case study of hm

Henry Gustav Molaison: The Curious Case of Patient H.M. 

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Henry Gustav Molaison, known as Patient H.M., is a landmark case study in psychology. After a surgery to alleviate severe epilepsy, which removed large portions of his hippocampus , he was left with anterograde amnesia , unable to form new explicit memories , thus offering crucial insights into the role of the hippocampus in memory formation.

• Henry Gustav Molaison (often referred to as H.M.) is a famous case of anterograde and retrograde amnesia in psychology.
• H. M. underwent brain surgery to remove his hippocampus and amygdala to control his seizures. As a result of his surgery, H.M.’s seizures decreased, but he could no longer form new memories or remember the prior 11 years of his life.
• He lost his ability to form many types of new memories (anterograde amnesia), such as new facts or faces, and the surgery also caused retrograde amnesia as he was able to recall childhood events but lost the ability to recall experiences a few years before his surgery.
• The case of H.M. and his life-long participation in studies gave researchers valuable insight into how memory functions and is organized in the brain. He is considered one of the most studied medical and psychological history cases.

Who is H.M.?

Henry Gustav Molaison, or “H.M” as he is commonly referred to by psychology and neuroscience textbooks, lost his memory on an operating table in 1953.

For years before his neurosurgery, H.M. suffered from epileptic seizures believed to be caused by a bicycle accident that occurred in his childhood. The seizures started out as minor at age ten, but they developed in severity when H.M. was a teenager.

Continuing to worsen in severity throughout his young adulthood, H.M. was eventually too disabled to work. Throughout this period, treatments continued to turn out unsuccessful, and epilepsy proved a major handicap and strain on H.M.’s quality of life.

And so, at age 27, H.M. agreed to undergo a radical surgery that would involve removing a part of his brain called the hippocampus — the region believed to be the source of his epileptic seizures (Squire, 2009).

For epilepsy patients, brain resection surgery refers to removing small portions of brain tissue responsible for causing seizures. Although resection is still a surgical procedure used today to treat epilepsy, the use of lasers and detailed brain scans help ensure valuable brain regions are not impacted.

In 1953, H.M.’s neurosurgeon did not have these tools, nor was he or the rest of the scientific or medical community fully aware of the true function of the hippocampus and its specific role in memory. In one regard, the surgery was successful, as H.M. did, in fact, experience fewer seizures.

However, family and doctors soon noticed he also suffered from severe amnesia, which persisted well past when he should have recovered. In addition to struggling to remember the years leading up to his surgery, H.M. also had gaps in his memory of the 11 years prior.

Furthermore, he lacked the ability to form new memories — causing him to perpetually live an existence of moment-to-moment forgetfulness for decades to come.

In one famous quote, he famously and somberly described his state as “like waking from a dream…. every day is alone in itself” (Squire et al., 2009).

H.M. soon became a major case study of interest for psychologists and neuroscientists who studied his memory deficits and cognitive abilities to better understand the hippocampus and its function.

When H.M. died on December 2, 2008, at the age of 82, he left behind a lifelong legacy of scientific contribution.

Surgical Procedure

Neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville performed H.M.’s surgery in Hartford, Connecticut, in August 1953 when H.M. was 27 years old.

During the procedure, Scoville removed parts of H.M.’s temporal lobe which refers to the portion of the brain that sits behind both ears and is associated with auditory and memory processing.

More specifically, the surgery involved what was called a “partial medial temporal lobe resection” (Scoville & Milner, 1957). In this resection, Scoville removed 8 cm of brain tissue from the hippocampus — a seahorse-shaped structure located deep in the temporal lobe .

Bilateral resection of the anterior temporal lobe in patient HM.

Further research conducted after this removal showed Scoville also probably destroyed the brain structures known as the “uncus” (theorized to play a role in the sense of smell and forming new memories) and the “amygdala” (theorized to play a crucial role in controlling our emotional responses such as fear and sadness).

As previously mentioned, the removal surgery partially reduced H.M.’s seizures; however, he also lost the ability to form new memories.

At the time, Scoville’s experimental procedure had previously only been performed on patients with psychosis, so H.M. was the first epileptic patient and showed no sign of mental illness. In the original case study of H.M., which is discussed in further detail below, nine of Scoville’s patients from this experimental surgery were described.

However, because these patients had disorders such as schizophrenia, their symptoms were not removed after surgery.

In this regard, H.M. was the only patient with “clean” amnesia along with no other apparent mental problems.

H.M’s Amnesia

H.M.’s apparent amnesia after waking from surgery presented in multiple forms. For starters, H.M. suffered from retrograde amnesia for the 11-year period prior to his surgery.

Retrograde describes amnesia, where you can’t recall memories that were formed before the event that caused the amnesia. Important to note, current research theorizes that H.M.’s retrograde amnesia was not actually caused by the loss of his hippocampus, but rather from a combination of antiepileptic drugs and frequent seizures prior to his surgery (Shrader 2012).

In contrast, H.M.’s inability to form new memories after his operation, known as anterograde amnesia, was the result of the loss of the hippocampus.

This meant that H.M. could not learn new words, facts, or faces after his surgery, and he would even forget who he was talking to the moment he walked away.

However, H.M. could perform tasks, and he could even perform those tasks easier after practice. This important finding represented a major scientific discovery when it comes to memory and the hippocampus. The memory that H.M. was missing in his life included the recall of facts, life events, and other experiences.

This type of long-term memory is referred to as “explicit” or “ declarative ” memories and they require conscious thinking.

In contrast, H.M.’s ability to improve in tasks after practice (even if he didn’t recall that practice) showed his “implicit” or “ procedural ” memory remained intact (Scoville & Milner, 1957). This type of long-term memory is unconscious, and examples include riding a bike, brushing your teeth, or typing on a keyboard.

Most importantly, after removing his hippocampus, H.M. lost his explicit memory but not his implicit memory — establishing that implicit memory must be controlled by some other area of the brain and not the hippocampus.

After the severity of the side effects of H.M.’s operation became clear, H.M. was referred to neurosurgeon Dr. Wilder Penfield and neuropsychologist Dr. Brenda Milner of Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) for further testing.

As discussed, H.M. was not the only patient who underwent this experimental surgery, but he was the only non-psychotic patient with such a degree of memory impairment. As a result, he became a major study and interest for Milner and the rest of the scientific community.

Since Penfield and Milner had already been conducting memory experiments on other patients at the time, they quickly realized H.M.’s “dense amnesia, intact intelligence, and precise neurosurgical lesions made him a perfect experimental subject” (Shrader 2012).

Milner continued to conduct cognitive testing on H.M. for the next fifty years, primarily at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her longitudinal case study of H.M.’s amnesia quickly became a sensation and is still one of the most widely-cited psychology studies.

In publishing her work, she protected Henry’s identity by first referring to him as the patient H.M. (Shrader 2012).

In the famous “star tracing task,” Milner tested if H.M.’s procedural memory was affected by the removal of the hippocampus during surgery.

In this task, H.M. had to trace an outline of a star, but he could only trace the star based on the mirrored reflection. H.M. then repeated this task once a day over a period of multiple days.

Over the course of these multiple days, Milner observed that H.M. performed the test faster and with fewer errors after continued practice. Although each time he performed the task, he had no memory of having participated in the task before, his performance improved immensely (Shrader 2012).

As this task showed, H.M. had lost his declarative/explicit memory, but his unconscious procedural/implicit memory remained intact.

Given the damage to his hippocampus in surgery, researchers concluded from tasks such as these that the hippocampus must play a role in declarative but not procedural memory.

Therefore, procedural memory must be localized somewhere else in the brain and not in the hippocampus.

H.M’s Legacy

Milner’s and hundreds of other researchers’ work with H.M. established fundamental principles about how memory functions and is organized in the brain.

Without the contribution of H.M. in volunteering the study of his mind to science, our knowledge today regarding the separation of memory function in the brain would certainly not be as strong.

Until H.M.’s watershed surgery, it was not known that the hippocampus was essential for making memories and that if we lost this valuable part of our brain, we would be forced to live only in the moment-to-moment constraints of our short-term memory .

Once this was realized, the findings regarding H.M. were widely publicized so that this operation to remove the hippocampus would never be done again (Shrader 2012).

H.M.’s case study represents a historical time period for neuroscience in which most brain research and findings were the result of brain dissections, lesioning certain sections, and seeing how different experimental procedures impacted different patients.

Therefore, it is paramount we recognize the contribution of patients like H.M., who underwent these dangerous operations in the mid-twentieth century and then went on to allow researchers to study them for the rest of their lives.

Even after his death, H.M. donated his brain to science. Researchers then took his unique brain, froze it, and then in a 53-hour procedure, sliced it into 2,401 slices which were then individually photographed and digitized as a three-dimensional map.

Through this map, H.M.’s brain could be preserved for posterity (Wb et al., 2014). As neuroscience researcher Suzanne Corkin once said it best, “H.M. was a pleasant, engaging, docile man with a keen sense of humor, who knew he had a poor memory but accepted his fate.

There was a man behind the data. Henry often told me that he hoped that research into his condition would help others live better lives. He would have been proud to know how much his tragedy has benefitted science and medicine” (Corkin, 2014).

Corkin, S. (2014). Permanent present tense: The man with no memory and what he taught the world. Penguin Books.

Hardt, O., Einarsson, E. Ö., & Nader, K. (2010). A bridge over troubled water: Reconsolidation as a link between cognitive and neuroscientific memory research traditions. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 141–167.

Scoville, W. B., & Milner, B. (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions . Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry, 20 (1), 11.

Shrader, J. (2012, January). HM, the man with no memory | Psychology Today. Retrieved from, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trouble-in-mind/201201/hm-the-man-no-memory

Squire, L. R. (2009). The legacy of patient H. M. for neuroscience . Neuron, 61 , 6–9.

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Key Study: HM’s case study (Milner and Scoville, 1957)

Travis Dixon January 29, 2019 Biological Psychology , Cognitive Psychology , Key Studies

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HM’s case study is one of the most famous and important case studies in psychology, especially in cognitive psychology. It was the source of groundbreaking new knowledge on the role of the hippocampus in memory. 

Background Info

“Localization of function in the brain” means that different parts of the brain have different functions. Researchers have discovered this from over 100 years of research into the ways the brain works. One such study was Milner’s case study on Henry Molaison.

The memory problems that HM experienced after the removal of his hippocampus provided new knowledge on the role of the hippocampus in memory formation (image: wikicommons)

At the time of the first study by Milner, HM was 29 years old. He was a mechanic who had suffered from minor epileptic seizures from when he was ten years old and began suffering severe seizures as a teenager. These may have been a result of a bike accident when he was nine. His seizures were getting worse in severity, which resulted in HM being unable to work. Treatment for his epilepsy had been unsuccessful, so at the age of 27 HM (and his family) agreed to undergo a radical surgery that would remove a part of his brain called the hippocampus . Previous research suggested that this could help reduce his seizures, but the impact it had on his memory was unexpected. The Doctor performing the radical surgery believed it was justified because of the seriousness of his seizures and the failures of other methods to treat them.

Methods and Results

In one regard, the surgery was successful as it resulted in HM experiencing less seizures. However, immediately after the surgery, the hospital staff and HM’s family noticed that he was suffering from anterograde amnesia (an inability to form new memories after the time of damage to the brain):

Here are some examples of his memory loss described in the case study:

• He could remember something if he concentrated on it, but if he broke his concentration it was lost.
• After the surgery the family moved houses. They stayed on the same street, but a few blocks away. The family noticed that HM as incapable of remembering the new address, but could remember the old one perfectly well. He could also not find his way home alone.
• He could not find objects around the house, even if they never changed locations and he had used them recently. His mother had to always show him where the lawnmower was in the garage.
• He would do the same jigsaw puzzles or read the same magazines every day, without ever apparently getting bored and realising he had read them before. (HM loved to do crossword puzzles and thought they helped him to remember words).
• He once ate lunch in front of Milner but 30 minutes later was unable to say what he had eaten, or remember even eating any lunch at all.
• When interviewed almost two years after the surgery in 1955, HM gave the date as 1953 and said his age was 27. He talked constantly about events from his childhood and could not remember details of his surgery.

Later testing also showed that he had suffered some partial retrograde amnesia (an inability to recall memories from before the time of damage to the brain). For instance, he could not remember that one of his favourite uncles passed away three years prior to his surgery or any of his time spent in hospital for his surgery. He could, however, remember some unimportant events that occurred just before his admission to the hospital.

Brenda Milner studied HM for almost 50 years – but he never remembered her.

Results continued…

His memories from events prior to 1950 (three years before his surgery), however, were fine. There was also no observable difference to his personality or to his intelligence. In fact, he scored 112 points on his IQ after the surgery, compared with 104 previously. The IQ test suggested that his ability in arithmetic had apparently improved. It seemed that the only behaviour that was affected by the removal of the hippocampus was his memory. HM was described as a kind and gentle person and this did not change after his surgery.

