Man Who MIstook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks Read Free Book Online Page B

school and engaged to a girl from Oregon. In fact
       *In his fascinating oral history The Good War (1985) Studs Terkel transcribes countless stories of men and women, especially fighting men, who felt World War II was intensely real-by far the most real and significant time of their lives-everything since as pallid in comparison. Such men tend to dwell on the war and to relive its battles, comradeship, moral certainties and intensity. But this dwelling on the past and relative hebetude towards the present-this emotional dulling of current feeling and memory-is nothing like Jimmie's organic amnesia. 1 recently had occasion to discuss the question with Terkel: 'I've met thousands of men,' he told me, 'who feel they've just been "marking time" since '45-but I never met anyone for whom time terminated, like your amnesiac Jimmie.'
       he had married the girl from Oregon, had become a father and grandfather, and been a practising accountant for thirty years.
       Where we had hoped for an abundance of information and feeling from his brother, we received a courteous but somewhat meagre letter. It was obvious from reading this-especially reading between the lines-that the brothers had scarcely seen each other since 1943, and gone separate ways, partly through the vicissitudes of location and profession, and partly through deep (though not estranging) differences of temperament. Jimmie, it seemed, had never 'settled down', was 'happy-go-lucky', and 'always a drinker'. The navy, his brother felt, provided a structure, a life, and the real problems started when he left it, in 1965. Without his habitual structure and anchor Jimmie had ceased to work, 'gone to pieces,' and started to drink heavily. There had been some memory impairment, of the Korsakov type, in the middle and especially the late Sixties, but not so severe that Jimmie couldn't 'cope' in his nonchalant fashion. But his drinking grew heavier in 1970.
       Around Christmas of that year, his brother understood, he had suddenly 'blown his top' and become deliriously excited and confused, and it was at this point he had been taken into Bellevue. During the next month, the excitement and delirium died down, but he was left with deep and bizarre memory lapses, or 'deficits,' to use the medical jargon. His brother had visited him at this time-they had not met for twenty years-and, to his horror, Jimmie not only failed to recognise him, but said, 'Stop joking! You're old enough to be my father. My brother's a young man, just going through accountancy school.'
       When I received this information, I was more perplexed still: why did Jimmie not remember his later years in the navy, why did he not recall and organise his memories until 1970? I had not heard then that such patients might have a retrograde amnesia (see Postscript). 'I wonder, increasingly,' I wrote at this time, 'whether there is not an element of hysterical or fugal amnesia-whether he is not in flight from something too awful to recall', and I suggested he be seen by our psychiatrist. Her report was searching and detailed-the examination had included a sodium amytal test, calculated to 'release' any memories which might be repressed.
       She also attempted to hypnotize Jimmie, in the hope of eliciting memories repressed by hysteria-this tends to work well in cases of hysterical amnesia. But it failed because Jimmie could not be hypnotized, not because of any 'resistance,' but because of his extreme amnesia, which caused him to lose track of what the hypnotist was saying. (Dr M. Homonoff, who worked on the amnesia ward at the Boston Veterans Administration hospital, tells me of similar experiences-and of his feeling that this is absolutely characteristic of patients with Korsakov's, as opposed to patients with hysterical amnesia.)
       'I have no feeling or evidence,' the psychiatrist wrote, 'of any hysterical or "put-on" deficit. He lacks both the means and the motive to make a facade. His memory