Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich Read Free Book Online Page B

human brain was so dauntingly complex that most of what we knew about it came from studying brains that
didn’t
work, brains whose infinite circuitry had been disrupted and whose basic functions had been stifled or altered in a variety of interesting ways.
    My grandfather held the guide ropes at either side of him and put one foot in front of the other. He must have felt proud. The bridge, even in its inchoate state, had already been extolled by
The New York Times
as a modern wonder of the world—“a symbol of man’s mastery over matter, not less convincing than Cheops’ pyramid itself”—and he had just conquered it. I imagine him, as he began his descent, freshly emboldened, ignoring the dark waters hundreds of feet below, ready to seize the opportunities that the world would soon tilt within his grasp.

FIVE
ARLINE
    T wo twenty-six, twenty-six.
    February 26, 1926.
    Henry’s birthday.
    There it was, right on his birth certificate. The certificate sat on a black velvet pedestal, inside a sealed rectangular box made of plexiglass. There were about a dozen other items on display, too: pictures, postcards, a pair of thick-lensed, thick-framed glasses, a Social Security card, a child’s drawing, a tiny silver crucifix. A sign on the display said, PERSONAL BELONGINGS OF H.M. and gave thanks to the scientist who had lent the items for use in this exhibit. The exhibit was in the lobby of a building on the edge of the campus of MIT, one of the universities where scientists had spent decades studying Henry.
    The largest photo in the display case was black-and-white, about eight and a half by eleven inches, and mounted in a chipped gold-painted wooden frame. It didn’t have any sort of identifying label, but it was clearly a class photo. The kids were maybe in second or third grade. Thirty-seven of them, almost evenly divided between boys and girls. The girls all wore dresses, the boys shirts and ties.
    I leaned in close and tried to spot him.
    —
    Between second and eighth grade, while the Molaison family lived in their light-housekeeping rooms in downtown Hartford, Henry attended St. Peter’s, a Catholic school near Colt Park, where that bicyclist sent him crashing to the ground. The scientists who studied Henry often asked him about his time at St. Peter’s, and he told them what he could.
    “It was set off from Main Street,” he said one afternoon in 1970, while sitting and smoking in an MIT laboratory, just a few blocks away from where that sampling of his personal relics would sit under plexiglass decades later. “Green grass in front of it. It was a brick building. Redbrick and white trim. White around the sill of the window. A basement and two stories…Had a window facing Main Street.”
    He remembered that there was so much noise from the traffic going by on Main Street that the nuns would often have to close those windows, and that at certain times of year this made things hot and stifling. They’d keep the classroom doors open so the air would circulate.
    “There’s one door who was forwards,” Henry said, “and there was another door down in the back of the room, and both were open. And a draft could go through. Or a breeze.”
    He remembered that some of the younger students were scared of the nuns because of the imposing habits they wore.
    “The black and the white,” he said.
    “Were
you
scared?” a scientist asked.
    “No.”
    He told them that he’d been born a lefty but one of the nuns made him learn to write with his right hand.
    “They changed me over,” he said. “And my writing’s never been good. But plain in a way…The sister…she was very…uh, wanted everyone to write one way.”
    “Did you complain about that?” the scientist asked.
    He hadn’t.
    “Do you remember any of the kids? Any of the other children in the class?”
    “Well,” he said. “I think of one right off. I graduated with her. Her father was a cop at the time and went to become chief of police. And her