The Star Tracing Task

In a follow up study, Milner designed a task that would test whether or not HMs procedural memory had been affected by the surgery. He was to trace an outline of a star, but he could only see the mirrored reflection. He did this once a day over a period of a few days and Milner observed that he became faster and faster. Each time he performed the task he had no memory of ever having done it before, but his performance kept improving. This is further evidence for localization of function – the hippocampus must play a role in declarative (explicit) memory but not procedural (implicit) memory.

Cognitive psychologists have categorized memories into different types. HM’s study suggests that the hippocampus is essential for explicit (conscious) and declarative memory, but not implicit (unconscious) procedural memory.

Was his memory 100% gone? Another follow-up study

Interestingly, HM showed signs of being able to remember famous people who had only become famous after his surgery, like Lee Harvey Oswald (who assassinated JFK in 1963). (Image: wikicommons)

Another fascinating follow-up study was conducted by two researchers who wanted to see if HM had learned anything about celebrities that became famous after his surgery. At first they tested his knowledge of celebrities from before his surgery, and he knew these just as well as controls. They then showed him two names at a time, one a famous name (e.g. Liza Minelli, Lee Harvey Oswald) and the other was a name randomly taken from the phonebook. He was asked to choose the famous name and he was correct on a significant number of trials (i.e. the statistics tests suggest he wasn’t just guessing). Even more incredible was that he remembered some details about these people when asked why they were famous. For example, he could remember that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated the president. One explanation given for the memory of these facts is that there was an emotional component. E.g. He liked these people, or the assassination was so violent, that he could remember a few details. 

HM became a hugely important case study for neuro and cognitive Psychologists. He was interviewed and tested by over 100 psychologists during the 53 years after his operation. Directly after his surgery, he lived at home with his parents as he was unable to live independently. He moved to a nursing home in 1980 and stayed there until his death in 2008. HM donated his brain to science and it was sliced into 2,401 thin slices that will be scanned and published electronically.

Critical Thinking Considerations

• How does this case study demonstrate localization of function in the brain? (e.g.c reating new long-term memories; procedural memories; storing and retrieving long term memories; intelligence; personality) ( Application )
• What are the ethical considerations involved in this study? ( Analysis )
• What are the strengths and limitations of this case study? ( Evaluation )
• Why would ongoing studies of HM be important? (Think about memory, neuroplasticity and neurogenesis) ( Analysis/Synthesis/Evaluation )
• How can findings from this case study be used to support and/or challenge the Multi-store Model of Memory? ( Application / Synthesis/Evaluation )

Exam Tips This study can be used for the following topics: Localization – the role of the hippocampus in memory Techniques to study the brain – MRI has been used to find out the exact location and size of damage to HM’s brain Bio and cognitive approach research method s – case study Bio and cognitive approach ethical considerations – anonymity Emotion and cognition – the follow-up study on HM and memories of famous people could be used in an essay to support the idea that emotion affects memory Models of memory – the multi-store model : HM’s study provides evidence for the fact that our memories all aren’t formed and stored in one place but travel from store to store (because his transfer from STS to LTS was damaged – if it was all in one store this specific problem would not occur)

Milner, Brenda. Scoville, William Beecher. “Loss of Recent Memory after Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions”. The Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. 1957; 20: 11 21. (Accessed from web.mit.edu )

The man who couldn’t remember”. nova science now. an interview with brenda corkin . 06.01.2009.       .

  Here’s a good video recreation documentary of HM’s case study…

Travis Dixon is an IB Psychology teacher, author, workshop leader, examiner and IA moderator.

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The Curious Case of Patient H.M.

• Reviewed 28 Aug 2018
• Author Deborah Halber
• Source BrainFacts/SfN

On September 1, 1953, time stopped for Henry Molaison. For roughly 10 years, the 27-year-old had suffered severe seizures. By 1953, they were so debilitating he could no longer hold down his job as a motor winder on an assembly line. On September 1, Molaison allowed surgeons to remove a thumb-sized section of tissue from each side of his brain. It was an experimental procedure that he and his surgeons hoped would quell the seizures wracking his brain.

And, it worked. The seizures abated, but afterwards Molaison was left with permanent amnesia. He could remember some things — scenes from his childhood, some facts about his parents, and historical events that occurred before his surgery — but he was unable to form new memories. If he met someone who then left the room, within minutes he had no recollection of the person or their meeting.

What was a tragedy for Molaison led to one of the most significant turning points in 20th century brain science: the understanding that complex functions such as learning and memory are tied to discrete regions of the brain.

In 1955, scientists William Beecher Scoville and Brenda Milner began studying Molaison — referred to as H.M. to protect his privacy — and nine other patients who had undergone similar surgery. Only patients who had specific portions of their medial temporal lobes removed experienced memory problems. And, the more tissue removed, the more severe the memory impairment. The researchers noted patients’ amnesia was “curiously specific to the domain of recent memory.”

Scoville and Milner’s observations pointed to a particular structure within the medial temporal lobe that was necessary for normal memory — the hippocampus. Over the next five decades, neuroscientists studying Molaison learned that the hippocampus and adjacent regions transform our transient perceptions and awareness into memories that can last a lifetime.

For Molaison, this transformation could no longer take place. He experienced every aspect of his daily life — eating a meal, taking a walk — as a first. Yet his intellect, personality, and perception were intact, and he was able to acquire new motor skills. Over time, he became more proficient at tasks such as tracing patterns while watching his hand movements in a mirror, despite the fact that he could never recall performing the task before.

Studies of Molaison paved the way for further exploration of the brain networks encoding conscious and unconscious memories. Even after his death in 2008 at the age of 82, neuroscientists continue to learn from him.

This article was adapted from the 8th edition of Brain Facts by Deborah Halber.

About the Author

Deborah Halber

Deborah Halber is a Boston-based author, science writer and journalist. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Time.com, The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, Boston magazine, and university publications.

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Study Notes

Scoville and Milner (1957)

Last updated 22 Mar 2021

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Effect of hippocampal damage on memory.

Background information: Scoville performed experimental surgery on H.M.’s brain to stop the severe epileptic seizures he had been suffering since a fall off his bicycle many years previously. Specifically, he removed parts of HM's temporal lobes (part of his hippocampus along with it). The seizures reduced drastically but H.M. suffered from amnesia for the rest of his life. Milner, who was a PhD student of Scoville’s, followed up the surgery with cognitive testing for fifty years after the original operation. Hers is a cognitive longitudinal case study of H.M.’s anterograde (after the surgery) and partial retrograde (before the surgery) amnesia. The biological part of the H.M. study is the correlation between the brain damage and the amnesia, which was assumed in the 1950s, and not verified until later brain scans in the 1990s (see Corkin, 1997)

Aim: In 1953 Scoville performed surgery on the then 27-year-old H.M. to cure him of his epileptic seizures. [Note: this is a surgical procedure – it only became a study later when the memory damage was noted].

Method: The surgery involved what was called a partial medial temporal lobe resection. Scoville removed 8 cm of brain tissue from the anterior two thirds of the hippocampus, and believed he “probably destroyed …. the uncus and amygdala” as well (Scoville and Milner, 1957). Once the extent of the memory loss was realised, Scoville and Milner wrote about this, along with the results from this type of surgery on nine other patients, in a prominent neurosurgical journal, and Milner started her cognitive studying of H.M.

Results: H.M. lost the ability to form new memories. This is called anterograde amnesia. He could do a task, and even comment that it seemed easier than he expected, without realising that he had done it hundreds of times before. His anterograde procedural memory was totally affected. He also lost his memory for events that had happened after his surgery: he could not remember moving house, nor that he had eaten a meal thirty minutes previously. He had also suffered some retrograde amnesia of events preceding the surgery, such as the death of his uncle three years before. However, his early childhood memories remained intact. His intelligence also remained as before, at slightly above average.

Conclusion: The surgery to remove part of the hippocampus, the uncus and the amygdala resulted in total anterograde amnesia and partial retrograde amnesia.

Evaluation:

This is the assumption, based on the results with other patients as well as H.M. In the absence at that time of brain-scanning equipment, other possibilities were also present. The high doses of anti-epileptic drug he was taking before, and the lower doses after the surgery, may have resulted in some memory loss. Also, so far as we can see, no memory tests were conducted on H.M. before the surgery, and the initial memory loss was largely reported by his mother, with whom he lived.

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Article Contents

Influential case studies, psychosurgery and asylums, temporal lobectomy, controversy, author notes.

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Remembering H.M.: Review of “PATIENT H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets”

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David W. Loring, Bruce Hermann, Remembering H.M.: Review of “PATIENT H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets”, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology , Volume 32, Issue 4, June 2017, Pages 501–505, https://doi.org/10.1093/arclin/acx041

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Although many influential case reports in neuropsychology exist ( Code, Wallesch, Joanette, & Lecours, 1996 ), there are certain patients who stand out because, based upon the historical zeitgeist in which their brain injuries occurred and the attention that those cases received, their neurobehavioral deficits and circumstances of their injury greatly altered our knowledge of brain-behavior relationships.

Among the most famous of these cases is Phineas Gage, the railroad foreman whose personality dramatically changed following frontal lobe injury in 1848 from an accidental explosion that thrust his tamping iron through his skull. Gage's survival after such a serious injury was a surprise, but Gage's contribution to clinical neuroscience was his significant personality change, aptly described by his physicians with the pithy observation, “Gage was no longer Gage” ( Macmillan, 2000 ). Although his personality changes were well documented soon after the accident, much of Gage's long-term outcome may have been exaggerated for entertainment value ( Macmillan & Lena, 2010 ). Thus, the lasting neurobehavioral effects of Gage's frontal lobe injury and how the deficits may have evolved over time remain clouded in the historical record due to the absence independent scientific characterization.

The second patient is Louis Victor Leborgne, whose expressive language disturbance from a left frontal lobe lesion was described in 1861 by the famous French neurologist Pierre Paul Broca. Monsieur Tan, as he was informally called because “tan tan” was his typical verbal output, retained his capacity to understand commands. The deficits of Monsieur Tan, supported by subsequent cases, demonstrated that language could be fractionated into different components associated with distinct brain regions, and that language was predominately a function of the left brain. Monsieur Tan's contribution, however, was in no small part due to Broca's distinguished reputation as a physician and scientist since localized language effects had been previously described by Jean-Baptiste Bouillard ( Sondhaus & Finger, 1988 ).

The third and most studied of these three cases is patient Henry Molaison (H.M.). H.M. suffered a dense and persistent anterograde amnesia following bilateral medial temporal lobectomy in 1953 to treat intractable epilepsy ( Scoville & Milner, 1957 ). His scientific fame derives from the dramatic demonstration of the critical role that the mesial temporal lobe structures play in learning and memory. Unlike Gage and Monsieur Tan, H.M.’s brain injury was iatrogenic, being an unanticipated adverse event associated with the surgical treatment of his epilepsy. Another important difference is that H.M.’s surgery injury occurred in what can broadly be considered to be the beginning of the modern era of neuroscience ( Shepherd, 2010 ). Thus, his cognitive abilities were subjected to formal characterization with extensive neuropsychological testing over five decades, providing a much richer characterization of his clinical semiology compared to Gage or Monsieur Tan.

H.M.’s amnesia framed how the neuroscience community would eventually conceptualize basic memory mechanisms, beginning with Brenda Milner's early demonstration that multiple memory systems exist such that declarative and procedural memory are readily dissociable ( Milner, 1965 ). Clinically, H.M.’s amnesia meaningfully influenced pre-operative epilepsy surgery protocols across the world. After several additional cases of post-surgical amnesia developed following unilateral temporal lobectomy, it was hypothesized that the functional reserve of the contralateral temporal lobe was insufficient to support the encoding of new memories following resection of the epileptogenic temporal lobe and mesial structures, and multiple methods for characterizing functional hippocampus status were developed ( Milner, 1975 ). What remains poorly reported in standard textbooks, however, is the historical context in which the decision to undergo epilepsy surgery was made, the blurring between experimental clinical techniques and informed consent, and the profound effects on H.M.’s quality of life.

To provide this broad historical context of H.M., Luke Dittrich has published PATIENT H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets ( Dittrich, 2016a ). This is far from a narrative review of H.M.’s contributions to understanding memory, and it is also not a typical biography. However, as the grandson of William Beecher Scoville, MD, the neurosurgeon who performed H.M.’s operation and a prolific practitioner of psychosurgery, Dittrich provides a unique “insider” perspective and captivating description of that era's medical zeitgeist that could not be easily achieved without such a personal relationship. In fact, much of the book does not directly involve H.M.’s life story, but rather, the management of significant psychiatric disease prior to the development of neuroleptics.

