For a medical book, what a thrill! I gasped, I cried, I raged, I ranted to my partner. The gory details are less in the brain surgery (though I'll admit I also winced) and more about the unethical human behavior. A bit too long perhaps, but a very good book.

This story falls into the category of fact being stranger than fiction. If the research and the evidence didn't exist, there is no way you would believe it to be true. That we, as humans, allow ourselves and others to test new technology on ourselves and each other is scary and amazing. I'm glad I finally read this book.

At the time I read this book, I was a premedical student (and I am now about to be a medical student!). I consider Patient H.M by Luke Dittrich to be an essential must-read for anyone interested in neurology. Patient H.M.
by Luke Dittrich is a fascinating look at the patient and history surrounding one of the most well-known case studies in neurology - a case study of a man who received a radical surgery, and lost the ability to form new memories.

As someone who is also interested in the doctors behind these medical case studies - why were these choices made? What is the historical context? How did the physician feel about the outcome? - this book was particularly interesting, as Dittrich is able to lend us perceptive on H.M's doctor - who is Dittrich's grandfather.

I highly enjoyed this book and recommend it to anyone who enjoys medical memoirs or case studies.

Read this book.
You need to learn about one of the most brutal medical mistakes of the 20th century.
The story of this particular patient shows the history of the practice of prefrontal lobotomy--slicing off part of the brain--to "cure" schizophrenia and other conditions, such as homosexuality, that were viewed as mental aberrations that warranted radical treaments.

This was a fascinating book! It really delves into the history of the lobotomy, what it was, what it was used for, and how it came to be viewed as time went on. The book also explained the progression of the field known as psychosurgery from its inception. The book focuses mostly on Patient H.M., the most well known test subject, but again, broadens out to other patients and case studies. Even though the material was detailed and factual, I found it easy to follow and understand.

All told, I enjoyed this book very much and highly recommend it.

5/5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for this reader's copy. In exchange, I am providing an honest review.

This was fascinating. Using Patient H.M. as the springboard for a deep dive into the history of lobotomies, Luke Dittrich has offered readers a very thorough look into the evolution of psychosurgery. In the process of his research, Dittrich discovers a family secret that makes a lot of sense of family history once known.

Why Patient H.M.? He passed away in 2008 and it was only then that his identity was revealed to the world. Henry Gustav Molaison was the most studied human in the world because of his brain. The short story is he was hit by a car as a kid and sustained a brain injury that caused him epileptic seizures which greatly affected his life as he had several a day. In 1953 W.B. Scoville offered to perform a lobotomy on him in the hopes it would cease the seizures. It didn't but what it did do is cause severe anterograde amnesia and moderate retrograde amnesia. Henry, dubbed Patient H.M. to protect his anonymity, became the focus of study for all of psychology until his death in 2008...and even then, his brain continued to be studied and still does to this day.

Dittrich has a connection, of sorts, to the story of Patient H.M. and the history of lobotomies. His grandfather was W.B. Scoville. That wasn't the secret Dittrich uncovered, however, that made sense of family history. The secret he uncovered had to do with his grandmother's experiences with mental illness. Spoiler Alert: Given what his grandfather did for a living, perhaps you can guess - as I did - what that secret was/is. But Dittrich cannot prove the heresy about what his grandfather did to his grandmother as there are no physical records confirming it. (For obvious reasons. That was a huge breach of ethics and morality to give your own wife a lobotomy.) Anyway, that wasn't the focus of the book at large.

Luke Dittrich took 6 years to write this book. He did due diligence in meeting with as many people as he could who have first-person knowledge of the early days of lobotomies and of working with people like his grandfather. He did deep research into the history of the brain and our fascination with it. He didn't try to frame his grandfather in a good light or protect any reputation that still exists for Scoville. Dittrich just simply told the story which included Scoville and happened to be his grandfather. What I'm saying is that Dittrich made it clear he had nothing to gain or lose by the story he crafted and put out there for the world to read. He's been criticized by MIT for his writing as it concerns Suzanne Corkin, a highly regarded neuroscientist who spent the bulk of her career on Patient H.M. After reading the book and the parts that include her part in the story of Patient H.M. and reading MIT's defense of her I'm Team Luke. His introduction of her into the larger story made me uneasy and as time progressed and by the end of Henry's life, it was clear Corkin was beyond interested in Patient H.M., she was obsessed in very unhealthy ways. It's a shame MIT supported that unhealthy attachment. As her mentor, Brenda Milner, said to Dittrich, it was time to move on from Patient H.M., there are other people and other avenues to explore. She had a healthy perspective of what Patient H.M. offered her personal career goals. It doesn't seem Corkin did. Anyway. That was a tangent.

