thoroughly researched story.

Though positive results have arisen from the type of physical experimentation that included lobotomy (the author cites the cure for smallpox as one example), we would now decry such operations as inhumane and those like Scoville who performed them to be morally suspect. This position bears even more weight for award-winning journalist and author Luke Dittrich as he pulls apart the complex threads of his grandfather’s private life, notably the suicide attempt and subsequent treatment of Scoville’s wife, once vivacious and rebellious, who became curiously passive and withdrawn after her stay in a mental hospital considered innovative for its time.

In constructing this disturbing but realistic recollection, Dittrich observes how medical science marches on and treatment trends change, hopefully for the better.