Scoville's neurosurgical practice primarily involved surgery for psychiatric indications rather than epilepsy surgery. The early development of psychosurgery's goals is exemplified with a quote from the 19th century physician Dr. Gottleib Burckhardt, who resected undifferentiated brain areas, that illustrates the depersonalization of patients with psychiatric disease: “Mrs. B. has changed from a dangerous and excited demented person to a quiet demented one” (p. 79). It was in late 1935, after listening to the report of operations on two chimpanzees, that Egas Moniz oversaw the first in his series of approximately 20 frontal leucotomies/lobotomies. This series significantly influenced Walter Freeman (neurologist) and James Watts (neurosurgeon) who initially worked together performing prefrontal lobotomies. The distinct approaches to frontal lobotomy developed by Scoville and Freeman also provide a striking contrast in how to best decrease the institutional burden of psychiatric disease. Although Scoville is described as an adventurer who liked expensive sports cars, he was a meticulous neurosurgeon with painstaking preparation before and during all surgical cases. Freeman's enthusiastic efforts to expand the use of frontal lobotomy was reflected by his technique in which an ice pick, inserted through the orbital sockets to a depth of approximately 3 inches, was moved back and forth for frontal disconnection before repeating the procedure on the opposite side. As practiced by Freeman, frontal lobotomy required approximately 15 min to complete, could be performed without a surgeon or an operating room, and multiple procedures could be easily performed in a single day. “Any reasonably competent psychiatrist (could be trained) to perform the ice-pick lobotomy in an afternoon” (p. 151). One can go elsewhere for the complete story of Freeman, his activities and their aftermath, which has been covered by others including the exquisite text by Elliot Valenstein (1986) .

Dittrich's concerns regarding psychiatric therapies during this era are not limited to psychosurgery. His grandmother, Scoville's wife, experienced a breakdown sometime after their marriage, suffered a brittle psychiatric course, and was institutionalized at the Hartford Institute of Living while her husband was director of neurosurgery there and was performing lobotomies at both the Institute of Living and Hartford Hospital. A variety of harsh non-surgical but unproven psychiatric treatments were used that included: (1) Continuous hydrotherapy in which patients were submerged in a tub with only their heads protruding through a small aperture. (2) Pyrotherapy in which patients were placed in a small copper coffin appearing device that, over a repeated treatment period of days, would elevate core temperatures to 105–106 °C. (3) Electric Shock Therapy. In response to patients’ fears about these therapies, treatment names were changed. “Since these treatments produce states of unconsciousness akin to normal slumber … we are adopting the names that are more truly descriptive of these treatments—INSULIN, METRAZOL, and ELECTRIC SLEEP” (p. 73). Karl Pribram, who was head of research at the Institute of Living at that time, claimed that Scoville had performed a frontal leucotomy on his wife, although Dittrich could not independently substantiate that assertion.

A recurring theme throughout PATIENT HM is the concept embodied by the Hippocratic Oath of “ primum non nocer ” (first, do no harm) as it contrasts with “ melius anceps remedium quam nullum” (it is better to do something than nothing). The tension between these approaches lies at the foundation of modern informed consent in which risks and benefits are carefully weighed as part of the decision-making processes prior to treatment initiation or when deciding to participate in clinical research. Informed consent discussion is not restricted to psychosurgery, shock therapies, or H.M. The rationale for informed consent includes the development of surgical treatment for vesicovaginal fistula by J. Marion Sims during the mid-19th century that was conducted on his slaves prior to application to white women, to the U.S. Public Health Service Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment in the 1930s, and the history of the Doctors Trial at Nuremberg after World War II resulting in the Nuremberg Code.

Scoville was a practitioner of psychosurgery rather than epilepsy surgery, and prior to H.M.’s surgery, Scoville had performed multiple bilateral temporal lobectomies for psychiatric indications. Although he describes H.M.’s surgery as an “experimental operation,” he also states that the procedure was considered due to H.M.’s seizure frequency and severity despite adequate medical therapy, and that surgery was “carried out with the understanding and approval of the patient and his family” ( Scoville & Milner, 1957 ).

By the time of H.M.’s surgery in 1953, the first reported series of temporal lobectomies for epilepsy had been published from the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) ( Penfield & Flanigin, 1950 ). Dittrich describes the important contributions of Wilder Penfield in epilepsy surgery development that ranged from identification of motor and sensory homunculi to how Penfield established a multidisciplinary and state of the art institute by including neurology, electrophysiology, and neuropsychology colleagues. It was in this context that Penfield hired Brenda Milner. A brief biography of Milner's early life is presented in which she designed psychological aptitude tests at Cambridge University during World War II before moving to Montreal and enrolling at McGill University as a graduate student of Donald Hebb.

Although H.M.’s surgery was not performed at the MNI, Milner's neuropsychological testing of epilepsy surgery patients at the MNI made her arguably the most appropriate individual to characterize H.M.’s memory impairment. The first formal scientific presentation of H.M.’s amnesia was published in 1957 by Scoville and Milner although his “very grave, recent memory loss” was described in 1953 at a meeting of the Harvey Cushing Society ( Scoville, 1954 ). However, the 1957 report also contains formal testing on additional temporal lobectomies performed on “seriously ill schizophrenic patients who had failed to respond to other forms of treatment” (p. 11), two of whom also developed significant amnesia following bitemporal resection. Orbital undercutting was extended to include the medial temporal lobes in the “hope that still greater psychiatric benefit might be obtained” (p. 11). The significant psychiatric disease of these patients decreased clinical awareness of memory change without Milner's formal testing given that “the psychotic patients were for the most part too disturbed before operation for finer testing of higher mental functions to be carried out” (p. 12). Thus, the extent of the memory impairment was unknown due to the significant overlaying psychiatric disease in the non-epilepsy patients on whom Dr. Scoville had performed bitemporal resection prior to H.M.

Scoville was sufficiently enthusiastic about the procedure to travel to teach other surgeons the technique. Interesting is mention of Scoville's trip to Manteno State Hospital, an extremely large psychiatric facility located south of Chicago in Manteno, Illinois. Here faculty from the University of Illinois were performing anterior temporal lobectomies that included hippocampal resection, something not undertaken by Percival Bailey in his series in Chicago. Dittrich mentions another severely amnestic case (D.C.) as an outcome of Scoville's surgery at Mantero, a physician from Chicago with a premorbid IQ of 122. He was evaluated postoperatively with the resulting amnesia, comparable to H.M., confirmed by Brenda Milner. This case was apparently very unsettling to Scoville.

It is impossible to review PATIENT HM without consideration of outside events that occurred after its publication. The New York Times Magazine published a book excerpt on August 3, 2016, beginning with interviews with H.M. illustrating the magnitude and severity of his memory impairment, briefly discussing post-mortem brain ownership disagreements between the University of California at San Diego and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presenting background material on the tension between research groups surrounding manuscript preparation describing an previously unknown lesion in H.M.’s frontal lobe that was detected at autopsy, and discussing how H.M.’s court-appointed guardian was identified. The excerpt concludes with interview quotations from Dr. Suzanne Corkin, who was the principal investigator of H.M.’s amnesia since 1977 following the death of Hans-Lukas Teuber. Again, in an interesting personal twist, Corkin lived across the street from the Scovilles, and was one of Dittrich's mother's best friends during their childhood and adolescence.

After The Times’ excerpt appeared, MIT and other organizations quickly issued statements disputing Dittrich's assertions and conclusions ( Eichenbaum & Kensinger, 2016 ; MIT News Office, 2016 ). The main points of contention included: (1) allegation that research records were or would be destroyed or shredded, (2) allegation that the finding of an additional lesion in left orbitofrontal cortex was suppressed, and (3) allegation that there was something inappropriate in the selection of (the conservator) as Mr. Molaison's guardian. In addition, a letter signed by over 200 scientists supporting Corkin dated August 5, 2017 was sent to The Times ( DiCarlo et al., 2016 ) asserting that Dittrich's claims were untrue.

Part of the interest in the quick response by the scientific community presumably was that Corkin died on May 24, 2016 prior to the book's publication and was unable to respond to these concerns. While Dittrich (2016b) has directly addressed each of the MIT concerns, their response has nevertheless led many of our colleagues and students to assume that Dittrich's book was incendiary, and whose entire story should not be believed.

While the interested reader will examine both sides of the argument (see Vyse, 2016 ), there is no evidence to suggest that any of Dittrich's factual allegations are wrong. Thus, there are two important points to consider when deciding if this controversy should make otherwise interested individuals pass on reading the book. First, in response to the assertion that research records were shredded, some have suggested Corkin's use of “shredding” was either colloquial or referred to material no longer considered relevant. Corkin is explicit in her description of data shredding in the audio clip of her interview that Dittrich posted ( Dittrich, 2016b ). Certainly, the presence of many files in a storage room says nothing about whether any files had been shredded, particularly since there has never apparently been a comprehensive catalog of the material established. Non-published information can still inform our understanding of H.M.’s clinical course as demonstrated by Dittrich's observation that H.M. had a significant memory impairment prior to surgery, a fact that had not been formally published. Similarly, non-significant findings or “failed experiments” also demonstrate a broader representation of functions either affected or unchanged following surgery. As Dittrich notes, Corkin was a “meticulous investigator, keeping careful notes” (p. 270), and these notes have both scientific and historical value.

H.M.’s legal guardianship merits greater discussion compared to disagreements about scientific ownership and publication disputes, however, which unfortunately are sufficiently common that university committees exist to address such conflicts. Conservatorship, however, is central to this story because it affects the informed consent for H.M.’s research participation, as well as influencing the final disposition of H.M.’s brain after autopsy. Similar to research study reporting standards, the nature of informed consent has evolved over the course of H.M.’s research participation. Consequently, the absence of any conservator or formal consent process early in H.M.’s research participation reflected generally accepted standards at that time. In 1992, an independent conservator was sought for H.M. to mitigate against unintended conflict of interest by H.M.’s investigators, reflecting greater overall awareness of the importance of informed consent.

The eventual conservator was a son of a former landlady of H.M. Dittrich provides evidence that, in contrast to formal court filings, the conservator was not a relative, and that one of H.M.’s relatives was a first cousin sharing H.M.’s last name (Frank Molaison). We will never fully know how the various points are intertwined or even if H.M.’s relatives had been contacted and were not interested in assuming the role of conservator, and part of this controversy is that Corkin's perspective on Dittrich's claims cannot be obtained. Nevertheless, Dittrich's reporting these issues are neither irrelevant nor inappropriate. Careful consideration of H.M.‘s ability to provide informed consent, and how conservatorship is established in circumstances in which research subjects cannot fully consent, will increase awareness of ambiguities that will allow future researchers to confidently ensure full and appropriate consent is obtained prior to research participation.

Most of the book presents a non-controversial narrative, however, and that was not adequately captured by The Times’ excerpt. What we found to be particularly enjoyable in this book is that it provides new details on the contours of H.M.’s life. Prior to H.M.’s death, there were few personal details known to the scientific community, so it should not be surprising that much of this book's appeal is due to its biographical content reporting a variety of details about H.M.’s past. Upon hearing of H.M.’s death, the initial knowledge of his full name was both exciting but then also associated with some sense of guilt and dismay as if suddenly becoming privy to secret information that had been inadvertently revealed. We enjoyed reading about H.M.’s confusion of The Beatles with The Rolling Stones when examining a photograph, but then accurately spelling B-E-A-T-L-E-S rather than beetles, but there are many others throughout the book such as H.M.’s thick New England accent. When asked “Who, or what, is Sue Corkin,” H.M. replied “She was a … well, a senator.” The book also describes frequent angry outbursts including physical harm to himself, which contrasts with the typical H.M. description of his being agreeable and passive, and it is interesting to speculate whether this behavior might have been related to the orbitofrontal damage identified during autopsy. These pieces of personal information help humanize H.M. rather than simply being either a research subject or clinical syndrome. A particularly poignant comment by H.M. was his statement that “every day is alone in itself. Whatever enjoyment I've had, and whatever sorrow I've had” (p. 375).

Despite the controversies that arose after publication of The Times’ excerpt, or perhaps because of them, this book provides a unique glimpse into the blurring of experimental therapy and research during the mid-20th century, motivations for finding treatments for psychiatrically intractable patients prior to the development of neuroleptics, as well as professional interactions and conflicts that may arise in collaborative research settings. Unlike Gage and Monsieur Tan, the depth of clinical research and the modern era in which he lived not only makes H.M. one of the most influential case studies in clinical neuroscience, but also provides one of the most compelling individual stories about how unanticipated surgical effects robbed H.M. of the capacity to form meaningful and lasting relationships with others due to the inability to form new memories. Though clearly not a textbook, and undeniably chatty at times, this is a volume that neuropsychologists at all levels of training and experience, and particularly those with interests in the history of medicine, will enjoy reading and remembering for a long time.