As someone who is fascinated by the brain and its inner workings but will never go beyond the surface study of it, I loved this book because it gave me insight and knowledge. It also disgusted me as the whole trend of lobotomies was ultimately very damaging to individuals and families. It was used as a way to force women into "better behavior" and to treat people who had homosexual tendencies. Those are two groups of people against which lobotomy was used as a weapon. Disgusting.

Thanks to Luke Dittrich for the years of research and study he put into writing this very interesting and informative book.

I loved reading as I kid but struggle to find time as an adult. It’s often impossible to sit down to focus. While this book was not memorable overall, I’m sure it’s not you, dear book, it’s me.

Very informative and interesting book about someone wronged by the medical community. Similar to Henrietta Lacks and other non-fiction works.

This book contains some interesting information and the story itself and topics surrounding it are fascinating, but it was written in a very dry way that left me just skimming through the book after a while. I had high hopes for this book, but I wouldn't recommend it.

Fascinating book that is great for fans of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It's both emotional and scientific at the same time. I've never read a book quite like this one.

I found this really fascinating at first, but I put it aside and every time I went to pick it up again I couldn't get back into it. Perhaps it's me rather than the book, but I found it hard to be engaged with it.

The preview of this book got me hooked but the actual story was a snooze fest! It was repetitive, clinical and often rambled. It was more of a textbook than an enjoyable read. I rate this book a 1.8

Stunning story, the summary sounded like a movie plot, but the book was poignant in its portrayal. I was struck by the dignity of Patient H.M and how he made a good life for himself - in spite of devastating memory loss he had to endure.

When we see the brain injuries from our almost 2 decades of war, Patient H.M gave me some hope.

I am sorry that I never received this book and was not able to review it. My email was a tshanahan@85 kindle address but in 32 kindles in my name, none of them had that address. I don't know how I ever gave you that address. It was a ridiculous mistake.

I looked forward to reading this book and am sorry I missed it.

Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets
Luke Dittrich lets us in on the history of neuroscience, the inner workings of our brains, and his own family's interaction with one of the sadder cases of human guinea piggery you will read.

If you are at all interested in any of those subjects, you will likely enjoy this book. I received an advance copy through NetGalley, so it was not the finished product. That means I can't really speak to what the published book is like, but I hope they fixed a bit of what gave me trouble. See the spoiler section if you want to hear my complaints.

