This week I want to tell you about the case of Henry Molaison, the most well-studied amnesia case in history. It may be a long one but it’s definitely worth it so strap in.
Henry, who would later become known as ‘H.M.’, was your average American guy born in Manchester, Connecticut in 1926. At the age of seven, he got into an accident on his bicycle, hitting his head and causing brain damage. From then on he began suffering minor or partial seizures with the doctors diagnosing him with epilepsy. As time went on he grew older, and not long after his 16th birthday, his seizures started to become more severe. He began working on an assembly line at a factory but by the time he was 27 his seizures became so severe that even with medication he could no longer continue to lead a normal life.
In 1953, because of this, he was referred to a neurosurgeon called William Beecher Scoville. Scoville managed to determine (although I couldn’t find out how) that Henry’s epilepsy was coming from the ‘medial temporal lobes' on both sides of his brain and, due to how badly it affected his life, recommended surgical removal. This included the entirety of his hippocampus as well as most of the amygdala. Some other areas also died off later because of the surgery. At the time, very little was known about the brain and how it functioned. When the doctors and researchers took out these areas they had little idea of what other effects this may have on him.
Now, of course, you may already know what the hippocampus is known for and expect what is coming next. The researchers, however, did not. For Henry, the day of the surgery is the day his life stopped. He could remember his childhood, most everyone in his life, and a lot of information about the world around them. He could not, however, form any new memories from that point onwards. Someone could walk into the room and introduce themselves, walk out, and once they returned Henry would have no recollection of who they were. For him, every moment from then on in his mind took place directly after his surgery. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.
Scoville, the neurosurgeon, and his researching partner, Brenda Milner, began to study him immediately. They made him do hundreds and hundreds of memory tests, trying to pinpoint exactly where his memory was strong and where it was failing. Eventually, they realised there was some memory loss from the decade leading up to the surgery, getting worse the closer it got to it. His short-term memory, however, appeared to be working pretty well, but he could not store them to remember things later. The results of their studies were published to the world, a condition which was called and is still known as ‘anterograde amnesia’.
This revolutionised a large part of the field of neuroscience. Because the details of the loss of brain areas were known researchers could find out exactly how the hippocampus was involved in memory, and what types of memory other brain areas must have done instead. He showed, in particular, that he could still learn motor skills and remember them, that he had problems with sentence and language comprehension, and that his spatial awareness and memory was severely damaged. Researchers and scientists of all types flooded in from around the world to study the patient known as H.M. For the next five decades, he would spend the vast majority of his time undergoing these studies, and while researchers told him of how he could be revolutionizing medicine he could never remember it himself. He lived a long life, dying at the age of 82 in 2008 and donating his brain to science, providing even more research to continue on him after his death.
While it is easy to get caught up in the science of this case it’s actually a very sad story of a man named Henry, who went to doctors to seek help and it caused the end of his life as he knew it. He was always willing to be researched and consented every time, but ethically looking at it he could never remember all the years where that was all he did. While he may not have been outwardly suffering I doubt we can say that if Henry could have been aware of his situation then he wouldn’t have wanted to spend the vast majority of his life as a subject of scientific study. However, he should be remembered. What scientists did learn from him completely changed, and most importantly improved, our understanding of brain function. Moreover, others who came after him with their own neurological issues would receive better treatment because of what he went through.
So, to Henry Molaison, neurosciences most famous patient!
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