PATIENT H.M: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets received the 2017 The PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. We thank Kimford J. Meador for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review.

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Author Interviews

The lobotomy of patient h.m: a personal tragedy and scientific breakthrough.

Patient H. M.

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Counting the cost of medical advances in 'patient h.m.'.

The story of Henry Molaison is a sad one. Known as Patient H.M. to the medical community, he lost the ability to create memories after he underwent a lobotomy to treat his seizures.

He did earn a place in history, though. His case taught scientists a lot about how the brain creates and stores memories.

"A lot of what we know about how memory work came from more than a half-century of experimentation that was conducted on Patient H.M.," says Luke Dittrich, author of the book Patient H.M. : A Story of Memory, Madness and Family Secrets .

Dittrich, who is also the grandson of William Scoville, the doctor who performed Patient H.M.'s lobotomy, tells NPR's Allison Aubrey that the story is one of both personal tragedy and scientific breakthrough.

"It's hard to argue that it was a good outcome for him. But it's one of those sort of murky cases that you find in the history of medicine, in the history of science, where his tragedy — it was a boon to science," Dittrich says. "We're still learning from him now."

Interview highlights contain web-only extended answers.

Interview Highlights

On Patient H.M.'s backstory and his contributions to medicine

Before he was Patient H.M., he was a man named Henry Molaison. He grew up in the Hartford area in Connecticut, and his story really begins when he was 8 or 9 years old, in the mid-1930s.

He was walking home from the park late one night, got knocked down by a bicyclist and hit his head. And shortly after that, he began experiencing seizures.

His seizures got worse and worse over the years, until by the time he was 27 years old, he was deeply and almost catastrophically epileptic. He would have these major seizures, sometimes multiple times a day, and it had a terrible impact on sort of all aspects of his life — his social life, his professional life.

His high school principal wouldn't let him walk across the stage during graduation because he worried that Henry would have a seizure and cause a scene. And so in the midst of this terrible and debilitating epilepsy, my grandfather, who was a renowned neurosurgeon, offered Henry's family hope in the form of an experimental brain operation.

He told them that he might be able to take Henry's epilepsy away by removing several mysterious and and deep-seated structures in Henry's brain. And they, in their desperation, said yes.

So my grandfather went in and he removed a significant portions of Henry's hippocampus, amygdala ... and what happened was that although it may have had some effect of alleviating the seizures, the main thing that the surgery did was render Henry completely and profoundly amnesiac.

He lived the rest of his life, a half-century or so, in more or less 30-second increments. You could meet him and have a conversation with him and then walk out of the room and come back in and, you know, introduce yourself to him for the first time all over again.

On his grandfather, the neurosurgeon William Scoville

He died when I was 9 years old, and so I knew him, but I didn't know him very well. But he always loomed large, even when I was a kid, as this sort of charismatic and dashing character. He had this rotating fleet of sports cars. He was a world traveler.

His passion was neurosurgery, and he was this gifted surgeon. He was one of the leading proponents in America of so-called psycho-surgery, which we commonly think of as lobotomy — that is, surgical treatment for mental illness.

One of the things I discovered during the course of researching my book was that his sort of passion for psycho-surgery, for the lobotomy, grew out of a sort of a personal desperation for my grandmother. His wife was herself mentally ill and institutionalized.

On the treatments that his grandmother — and many other mental health patients — endured in asylums

My grandmother was institutionalized at ... the Institute of Living in Hartford Conn., and it was, at the time, a very assertive, upscale asylum. It had an almost country club environment on the surface.

That asylum had its own operating room devoted exclusively to surgery. And then, once you had your surgery, you were put in a special sort of education ward, where the idea was that your personality had been wiped clean and then the doctors could sort of build you up again and create a new personality for you in that ward.

I had to go to dig deep into the records of this one particular asylum that she was institutionalized at to come up with information about all the treatments that she endured back then. ... What she endured was really terrifying.

I mean, to be to be a woman in a mental institution in the 1940s was, in some ways, to be living a horror story. She underwent something called pyretotherapy, for example, which I hadn't even heard of. It's otherwise known as fever therapy, and in the early days of fever therapy, they would they would literally inject you with the malaria parasite in order to induce high fevers, which were supposed to bring about some sort of mental clarity.

But by the time she was institutionalized, they had what they considered to be a more modern version of it, where they would lock you into like a brass coffin and then heat up the inside until you developed a fever of as high as 105 degrees. And they would keep you there for eight hours a day, sometimes for a week straight, and that was thought to have somehow a pacifying effect on patients who were mentally disturbed.

A lot of the treatments of the time, looking back on them, you can't help but be horrified by them.

On the kinds of people who received lobotomies

If you break down the patients by sex, the vast majority were women. It's an open question as to why that was, but one possible answer is that the side effects of the consequences of lobotomy — tractability, passivity, docility — were in some senses viewed by certain men of that era as being almost ideal feminine characteristics.

Anyway, it was a way of changing personality. It was done with the intent of addressing mental illness

Some people operated on people as young as 7 years. They would do it for what we would consider to be almost a normal childlike behavior, to treat juvenile delinquency, hyperactivity, misbehavior. It was definitely extreme, it was definitely irreversible, and it was also used to treat "conditions" that were not conditions at all. People were lobotomized for homosexuality.

On whether or not the patients consented

Notions of informed consent really did not exist in the 1940s. ... So it's safe to say that that a lot of these patients who were submitted to surgical procedures did not consent in any sense of the word that we would I understand now.

Probably the most prolific lobotomist then, Walter Freeman, argued that the more a patient fought against being lobotomized, the more that indicated that that patient should be lobotomized.

On what it was like to research and publish his own family secrets

It was a unique experience and a hard experience in a lot of ways. I have done a lot of investigative journalism in the past. Some of the stories you write are going to cause some level of pain to people, but I'm not used to causing pain to the people closest to me, the people that, you know, I love most of all. I came up with information that ultimately was not only shocking to me but hard to process for my own mother.

I'm having to sort of confront and decide that, well, the story is worth telling, and so I can't keep anything really off-limits. I mean, there's a few things I kept off-limits, but I put a lot in there that certain members of my family probably would wish that I would not.

This is a book that I wrote about memory and how memory works, and one of the one of the strange sort of side effects of working on this book is that it has in some ways I have shifted and change some of my own memories from my childhood.

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Who Was H.M.? Inside The Mind Of The Amnesiac Who Revolutionized Neuroscience

By Suzanne Corkin

Posted on May 29, 2013 6:30 PM EDT

5 minute read

My friend’s father was a neurosurgeon. As a child, I had no idea what a neurosurgeon did. Years later, when I was a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at McGill University, this man reentered my life. While reading articles on memory in medical journals, I came across a report by a doctor who had performed a brain operation to cure a young man’s intractable epilepsy. The operation caused the patient to lose his capacity to establish new memories. The doctor who coauthored the article was my friend’s father, William Beecher Scoville. The patient was Henry.

This childhood connection to Henry’s neurosurgeon made reading about the “amnesic patient, H.M.” more compelling. Later, when I joined Brenda Milner’s laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute, Henry’s case fell into my lap. For my PhD thesis, I was able to test him in 1962 when he came to Milner’s lab for scientific study. She had been the first psychologist to test Henry after his operation, and her 1957 paper with Scoville, describing Henry’s operation and its awful consequences, revolutionized the science of memory.

I was trying to expand the scientific understanding of Henry’s amnesia by examining his memory through his sense of touch, his somatosensory system. My initial investigation with him was focused and brief, lasting one week. After I moved to MIT, however, Henry’s extraordinary value as a research participant became clear to me, and I went on to study him for the rest of his life, forty-six years. Since his death, I have dedicated my work to linking fifty-five years of rich behavioral data to what we will learn from his autopsied brain.

When I first met Henry, he told me stories about his early life. I could instantly connect with the places he was talking about and feel a sense of his life history. Several generations of my family lived in the Hartford area: my mother attended Henry’s high school, and my father was raised in the same neighborhood where Henry lived before and after his operation. I was born in the Hartford Hospital, the same hospital where Henry’s brain surgery was performed. With all these intersections in our backgrounds and experiences, it was interesting that when I would ask him whether we had met before, he typically replied, “Yes, in high school.” I can only speculate as to how Henry forged the connection between his high-school experience and me. One possibility is that I resembled someone he knew back then; another is that during his many visits to MIT for testing, he gradually built up a sense of familiarity for me and filed this representation among his high-school memories.

Henry was famous, but did not know it. His striking condition had made him the subject of scientific research and public fascination. For decades, I received requests from the media to interview and videotape him. Each time I told him how special he was, he could momentarily grasp, but not retain, what I had said.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recorded our 1992 conversation for two radio programs, one devoted to memory, the other to epilepsy. A year earlier, Philip Hilts had written an article about Henry for the New York Times, and later made him the focus of a book, Memory’s Ghost.

Scientific papers and book chapters were written about Henry, and his case is one of the most frequently cited in the neuroscience literature. Open any introductory psychology textbook and you are likely to find somewhere in its pages a description of a patient known only as H.M., next to diagrams of the hippocampus and black-and-white MRI images. Henry’s disability, a tremendous cost to him and his family, became science’s gain.

Henry would have been proud to know how much his tragedy has benefited science and medicine.During his life, the people who knew Henry kept his identity private, always referring to him by his initials. When I gave lectures about Henry’s contributions to science, I always encountered intense curiosity about who he was, but his name was revealed to the world only after his death in 2008.

Over the course of decades, during which I worked with Henry, it became my mission to make sure that he is not remembered just by brief, anonymous descriptions in textbooks. Henry Molaison was much more than a collection of test scores and brain images. He was a pleasant, engaging, docile man with a keen sense of humor, who knew that he had a poor memory and accepted his fate. There was a man behind the initials, and a life behind the data. Henry often told me that he hoped that research into his condition would help others live better lives. He would have been proud to know how much his tragedy has benefited science and medicine.

Memory is an essential component of everything we do, but we are not consciously aware of its scope and importance. We take memory for granted. As we walk, talk, and eat, we are not aware that our behavior stems from information and skills that we previously learned and remembered. We rely constantly on our memory to get us through each moment and each day. We need memory to survive—without it, we would not know how to clothe ourselves, navigate our neighborhoods, or communicate with others. Memory enables us to revisit our experiences, to learn from the past, and even to plan what to do in the future. It provides continuity from moment to moment, morning to evening, day to day, and year to year.

Through Henry’s case, we gained insights that allowed us to break memory down into many specific processes and to understand the underlying brain circuits. We now know that when we describe what we had for dinner last night, or recite a fact about European history, or type a sentence on a keyboard without looking at the keys, we are accessing different types of memory stored in our brains.

Henry helped us understand what happens when the ability to store information is missing. He retained much of the knowledge he had acquired before his operation, but in his daily life afterward, he depended heavily on the memories of those around him. His family members, and later the staff at his nursing home, remembered what Henry had eaten that day, what medications he needed to take, and whether he needed a shower. His test results, and medical reports, and the transcripts of his interviews, helped preserve information about his life that he could not retain. Of course, none of these resources could substitute for the capacities Henry had lost. For memory does more than just help us survive—it influences our quality of life and helps shape our identity.

Excerpted with permission from Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. _ by Suzanne Corkin. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2013._

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H.M.’s Contributions to Neuroscience: A Review and Autopsy Studies

Jean c. augustinack.

1 Department of Radiology, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, Massachusetts

André J.W. van der Kouwe

David h. salat, thomas benner, allison a. stevens, jacopo annese.

2 The Brain Observatory, San Diego, California 92101, USA and Department of Radiology, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California 92093, USA

Bruce Fischl

3 CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Matthew P. Frosch

4 C.S. Kubik Laboratory for Neuropathology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts

Suzanne Corkin

5 Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts

H.M., Henry Molaison, was one of the world’s most famous amnesic patients. His amnesia was caused by an experimental brain operation, bilateral medial temporal lobe resection, carried out in 1953 to relieve intractable epilepsy. He died on December 2, 2008, and that night we conducted a wide variety of in situ MRI scans in a 3 T scanner at the Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General) Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. For the in situ experiments, we acquired a full set of standard clinical scans, 1 mm isotropic anatomical scans, and multiple averages of 440 µm isotropic anatomical scans. The next morning, H.M.’s body was transported to the Mass General Morgue for autopsy. The photographs taken at that time provided the first documentation of H.M.’s lesions in his physical brain. After tissue fixation, we obtained ex vivo structural data at ultra-high resolution using 3 T and 7 T magnets. For the ex vivo acquisitions, the highest resolution images were 210 µm isotropic. Based on the MRI data, the anatomical areas removed during H.M.’s experimental operation were the medial temporopolar cortex, piriform cortex, virtually all of the entorhinal cortex, most of the perirhinal cortex and subiculum, the amygdala (except parts of the dorsal-most nuclei—central and medial), anterior half of the hippocampus, and the dentate gyrus (posterior head and body). The posterior parahippocampal gyrus and medial temporal stem were partially damaged. Spared medial temporal lobe tissue included the dorsal-most amygdala, the hippocampal-amygdalotransition- area, ~2 cm of the tail of the hippocampus, a small part of perirhinal cortex, a small portion of medial hippocampal tissue, and ~2 cm of posterior parahippocampal gyrus. H.M.’s impact on the field of memory has been remarkable, and his contributions to neuroscience continue with a unique dataset that includes in vivo, in situ, and ex vivo high-resolution MRI.