H.M. was Henry Molaison, a man suffering from severe seizures. In 1953, a surgery performed by the author's grandfather, the brilliant Dr. William Scoville, was intended to alleviate the problem. But it left Henry without the ability to form new long-term memories. This ruined his life, but gave doctors and scientist a remarkable insight into how our minds operate.


~~~~~SPOILER ALERT~~~~~
If you don't want to find out any of the "secrets" of the book, please scroll down past the random picture of someone holding a brain.

Alright, now that it's just us chickens, I will tell you that I was shocked by what I viewed as a huge oversight in the composition of this book. Up through the middle of the book, we hear a lot about how the author's grandmother had "issues". When her children were young, she did odd, inappropriate things and seemed to be deteriorating, becoming more erratic. But when the author knew her in his youth, she always seemed placid, but a bit detached. Now, this woman's husband was a brain surgeon, one who specialized in LOBOTOMIZING people who had issues very similar to his wife's. Often his patients had problems less severe than his wife's.

So I just assumed that gramps performed said surgery on his own wife in order to alleviate her strange behavior and that the author had even mentioned this somewhere along the way. Imagine my surprise and confusion when we are finally told toward the end of the book that hey, MAYYYYYBE Scoville lobotomized his own wife?! Well, duh. This was not a man overly concerned with the ill effects of his procedures, and anyone who has read the book up to that point would have no problem believing he would do such a thing.

This means that I was really shocked on two fronts. 1) Did Dittrich honestly not think that his readers wouldn't see the inevitable coming when he described his grandfather's controlling streak and the vastly changed behavior his grandmother exhibited over the years? 2) Did it honestly surprise Dittrich that this spouse-on-spouse lobotomy was a possibility?

Dittrich admits that despite searching for records of such a procedure, he was not able to find any. But for a man of Scoville's clout, it would not have been difficult to cut into his wife's skull off the books, even if he used the operating room where he normally worked and had multiple witnesses.





And if you do plan to read the book, I don't think that the spoiler section above will ruin it for you. In fact, maybe it would save you from the same confusion I felt.

Genre: Non-fiction
Rating out of 5 stars: 4

I read this book during a GR challenge. I would pick it up, read some, and then need to switch to another book that better fit the challenge. This was not the ideal way to read this book and in fairness, it probably had some impact on my rating. While the book had a lot of interesting facts about the history of lobotomy and mental health treatment over the past 150 years, it jumped around way too much and I found it difficult to follow. I did not care for the author's attempt to connect H.M.'s story with the history of the surgeon who performed his lobotomy (the surgeon was the author's grandfather). There were just too many other patients and other surgeons in the story and that along with the fact that the story was not linear, made it a slow, confusing read. Lots of readers did give 5 stars, so you may want to read it and judge for yourself. I would think it may hold more interest for someone in the medical field, but as for me I found it overly technical and just too slow. 2.5stars

The topic of this book thrilled me to no end; mental health practices, lobotomies, asylums, and what patients (specifically patient H.M.) went through.
The writing style, however, was severely lacking.
Do you have that one friend that manages to find an interesting topic, but then proceeds to mangle the delivery and talk about it to death? That friend could have wrote this.
There were asides to asides that didn't add anything to the narrative, repetitive information every new section, very little about Henry Molaison, which the book was titled after, and long, drawn out paragraphs about what Dittrich assumed what had happened.
It is a shame, since I really wanted to learn more about this fascinating topic. Unfortunately, I couldn't get into this book at all.

This book was quite difficult for me to read, with all of the discussion of eugenics, of eliminating "defectives" - in this case mental defectives. A discussion about the development of lobotomies in general, as well as their results, in making patients more compliant. These early lobotomies, and their predecessor, leucotomies, were done on patients who were fully awake, using a technique that sounds positively ghastly. The author's grandfather, the doctor who treated patient H.M., a eugenicist, was interested in learning more about neurology and neurosurgery by performing surgery and seeing what the results were - and at what cost.

This book does make me thankful that this sort of human experimentation is now illegal under international law. It's upsetting that we are still using these methods in modern treatments and education.

Read this book. cautiously. It contains a lot of historical information.

This is the second or third book I've read because of the topic being mentioned in The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons. I think I would have liked this more if I hadn't had previously read books similar to it. This non-fiction narrative intertwines the history of lobotomies with Dittrich's own neurosurgeon grandpa, his schizophrenic grandmother, and the post-lobotomized life of patient H.M

Every time I read one of these stories about how the medical field operated in the past (and probably in some ways still today) it shocks me. You'd think I'd be use to it by now, but hearing about how they used humans with mental illnesses and epilepsy and those who identified as homosexuals as guinea pigs appalled me. I know we learned a lot from it and we have to weigh the cost against the reward. (I will leave that up to the experts to decide if it was worth it.)

I do applaud Dittrich for seamlessly switching between each story line and bringing them all together to create an in depth look at neurosurgery.

In Patient H.M. the dissection of the evolution of brain science and surgery was well-written, so it was both informative and touching, though at times the unending introductions of scientists, surgeons and therapists weighing in on all the experimental procedures often became more tedious than moving. Yes, the story of poor H.M., the purported main character, quickly took a back seat to the story of The Lobotomy, which becomes the true main character of the book, and people, this story is NOT pretty.

By reading other reviews, I see people complaining that the author recounts historical events only a niche group of people will find compelling. I am happy to admit I am one of those people.