INTRODUCTION

This review chronicles H.M.’s history, his contributions to the neuroscience of memory, neuroimaging studies past and present, and his autopsy. In the following paragraphs, we walk through the anatomical details of the medial temporal lobe, describe the specific structures removed and spared in H.M., and provide the only glimpse of his intact, fresh brain. We recount the critical discoveries that made him one of the most famous amnesic patients in the world, and illustrate, with high-resolution imaging, the age-related white matter disease that likely accounts for his dementia in the final part of his life. We also identify key questions to be addressed in the forthcoming neuropathological examination and in future histological studies.

On August 25, 1953, the neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville performed an experimental operation in a 27-year-old man, Henry Gustave Molaison (H.M.), in the hope of curing his medically intractable epilepsy ( Scoville, 1954 ; Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). H.M. had experienced petit mal seizures from the age of 10 and grand mal seizures that began on his 15th birthday. The etiology of his seizures was unclear—as a young boy, he had sustained a minor head injury and, in addition, several of his father’s relatives had epilepsy. H.M. graduated from high school when he was 21 and later repaired electric motors and worked on a typewriter assembly line. He took large doses of anti-epilepsy drugs, but they did not quell his attacks. Because numerous EEG studies failed to reveal a precise surgical target for seizure control, Scoville proposed a psychosurgical procedure that he had devised, bilateral medial temporal lobotomy ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). He had previously performed the operation in patients with psychiatric disorders, mainly schizophrenia, with mixed results. H.M. was the first patient to undergo this procedure for intractable epilepsy. Scoville later renamed the operation bilateral medial temporal lobe resection.

Postoperatively, H.M.’s petit and grand mal attacks continued, and although their frequency decreased markedly, he required anti-epilepsy drugs for the rest of his life. His seizure control, however, was accompanied by a devastating loss. For the next 55 years, H.M. was trapped in the moment because of profound anterograde amnesia. His amnesia was pure—unconfounded by other cognitive deficits. His IQ was above average, and his language, reasoning, and perceptual capacities were normal. The exceptions were impaired olfactory function, caused by the operation, and cerebellar symptoms, a side effect of his anti-seizure medication, Dilantin.

The discrete nature and severity of H.M.’s amnesia made him the topic of scientific scrutiny for the remainder of his life and even after his death. Over 100 researchers participated in collaborative projects to study him, integrating behavioral testing, standardized interviews, and structural and functional imaging. In 1955, Brenda Milner conducted the first postoperative psychological testing of H.M., providing quantitative evidence of profound memory loss with preserved intelligence and immediate memory ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). She and Scoville concluded, “The findings reported herein have led us to attribute a special importance to the anterior hippocampus and hippocampal gyrus in the retention of new experience” (p. 21). Milner later introduced the idea that some memory processes were not hippocampus dependent by showing that H.M.’s error scores decreased across three days of testing on a motor skill-learning task, mirror tracing ( Milner, 1962 ). This discovery constituted the first experimental demonstration of preserved learning in amnesia.

Dissociable Memory Processes

Subsequent research with H.M. extended Milner’s pioneering work and established several firm conclusions. The evidence supported the dual process theory of memory proposed by James (1890) and Hebb (1949) . They viewed short-term and long-term memory as separate processes. Accordingly, H.M.’s short-term memory was preserved, while his long-term memory was impaired. His episodic and semantic learning were both deficient, indicating overlapping neural substrates ( Gabrieli et al., 1988 ; Steinvorth et al., 2005 ). Tests that distinguished two forms of recognition memory—recollection and familiarity—revealed that H.M. could make familiarity-based judgments to recognize complex pictures, even six months after encoding. This surprising result showed that recollection depends on the hippocampus, but familiarity does not. Examinations of H.M.’s retrograde amnesia led to the discovery that he could remember only two preoperatively experienced autobiographical episodes, whereas his semantic memory for the same time period was normal ( Steinvorth et al., 2005 ; Corkin, 2013 ). This dissociation implicates the hippocampus as necessary for the retrieval of premorbid autobiographical but not semantic information. At the same time, certain kinds of nondeclarative learning—motor skill learning, classical conditioning, and repetition priming—were preserved.

The issues that motivated decades of research with H.M. were to understand the scope of his amnesia, to elucidate the kinds of learning and memory that were spared, and to establish a causal link between his amnesia and specific brain circuits. Some information about the integrity of his brain was available even before his operation. H.M. had a pneumoencephalogram in 1946 and another in 1953, both of which were read as normal. At the time of his operation in 1953, information about the damage to his brain came exclusively from Scoville’s account of what he had removed. His notes and drawings formed the basis of a set of detailed drawings by another neurosurgeon, Lamar Roberts, which accompanied Scoville and Milner’s 1957 paper ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). Scoville estimated that the medial temporal lobe resection extended 8 cm back from the tip of each temporal lobe, but subsequent MRI scans indicated that the removal was much less extensive.

Postoperative In Vivo Imaging

CT scans carried out in 1977 and 1984 showed metallic clips from the operation, minimal atrophic change in the anterior temporal region bilaterally, cerebellar atrophy, and, in the 1984 scan when he was 58, mild to moderate cortical atrophy ( Corkin, 1984 ). Specific brain structures were not visualized. A SPECT scan conducted in 1992 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston confirmed his bilateral medial temporal lobe resection and cerebellar atrophy.

H.M.’s first MRI scans occurred in 1992 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and in 1993 at Mass General, when he was 66 and 67 years old, respectively ( Corkin et al., 1997 ). These images showed that the removal extended back about 5.4 cm from the tip of the temporal lobe on the left and about 5.1 cm on the right. The bilaterally symmetrical lesion damaged most of the amygdaloid complex, the entorhinal cortex, part of perirhinal cortex, the uncal and rostral portions of the hippocampal complex, and part of parahippocampal cortex. Some of the ventral perirhinal and posterior parahippocampal cortices were intact. Approximately 2 cm of caudal hippocampal tissue was also spared, but it appeared atrophic and was likely deafferented due to removal of the entorhinal cortex. The subcortical white matter associated with the most anterior portions of the superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyri may have been compromised by the resection. The cerebellar atrophy was dramatic, but the cortical surface appeared normal for H.M.’s age ( Corkin et al., 1997 ).

A decade later, in 2002 to 2004, Salat and colleagues scanned H.M. at the Mass General Martinos Center, using improved MRI data acquisition and analysis tools—higher resolution, quantitative measures of tissue morphometry, and indices of tissue integrity ( Salat et al., 2004 , 2006 ; van der Kouwe et al., 2005 , 2006 ; Wiggins et al., 2006 ). By then, H.M. was 74 to 77 years old, and we uncovered new age-related abnormalities that were not connected to his 1953 resection—cortical thinning and abnormal signal in white matter and deep gray matter. H.M.’s T1 morphometry images showed significant atrophy of the cerebral ribbon, ranging from ~0.3 mm to ~0.7 mm relative to control participants. The atrophy that occurred between 1998 and 2003 was greater than that between 1993 and 1998, suggesting an aging-related degenerative process ( Salat et al., 2006 ). T1-weighted images also revealed infarcts in a number of subcortical gray matter structures, including the thalamus and putamen. Consistent with earlier imaging studies, H.M.’s cerebellum was severely atrophied. In T2-weighted images, Salat et al. noted significant white matter hyperintensities throughout H.M.’s brain that were especially pronounced in the inferior frontal gyrus near the corpus callosum. These new abnormalities appeared to be the result of high blood pressure and small vessel disease. We also collected the first diffusion MRI scans of H.M.’s brain, allowing the examination of fractional anisotropy (FA) maps to quantify the microstructural integrity of the white matter. Overall, H.M. had decreased FA compared to matched controls, and the focal areas of white matter damage had reduced FA. We never found any abnormality that would account for his original seizure disorder.

Current Study

H.M. died on December 2, 2008. That night, we conducted a wide variety of in situ MRI scans in a 3 T scanner at the Mass General Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. The next morning, H.M.’s body was transported to the Mass General Morgue where Matthew Frosch, Director of the Neuropathology Unit, performed an autopsy. Jacopo Annese assisted with the autopsy. Photographs taken immediately afterward provided the first documentation of H.M.’s lesions in his physical brain. After ~10 weeks of tissue fixation, we obtained ex vivo structural data at ultra-high resolution using 3 T and 7 T magnets. This postmortem research had two goals—to document the specific structures that were removed and spared in H.M.’s brain, based on the gross examination of the fresh brain and analysis of the MRI images, and to relate the behavioral dissociations documented during H.M.’s life to the precisely established sparing and loss of brain tissue. An additional motivation for the ex vivo imaging was to provide an MRI-based method to later register the histological sections in 3D. The Partners Human Research Committee approved all studies described here. In this report, we first introduce the anatomical structures that define the medial temporal lobe region and then describe H.M.’s autopsy and MRI results.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Participant, h.m.

At the time of his death, H.M. was 82 years old. The cause of death was arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. In 1992, H.M. and his court-appointed conservator had signed a brain donation form authorizing Mass General and MIT to perform a postmortem examination upon his death, and the conservator gave consent for the autopsy the evening H.M. died.

Neuroanatomy of the Intact Adult Medial Temporal Lobe—Terminology

To establish the terminology used in this report, we first describe pertinent structures in an intact adult brain, focusing on the medial temporal lobe region ( Rosene and Van Hoesen, 1987 ; Gloor, 1995 ; Insausti et al., 1995 ; Van Hoesen, 1995 ; Insausti et al., 1998 ). To educate the reader on the relevant structures, we selected nine blockface images from a control case (60 year old, male) in our MGH brain collection and labeled them ( Fig. 1 ). The areas include the piriform cortex (primary olfactory cortex), mesocortices of the parahippocampal gyrus (entorhinal and perirhinal cortices), and temporal polar cortex; the hippocampal formation—hippocampus, subiculum, and dentate gyrus; and the subcortical collection of nuclei that comprise the amygdala ( Fig. 1 ). The structures and slices are described from anterior to posterior.

Blockface images of medial temporal lobe structures from a control case (60-year-old, male). Nine levels represent the anterior-posterior extent of the medial temporal lobe. Level (A) temporal pole, (B) pyriform (olfactory) cortex, anterior-most entorhinal cortex, (C) anterior amygdala, (D) mid-amygdala, (E) anterior hippocampal head (pes), (F) posterior hippocampal head, (G) posterior hippocampal head and anterior hippocampal body, (H) hippocampal body, (I) posterior hippocampal body, hippocampal tail (not illustrated). Numerical labels correspond to Brodmann areas, and letter abbreviations are defined as: AAA = anterior amygdala area, AB = accessory basal nucleus of amygdala, B = basal nucleus of amygdala, CA = cornu ammonis (1–4), CAT = cortical amygdala transition area, Ce = central nucleus of amygdala, Co = cortical nucleus of amygdala, CS = collateral sulcus, DG = dentate gyrus, ES = endorhinal sulcus, fm = fimbria, HATA = hippocampal amygdala transition area, HF = hippocampal fissure, L = lateral nucleus of amygdala, LV = lateral ventricle, M = medial nucleus of amygdala, Pre = presubiculum, Par = parasubiculum, SUB = subiculum, TP = temporal pole, and Un = uncus. Magnification bar = 1 cm.

The temporal pole is divided into four regions: dorsal, ventral, medial, and lateral. Anteriorly, the temporal polar cortex hangs unattached to other brain tissue for ~1.5 cm ( Fig. 1A ), after which the temporal lobe joins the frontal cortex at the level of the limen insula. At this level, several features are noteworthy. The frontal insula and temporal insula merge together, the temporal polar cortex ends, and the piriform cortex begins to occupy the medial temporal area ( Fig. 1B ). The sulcal configuration in this region is complicated because the rhinal sulcus is incipient in humans and not present in all brains. The main sulci that outline the parahippocampal gyrus include the rhinal sulcus anteriorly, albeit variably, and the collateral sulcus laterally. The control case illustrated in Figure 1 does not exhibit a rhinal sulcus. If a rhinal sulcus were present, it would reside approximately at level B, at the level of the piriform cortex. Deep to the parahippocampal gyrus, the endorhinal sulcus dorsally separates the corticomedial nuclei of the amygdala from the optic tract area, the sulcus semi-annularis separates the medial parahippocampal cortex from the corticoamygdala-transition-area, and the hippocampal fissure separates the parahippocampal gyrus from the hippocampus ( Figs. 1C–F ). At the point where the frontal and temporal lobar regions connect, the temporal stem, one of the major white matter conduits for the temporal lobe, appears.

The amygdala lies posterior and slightly dorsal to the piriform cortex, which is situated deep beneath the parahippocampal cortex between the olfactory cortex anteriorly and the hippocampus posteriorly. The key amygdala nuclei are (from lateral to medial) the lateral nucleus, basal nucleus, accessory basal nucleus, paralaminar nucleus, medial nucleus, cortical nucleus, and corticoamygdala-transition-area ( Figs. 1C,D ). At the medial most edge of the amygdala, three nuclei line up from superior to inferior: medial nucleus, cortical nucleus, and corticoamygdala-transition area ( Figs. 1C,D ).

At the amygdala’s broadest part, immediately anterior and slightly dorsal to the hippocampus, the parahippocampal gyrus is also at its largest width. The anterior parahippocampal gyrus contains two Brodmann areas, area 34 medially and area 28 laterally ( Brodmann, 1909 ; Lorente de No, 1934 ). Brodmann area 34 corresponds to the gyrus ambiens and sometimes has a bulbar configuration that is often mistaken for the uncus of the hippocampus, but the uncus resides deep to the gyrus ambiens and slightly posterior ( Fig. 1D ). The hippocampal fissure borders the uncus and lower bank of the parahippocampal gyrus where the subicular cortices are located ( Fig. 1E ). Brodmann area 28 makes up a substantial component of the parahippocampal territory and occupies the entire crown of the anterior parahippocampal gyrus, commonly referred to as the entorhinal cortex. Equally prominent within the parahippocampal cortex is the entorhinal cortex’s neighbor laterally, the perirhinal cortex ( Figs. 1B–I ). The perirhinal cortex (Brodmann area 35, Braak’s transentorhinal) ( Braak and Braak, 1985 ) is sometimes slightly larger than the entorhinal cortex and surrounds it anteriorly, laterally, and posteriorly ( Insausti et al., 1998 ; Van Hoesen et al., 2000 ; Ding and Van Hoesen, 2010 ). The perirhinal cortex lies lateral to the rhinal sulcus but medial relative to the collateral sulcus, once the collateral sulcus has begun ( Van Hoesen et al., 2000 ; Ding et al., 2009 ). The ectorhinal cortex (Brodmann area 36) is temporal isocortex; we classify it separately from perirhinal cortex based on the fact that perirhinal area 35 is agranular and dysgranular (area 35a periallocortex and 35b proisocortex, respectively), whereas temporal isocortex (area 36) contains a granular layer. On the crown of the posterior parahippocampal gyrus, areas TH and TF ( von Economo and Koskinas, 1925 ; von Bonin and Bailey, 1947 ) make up the remaining parahippocampal cortex as it ends caudally at the retrosplenial cortex and calcarine sulcus (TH-TF, not illustrated).

The hippocampal formation comprises the hippocampus proper, subicular cortices (subiculum, presubiculum, and parasubiculum), and dentate gyrus ( Rosene and van Hoesen, 1987 ). The hippocampus proper contains subfields CA1, CA2, CA3, and CA4, named for cornu ammonis because it resembles a ram’s horn. The hippocampus, which contains four main structural parts, genu ( Fig. 1D ), head ( Figs. 1E–G ), body ( Figs. 1G–I ), and tail (not illustrated), sits deep beneath the parahippocampal cortex. Its structure changes significantly from anterior to posterior, with the head being disproportionately larger than the body and tail. The head of the hippocampus is made up of several convolutions, the pes hippocampi, where the medial-most convolution defines the uncus ( Figs. 1E,F ). The inferior horn of the lateral ventricle makes its first appearance at the level of the amygdala and hippocampal head.

Autopsy and Fixation

On December 4, 2008, when the postmortem interval was ~19 hrs, Matthew Frosch conducted the autopsy. H.M.’s brain was fixed in standard 10% formalin for several hours and was then transferred to buffered 4% paraformaldehyde. The fixative solution was changed twice during the two months that it remained in the Mass General Department of Pathology, allowing the brain tissue to fix thoroughly. On February 12, 2009, when it was transferred to the Martinos Center for ex vivo scanning, it remained in 4% paraformaldehyde.

In Situ MRI Acquisition

On the evening of December 2, 2008, just under 4 hr after H.M.’s death in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, we collected in situ scans at the Mass General Martinos Center. In situ refers here to postmortem imaging of the brain in the head. Images were collected in a 3 T Siemens (Erlangen, Germany) TIM Trio MRI scanner with a 32-channel head coil. We determined beforehand that the configuration of this system (in particular, the imaging gradient switching and RF energy deposition) would not damage the brain by heating the tissue or by heating or vibrating the surgical clips.

Because subject fatigue and motion were not an issue and scanning could continue for several hours, we collected high-quality, high-resolution images that would not be possible in a living subject. The in situ 3 T session lasted 9 hr. We obtained a wide range of contrasts of the unfixed brain with different scan types and high-resolution anatomical images.

We first acquired a full set of standard clinical scans for comparison with antemortem images. In addition, we obtained a 2 mm isotropic diffusion scan, 1 mm isotropic single and multiecho MPRAGEs ( Mugler and Brookeman, 1990 ; van der Kouwe et al., 2008 ), 1 mm isotropic multi-flip angle multiecho FLASH scans with 2 mm isotropic B1± maps, and multiple averages of a 440 µm isotropic single-echo multi-flip angle FLASH scan. All scans were automatically localized for acquisition using AutoAlign ( van der Kouwe et al., 2005 ; Benner et al., 2006 ). The synthetic images presented in this report were generated using estimates of intrinsic tissue parameters derived from a combination of acquired multiecho FLASH images with native contrast ( Fischl et al., 2004 ).

Clinical scans

We obtained five standard clinical scans: (1) sagittal T1-weighted spin-echo, (2) axial T2-weighted turbo-spin-echo, (3) axial FLAIR, (4) susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI), and (5) diffusion with matching B0 field map. Prescan intensity normalization was applied to all scans.

• T1-weighted 2D-encoded spin-echo ( T acq 4 m 20 s); 24 sagittal slices of 5 mm with 1 mm gap, 240 mm field of view with 256 matrix and 75% phase resolution, phase encode AP (1.3 × 0.9 × 5 mm). TE 7.1 ms, TR 550 ms, BW 201 Hz/px, FA 120°, two concatenations.
• T2-weighted 2D-encoded turbo-spin-echo ( T acq 5 m 27 s); 23 axial slices of 5 mm with 1 mm gap, 230 × 172.5 mm field of view with 512 matrix and 75% phase resolution, phase encode RL (0.6 × 0.4 × 5 mm). TE 91 ms, TR 5 s, BW 100 Hz/px, FA 134°, two averages, flow compensation in slice direction.
• FLAIR 2D-encoded turbo-spin-echo ( T acq 6 m 52 s); 23 axial slices of 5 mm with 1 mm gap, 230 × 172.5 mm field of view with 384 matrix and 75% phase resolution, phase encode RL (0.8 × 0.6 × 5 mm). TE 71 ms, TR 10 s, TI 2,500 ms, BW 130 Hz/px, FA 150°, two averages, flow compensation in slice direction.
• Susceptibility-weighted 3D-encoded gradient echo ( T acq 6 m 59 s). 96 axial partitions (k-space slices) of 1.5 mm, 220 × 171.9 mm field of view with 448 × 350 matrix, phase encode RL (0.5 × 0.5 × 1.5 mm). TE 20 ms, TR 28 ms, BW 120 Hz/px, FA 15° (slab-selective), flow compensation.

Standard anatomical scans for morphometry

We collected a standard set of 1 mm isotropic anatomical scans designed to elucidate brain morphometry using FreeSurfer ( http://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu ) ( Dale et al., 1999 ; Fischl et al., 2002 , 2004 ). The set consisted of T1-weighted multiecho MPRAGE (MEMPR) for cortical modeling and subcortical segmentation, multiecho FLASH (MEF) for tissue parameter quantification, and T2-SPACE and FLAIR T2-SPACE for T2 contrast. Prescan normalization was applied to all scans, and, for accurate alignment, scans were matched with respect to geometry and bandwidth (thus, degree of distortion).

• T1-weighted 3D-encoded 4-echo MEMPR ( van der Kouwe et al., 2008 ) ( T acq 6 m 3 s); 176 sagittal partitions of 1 mm, 256 mm field of view with 256 × 256 matrix, phase encode AP (1 mm isotropic), 2× GRAPPA with 32 reference lines. TE 1.64/3.5/5.36/7.22 ms, TR 2,530 ms, TI 1,200 ms (non-selective), BW 651 Hz/px, FA 7° (nonselective).
• T1-weighted 3D-encoded 8-echo FLASH ( T acq 13 m 25 s at each of three flip angles); 176 sagittal partitions of 1 mm, 256 mm field of view with 256 × 256 matrix, phase encode AP, 50% phase oversampling (1 mm isotropic), 2× GRAPPA with 32 reference lines. TE (1.85 + n × 2.0 + n × ( n −1)/2×0.1) ms ( n = 0,…,7) (uneven spacing for phase unwrapping), TR 22 ms, BW 651 Hz/px, FA 5/20/30° (nonselective), magnitude and phase images.
• T2-weighted variable flip angle 3D-encoded turbo-spin-echo (T2-SPACE) ( Mugler et al., 2000 ) (T acq 4 m 43 s); 176 sagittal partitions of 1 mm, 192 mm field of view with 192 × 192 matrix, phase encode AP (1 mm isotropic), 2× GRAPPA with 24 reference lines. TE 368 ms, TR 3,200 ms, BW 651 Hz/px, FA variable (nonselective).
• T2-weighted variable flip angle 3D-encoded turbo-spin-echo with fluid attenuation (FLAIR T2-SPACE) ( Mugler et al., 2000 ) ( T acq 7 m 22 s). 176 sagittal partitions of 1 mm, 192 mm field of view with 192 × 192 matrix, phase encode AP (1 mm isotropic), 2× GRAPPA with 24 reference lines. TE 352 ms, TR 5 s, TI 1,800 ms, BW 789 Hz/px, FA variable (nonselective).

T2*-weighted anatomical scans

To quantify tissue T2*, we carried out a multiecho FLASH scan according to a protocol that had a longer TR and more widely spaced echoes than the 8-echo FLASH described above. We also repeated the 8-echo FLASH protocol at 2 mm isotropic resolution (two repetitions of T acq 6 m 42 s with 128 × 128 matrix).

• 3D-encoded 8-echo FLASH ( T acq 14 m 15 s). 128 sagittal partitions of 1.33 mm, 256 mm field of view with 192 × 192 matrix, phase encode AP (1.33 mm isotropic), 2× GRAPPA with 32 reference lines. TE (3.41 + n × 6.9 + n × ( n − 1)/2 × 0.1) ms ( n = 0,․,7) (uneven spacing for phase unwrapping), TR 60 ms, BW 202 Hz/px, FA 20° (nonselective), magnitude and phase images.

High-resolution anatomical scans

We dedicated ~5 hr of the in situ scanning time to obtaining high-resolution anatomical scans, using a single-echo FLASH protocol with an isotropic resolution of 440 µm.

• T1-weighted 3D-encoded FLASH ( T acq 24 m 19 s at each of 6 flip angles); 384 sagittal partitions of 0.44 mm, 225 mm field of view with 512 × 512 matrix, phase encode AP, 50% phase oversampling (1 mm isotropic), 2× GRAPPA with 32 reference lines. TE 4.09 ms, TR 9.5 ms, BW 199 Hz/px, FA 3/5/8/10/15/18° (non-selective), magnitude and phase images.

Quality control scans

We obtained additional scans to correct artifacts. For the diffusion scans, matching B0 field maps were acquired. We collected data for 1 mm isotropic DESPOT1, DESPOT2, and HiFi analyses ( Deoni et al., 2003 , 2005 ; Deoni, 2007 ). Based on these results, we chose the optimal range of flip angles for the subsequent FLASH scans. We obtained a B1 transmit map using Actual Flip Angle Imaging ( Yarnykh, 2007 ) at 2.5 mm isotropic resolution and a B1 transmit/receive map by imaging at 2 mm isotropic resolution with the body coil and with each element of the 32-channel array. In addition, we acquired a gradient echo EPI series of volumes (TR 3 s, 192 measurements, 3 mm resolution with 0.6 mm gap between slices, 42 slices). Two additional runs used an experimental radial and Cartesian-encoded gradient echo protocol with an ultrashort echo (FLUSTER) ( Van der Kouwe, 2008 ) (data not shown).

Ex Vivo Imaging

Ex vivo imaging occurred after H.M.’s brain had been stored in 10% formalin for ~10 weeks. The fixed brain was placed in a custom-made Plexiglas chamber and imaged at high field ( Annese et al., 2014 ). We repeated the in situ scans ex vivo, and as expected the images confirmed the observations made in in situ.

High-resolution scans (7 T)

We used a 7 T Siemens scanner based on the Avanto platform for high-resolution imaging with a 31-channel custom-built head coil. The highest resolution images were 210 µm isotropic single-echo multi-flip angle FLASH scans. We measured coil covariance for image reconstruction and obtained 1.68 mm isotropic B1 transmit/receive maps and a two-echo gradient echo field map (2 mm × 2 mm × 3 mm resolution) for image correction.

We dedicated 15.5 hr of scan time to collecting high-resolution images of the entire fixed brain. Encoding at 210 µm isotropic resolution with the 31-channel head coil required offline image reconstruction because the k-space data volumes were larger than the 32 GB of RAM available on the scanner image reconstruction computer. The k -space data were streamed to an external storage site during acquisition because the total amount of data per scan exceeded the 320 GB of disk space available on the scanner RAID. We used the coil covariance matrix to combine the signals from the 31 head coil channels to form a single image volume ( Roemer et al., 1990 ).

• T1-weighted 3D-encoded FLASH ( T acq 4 h 50 m at each of three flip angles); 704 partitions of 210 µm, 175 × 153 mm field of view with 832 × 728 matrix (210 µm isotropic). TE 15.1 ms, TR 34 ms, BW 40 Hz/px, FA 10/20/30° (nonselective).

Temperature Monitoring

From the time of H.M.’s death until his body reached the Martinos Center, his head was enclosed in a Cryopak Ice Blanket to keep his brain cool. During the in situ scanning, room temperature was maintained at ~18°C. During ex vivo scanning, we monitored temperature carefully, keeping it below 19°C on the outer surface of the chamber at 3 T and 7 T. Temperature was a concern because RF energy deposition during MR imaging can heat the sample. To ensure that temperature fluctuations due to imaging would be well below normal fluctuations in room temperature, we previously monitored a test sample (whole brain) during imaging with the highest specific absorption rate sequences. A multichannel fiber optic temperature sensor (Neoptix, Inc., Quebec, Canada) recorded the temperature in four areas—deep in the tissue, close to the inner wall of the chamber, on the outer surface of the chamber, and in the room air. As expected, even during high (100%) specific absorption rate protocols, the temperature inside the tissue never increased more than 4°C relative to the inside and outside of the container. The specific absorption rate of RF energy for the 3 T diffusion sequence was close to 100% of the clinically safe value imposed by the scanner hardware, and it was substantially lower for the other protocols. The room temperature was at the minimum thermostat setting (18°C), and an additional fan was used to dissipate heat from around the chamber. The temperatures of the outer surface of the chamber and the surrounding air were monitored with the fiber optic system. Because these temperatures never exceeded 19°C, we reasoned that the temperature of the brain tissue never went above 23°C during imaging. We believe that the temperature differentials were even smaller during in situ imaging because the imaging session was shorter, the protocols were less energy intensive, and the energy could dissipate throughout the body.

Lesions in the Fresh

Brain The unfixed brain weighed 1,100 g, ~200 g less than one would expect for a 6-foot-tall, healthy man. Photographs of the brain taken immediately after its removal from the skull showed the overall topography of the gross brain to be relatively preserved. Notably, the olfactory bulbs and tracts were intact, and we saw no explicit damage, with the obvious exceptions of the medial temporal lobe excisions and a shriveled cerebellum ( Fig. 2 ). The dashed white lines drawn laterally and posteriorly illustrate where a normal sized cerebellum would be. The blood vessels appeared mildly atherosclerotic. In the right ventral temporal lobe, we identified a black surgical clip, which we believe was intentionally left behind by Scoville to prevent bleeding ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). A second clip was located in the left temporal lobe.

Photograph of the whole fresh brain (inferior surface) taken at H.M.’s autopsy. In the ventral view, the white arrows on both sides of the brain indicate the lines of cut in the coronal MRI slices in Figure 5 . These slices (white arrows) correspond to the in situ MRI ( Figs. 5A–L ). Note the area of excision and additional fibrous tissue (i.e., scar tissue) bilaterally, and the residual medial most tissue (bilaterally but larger on the left) in the medial temporal area, next to cranial nerve III. Abbreviations: B = basilar artery, M = medulla, MB = mammillary bodies, OB = olfactory bulb, OC = optic chiasm, ON = optic nerve, TP = temporal pole, V = vertebral artery, and III = cranial nerve III (oculomotor nerve). White arrowheads point to posterior temporal artery on both right and left. Dashed white lines illustrate atrophy in the cerebellum. Note the black surgical clip on right temporal lobe. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com .]

Figure 3 magnifies the ventromedial view to reveal a close-up of the right (A) and left (B) medial temporal lobe lesions. The photographs show slightly different views, a consequence of the unfixed state. (An unfixed brain collapses or widens slightly and does not retain the classical formation until fixed.) The medial temporal lobe lesions began immediately to the left and right of the optic nerves, which had been cut during the autopsy so the brain could be pulled out of the skull, leaving the eyes intact. On both sides, the lesion extended posteriorly from the temporal polar cortex through the parahippocampal gyrus until about the level of the halfway point of the basilar artery. In a normal case, the gyrus ambiens would reside immediately and slightly anterior to the uncus. In H.M., medial tissue remained on both sides but to a greater extent on the left ( Figs. 3A,B ). We could not determine definitively whether the remaining medial tissue on the left was uncus or gyrus ambiens because the banks of the hippocampal fissure and other landmarks had been surgically removed. The histological analysis, which will be the topic of a later report, will reveal whether the cytoarchitecture of this tissue is hippocampal (allocortical) or cortical (periallocortical). Continuing posteriorly, significant scar tissue occupied the medial temporal areas bilaterally.

Close-up photographs of H.M.’s medial temporal lobe showing a ventral view of the right and left temporal regions (A and B). Tissue was splayed out (due to being unfixed) to reveal a slightly different viewpoint of the extent of the lesion. In A and B, the lesion extends from the temporal pole to the midparahippocampal gyrus. Note the absence of tissue and the abundant scar tissue bilaterally. The basilar and vertebral arteries contain several atherosclerotic plaques. [Color figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com .]

In Situ MRI

The several different contrasts acquired in situ provided an MEMPR (T1-weighted) image ( Fig. 4A ) with the classic MRI contrast that shows CSF as dark and white matter as white. In the T2-SPACE acquisition ( Fig. 4B ), white matter was relatively dark, gray matter was brighter, and CSF was brightest. Because the lesion void was filled with CSF, it appeared bright in the image. In the T2-SPACE acquisition with fluid attenuation (FLAIR) ( Fig. 4C ), the CSF in the region of the lesion was dark, but the remaining tissue fragments were relatively bright and clearest compared to other contrasts. The bottom panels of Figure 4 show quantitative proton density (PD) ( Fig. 4D ) and T1 estimates ( Fig. 4E ) together with a synthetic image constructed from the corresponding 440 µm volumes ( Fig. 4F ) ( Fischl et al., 2004 ). We estimated the T1 and PD volumes from a combination of multiecho FLASH scans with different flip angles. Figure 4D shows only PD contrast (arbitrary units, but proportional to spin density); Figure 4E shows estimated T1 relaxation time (sec). PD reflected only the proton (or spin) density and was a relatively flat contrast. The lesions appeared fairly bright because CSF is relatively dense in free water, while the PD of white matter is slightly less than that of gray matter. Both appeared darker than CSF in the PD image. Because higher T1 produces darker voxels in T1-weighted images, the image showing the absolute T1 value had the opposite contrast of the MEMPR (i.e., white matter is darker than gray matter and CSF in the quantitative image because white matter has a shorter T1 relaxation time). To optimize contrast and increase signal-to-noise, we created a synthetic image from the FLASH scans ( Deoni et al., 2003 ; Fischl et al., 2004 ). Figure 4F shows the synthetic FLASH image that would result if the TR had been 22 ms, flip angle had been 20°, and TE had been 0. This image was synthesized from the PD and T1 estimates by applying the steady-state FLASH model, in the reverse of the estimation procedure. We chose the TR and flip angle to achieve optimal discrimination between the structures segmented by FreeSurfer ( http://www.surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/ ), based on contrast (TE 0 implies no signal decay due to T2* relaxation). The synthetic image in Figure 4F has a T1-weighted contrast similar to the MPRAGE.

Various MRI contrasts acquired at 3.0 T in situ. (A) multiecho MPRAGE (MEMPR), (B) T2-SPACE, (C) T2-SPACE FLAIR, (D) quantitative PD, (E) quantitative T1, (F) synthetic FLASH. Note the lesion in all contrasts, with the borders especially clear in the multiecho MPRAGE and synthetic FLASH images. T1 and T2-SPACE FLAIR revealed scar tissue faintly in addition to the lesion.

Lesions in medial temporal lobe structures

Here we describe the specific medial temporal lobe areas that were explicitly removed and identify other structures that remained. The 12 coronal MR images ( Fig. 5 ) highlight the lesion extent and illustrate remaining anatomical structures, based on remaining landmarks ( Figs. 5A–L ). Levels are spaced 4 mm apart. The first image shows the temporal pole where the anterior-most portion of the lesion began ( Fig. 5A ). The medial temporopolar cortex, mainly dysgranular area 38 and area 36, were removed. The temporal polar sulcus, located dorsally, was partially destroyed.

Twelve coronal MR images showing the anterior and posterior extent of H.M.’s medial temporal lobe lesion. Images were synthesized from multi-echo FLASH scans acquired in situ and are ordered from anterior (A) to posterior (L). In all images, note the enlarged ventricles, general atrophy, and a plethora of regional white matter signal abnormalities. We identify particular structures (present or absent) in each panel. A, B, C: medial temporal pole removed; D: anterior entorhinal cortex removed (i.e. piriform cortex), E: cortical amygdala and possibly central nucleus remained; F: gyrus ambiens or uncus remained; G and H: perirhinal cortex and damaged parahippocampal cortex; I: the body of the hippocampus visible; J: first full observation of parahippocampal cortex (right side) and fimbria; K: posterior tip of the lesion (right side is past the lesion), and L: the undamaged parahippocampal cortex posterior to the lesion. Magnification bar = 1 cm.

In the second image ( Fig. 5B ), the lesion entered prime temporal polar cortex territory, where we observed the optic nerves (slightly off the midline) and the caudate nucleus. Here, the limen insula had not yet connected to the frontal and temporal lobes. The temporal polar areas, 38 and area 36, were still absent at this level. The olfactory tract, seen inferiorly to the orbitofrontal gyrus, appeared normal. The third image ( Fig. 5C ) was approximately at the level of the anterior amygdala.

The fourth image ( Fig. 5D ) fell at the level of the optic chiasm. Presumptive medial structures were the posterior piriform cortex, part of perirhinal cortex (area 35), and temporal isocortical area 36. In all slices described thus far, the medial temporal stem was partially damaged bilaterally, and the white matter quality appeared compromised, with the lesion in the left hemisphere extending farther medially than in the right. The collateral sulcus appeared in images four through eight ( Figs. 5D–H ), and perirhinal cortex occupied its medial bank.

A small part of the entorhinal cortex appeared in the fifth and sixth images ( Figs. 5E,F ), but only on the extreme lateral convexity of the gyrus. The border between the entorhinal and perirhinal cortices typically falls on the corner of the parahippocampal gyrus near the collateral sulcus. The fifth image captured the emerging optic tracts, anterior commissure (midline), and caudate/putamen ( Fig. 5E ). The anterior-most amygdala—specifically parts of the endopiriform nucleus and the corticoamygdalo-transition-area—might have been present in this image. Noticeably, the anterior-amygdala-area was lacking at this level. The landmarks in the sixth image included the optic tract, anterior commissure laterally (very subtle), caudate/putamen/anterior limb of the internal capsule, globus pallidus, hypothalamus, and columns of the fornix, indicating that this slice was at the level of the mid-amygdala ( Fig. 5F ). In a healthy brain, this level would represent the amygdala at its largest extent along with the gyrus ambiens (Brodmann area 34 in humans). The left side may have contained a portion of the semilunar gyrus slightly dorsal to gyrus ambiens; this possibility will be examined in the histological analysis. Figure 5F shows the best MRI example of the medial tissue that remained. The hypothalamus appeared atrophied, likely due to the lack of hippocampal input, and the fornix and hippocampal commissure showed significant atrophy.

The seventh image is where one would expect to see the posterior amygdala, subiculum, and anterior-most hippocampus, given that other landmarks usually present at this level are visible—the mammillary bodies of the hypothalamus, the thalamus, putamen, globus pallidus, and the optic tract (tucked in medially) ( Fig. 5G ). The spared posterior hippocampal tissue first appeared in this slice, with the right side showing more hippocampal head than the left ( Fig. 5G ).

The eighth image ( Fig. 5H ) embodied the presumptive uncal hippocampus and anterior dentate gyrus level, where neighboring anatomical landmarks were the cerebral peduncles, red nucleus, substantia nigra in the brainstem, anterior nucleus of the thalamus and posterior putamen. In the ninth image ( Fig. 5I ), the right hippocampus began to resemble the classic hippocampal shape, and this slice showed the body of the hippocampus for the first time. The tenth image exposed the body of the hippocampus where the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus made its first appearance, defining the end of the entorhinal cortex ( Fig. 5J ). Images ten and eleven revealed badly damaged parahippocampal gyri, especially on the left side ( Figs. 5J,K ). Images eleven and twelve showed the shrunken posterior body and tail of the hippocampus ( Figs. 5K,L ). In the twelfth image, the posterior thalamus (pulvinar), fimbria-fornix, and posterior commissure all came into view ( Fig. 5L ).

In summary, the high-resolution, high-contrast images reported here indicated that the areas removed bilaterally by suction during H.M.’s experimental operation were the medial temporopolar cortex, piriform cortex, virtually all of the entorhinal cortex, most of the perirhinal cortex (area 35), a large amount of subiculum, amygdala, except the dorsal most nuclei (i.e., central and medial), most of the hippocampus (head and body), and the dentate gyrus (posterior head and body). Parts of posterior parahippocampal gyrus (roughly equivalent to TH and TF) remained but were damaged. Other medial temporal lobe areas spared bilaterally were: the dorsal-most amygdala, part of the hippocampal-amygdalo-transition-area, a portion of perirhinal area 35, a medial portion of the hippocampus or gyrus ambiens, and the posterior body and tail of the hippocampus. The major sulci in the medial temporal lobe were remarkably well preserved bilaterally, with the exception of the hippocampal fissure. The collateral sulci were partially present, but shallow. The endorhinal sulci were present dorsally and medially, the sulci semi-annularis were spared medially, but the rhinal sulci were absent rostrally.

Ex Vivo MRI

At higher field strength (7.0 T), we acquired ultra-high-resolution images at 210 µm for the whole brain. Because the brain was suspended in 4% paraformaldehyde during scanning, the background contained some MRI signal from the water molecules in the solution. The contrast to noise ratio (CNR) and signal to noise ratio (SNR) were compromised for two reasons—the tissue contrast and solution contrast were similar, and the resolution was high. Due to the preciousness of this brain, we chose not to subject it to a proton-free liquid, such as Fomblin. Had we used a proton-free liquid, we would have avoided the unsatisfactory background observed in the 7.0 T images ( Fig. 6 ). Even with the high background, however, the ex vivo scans showed new details, and we delineated specific landmarks, such as the endorhinal sulcus and collateral sulcus, which helped determine the exact boundaries of the lesion. We outlined the lesion with dotted lines at three pertinent anterior-posterior levels: the anterior commissure, columns of fornix, and mammillary bodies. The high-resolution ex vivo scans provided additional information about the exact shape of H.M.’s lesions.

Ex vivo images of medial temporal lobe areas acquired at 7 T. Images at 210 µm isotropic show the extent of the lesion and remaining medial structures. For level-of-cut cross reference, see Figure 5 . Panels A, B, and C correspond to the MRI slices in Figures 5E–G . A shows H.M.’s lesion approximately at the level of the amygdala. The lesion shape is relatively uniform at this level. Note the square corners at the dorsal-most part of the lesion. B demonstrates the lesion where the posterior amygdala-anterior hippocampal level would have been. Note the fornix columns medially in the hypothalamus and the irregular lesion shape. The large round black structures in C are regions of susceptibility surrounding air bubbles. C illustrates the lesion at the level of the mammillary bodies where the head of the hippocampus (i.e., pes hippocampus) would normally reside. At level C the lesion narrows. The shape of the lesion changes considerably from anterior to posterior, scar tissue is visible. The white arrowheads point to the collateral sulcus. Numbers represent Brodmann areas. Abbreviations: AC = anterior commissure, ES = endorhinal sulcus, FX = fornix, MB = mammillary bodies, OC = optic chiasm, RN = red nucleus, and SN = substantia nigra.

At the level of the anterior commissure, the anterior-most levels of the entorhinal cortex (i.e., the piriform cortex) and the extreme anterior parts of amygdala were removed ( Fig. 6A ). It is noteworthy that at this level, the lesion represented a rectangular shape and showed sharp 90° angles at the innermost (and superior) borders.

The second level is at the columns of the fornix ( Fig. 6B ). At this mid-amygdala level, the lesion shape, indicated by the dotted white lines, became irregular, especially on the left ( Fig. 6B ). The white arrow points to tissue that was likely the anterior hippocampus.

The third medial temporal lobe level is at the mammillary bodies of the hypothalamus, where the hippocampal head is largest. The right lesion appeared significantly larger than the left in the medial-lateral direction, consistent with our lesion measurements. Based on the quantitative data and these qualitative data, the right-sided lesion was slightly shorter than the left-sided in the anterior-posterior plane but slightly wider in the medial-lateral plane.

Lesion Size

We defined the overall length and width of H.M.’s lesion as the distance parallel to the anterior-posterior direction and left-right direction, respectively. We considered the lesion measurements in two ways, the total ablation and the total ablation plus damaged cortex. For the left-sided lesion, the length from the tip of the temporal lobe was 4.6 cm for the ablation and 6.0 cm for the ablation and damaged cortex ( Fig. 7 ). For the right-sided lesion, the length from the tip of the temporal lobe was 4.2 cm for the ablation and 5.5 cm for the ablation and damaged cortex ( Fig. 7 ). These dimensions indicated that the left medial temporal lobe lesion was larger than the right. The width was 2.04 cm on the left and 1.89 cm on the right at the temporal pole, 1.54 cm on the left and 1.63 cm on the right at the amygdala/uncus, and 1.02 cm on the left and 0.95 cm on the right at the hippocampal tail. The overall shape of the lesion matched a truncated cone with the wide base anterior and the narrow end posterior.

Axial view of the multiecho FLASH images. Line measurements were acquired in the axial plane to assess the anterior-posterior lesion size. The ablation on the right side measured 5.5 cm while the left measured 6.0 cm. The left temporal lobe lost considerably more cortex during surgery. Note the cerebellar atrophy due to Dilantin.

We also obtained two high-resolution anatomical volumes—the 440 µm in situ volume and the 210 µm ex vivo volume. Both were synthesized from multiple FLASH scans collected at different flip angles. The in situ 440 µm volume had near in vivo contrast, with gray matter appearing darker than white matter and CSF that was dark, but not black (visible also in the vicinity of the lesion).

The ex vivo 210 µm volume had a different contrast because the tissue was fixed (tissue classes are better distinguished by T2* contrast in fixed ex vivo brain tissue) ( Tovi and Ericsson, 1992 ). In these images, gray matter was brighter than white matter and exhibited distinct layers, such as the stria Gennari , which were not visible in the in situ scans. Because the brain was packed in paraformaldehyde, which generated a relatively strong signal that was comparable to white matter, the ventricles and region of the lesion were not extremely distinct from the adjacent structures. The cotton packing and the brain contained small bubbles, and the latter gave rise to spin dephasing artifacts, which were exaggerated by the choice of a long TE, a consequence of the low bandwidth needed to obtain reasonable SNR and gradient strengths at the required high resolution.

The white matter was noticeably inhomogeneous in both the in situ and ex vivo images, presumably a consequence of aging-related white matter disease. In the ex vivo images, B1 + (RF transmit field) inhomogeneities due to the dielectric resonance effect at high field contributed further to overall image non-uniformity. Despite the fact that we invested 15.5 hrs in the 210 µm volumes vs. 2.5 hrs for the 440 µm, SNR was higher for the 440 µm volume because SNR falls dramatically with increasing isotropic resolution. SNR was roughly 20 to 50 and 130 to 150 for brain tissue in the 210 µm and 440 µm volumes, respectively. These values are approximate because SNR varies spatially, and the noise distribution is not precisely Gaussian. We selected protocols that would give reasonable SNR in the time available. The CNR (gray/white) for the 440 µm data was 14.7. In the 210 µm data, CNR measures for gray/white matter were 15.1 for high signal areas and 5.7 for medium signal areas. The SNR measures in these regions were 4.24 and 3.39, respectively ( Fig. 4 ).

Structures Outside the Medial Temporal Lobes

The cerebellum was severely atrophic and at autopsy appeared nearly half the size of a healthy cerebellum. The cerebellar atrophy seemed uniform with the flocculonodulus, vermis, and lateral hemispheres all reduced in size. In the in situ MRI images, we observed the dentate nucleus, the largest of the deep cerebellar nuclei, in its usual location, but we could not detect the other nuclei (fastigial, globose, emboliform), given the resolution (440 um) 3 .

Aging-related changes

At the end of his life, H.M. became demented. Multiple small strokes due to untreated hypertension and white matter atrophy likely contributed to his mental deterioration. The black spots in the MRI images indicate hypertensive disease and were particularly notable in the brainstem in Figure 4A . As a consequence of the untreated hypertension and perhaps other aging processes, we observed extensive isocortical and subcortical atrophy in all structures. Limbic structures such as the fornix, hippocampal commissure, and mammillary bodies, which were connected to the hippocampus before the surgery, were markedly degenerated ( Fig. 5G ). Similarly, the extended amygdala (centromedial amygdala and bed nucleus of stria terminalis) and other structures (i.e., the substantia inominata, including the nucleus basalis of Meynert and the diagonal band of Broca) showed noteworthy deterioration, as did the ventral striatopallidal areas. In the basal forebrain, the atrophy was so extensive that it was difficult to discern the location of nuclei. Degeneration went beyond the limbic cortices and limbic-related areas. We observed severe atrophy in the striatopallidum (caudate, putamen, globus pallidus) and thalamus (anterior nucleus, ventral anterior nucleus, mediodorsal nucleus, lateral posterior, lateral dorsal nucleus, pulvinar nucleus, medial geniculate nucleus and lateral geniculate nucleus) as demonstrated by the large size of the third ventricle ( Figs. 5H–J ). We noted atrophy of the anterior commissure and all parts of the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum appeared so thin that it resembled the thickness of a healthy anterior commissure. We found isocortical thinning in all areas, including primary and secondary sensory and motor cortices. Shrinkage was especially pronounced in prefrontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital association areas.

White Matter Integrity

The diffusion imaging data acquired as part of the imaging sessions will be reported at a later time. The structural images, however, demonstrated a clear and substantial deterioration of the connective integrity of H.M.’s brain, with overt macrostructural white matter lesions throughout several portions of the cerebrum ( Fig. 5 ). We previously described this damage and noted that hints of white matter deterioration were apparent as far back as 1998 when he was 72 ( Corkin et al., 1997 ; Salat et al., 2006 ). In the 2008 imaging sessions, dark bands of hypointense white matter in T1 images were obvious throughout the periventricular regions. Such changes are commonly observed in older adults, but the degree of alterations here was well beyond what could be considered a benign consequence of aging.

Blood Supply

We did not explicitly trace the blood vessels in H.M.’s brain, but based on the anatomical areas that were surgically removed, it is likely that the blood supply was also interrupted. The arterial origins of the vascular supply to the medial temporal lobe include the middle cerebral artery, internal carotid artery, anterior choroidal artery, and posterior cerebral artery. From the fresh brain, it appeared that the anterior temporal artery, a branch of the posterior cerebral artery was removed bilaterally. The anterior choroidal artery, known to supply the anterior hippocampus, was absent on both sides, as was the anteroinferior parahippocampal artery, which supplies the anterior parahippocampal gyrus (i.e., entorhinal cortex). The posterior temporal artery was spared on both sides ( Figs. 2 and ​ and3) 3 ) as well as the posterior parahippocampal artery, which supplies the posterior parahippocampal gyrus (i.e., TH and TF). Further tissue damage suggested that the posterior hippocampal artery, which supplies the posterior hippocampus, was compromised bilaterally.

The onset of H.M.’s profound memory impairment immediately after the operation established for the first time that removal of the hippocampus and surrounding structures causes amnesia ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). The postmortem studies reported here are part of an ongoing effort to characterize the damage as precisely as possible. Our first goal was to document in detail the medial temporal lobe lesions, and the second was to examine the integrity of other structures that likely supported his intact intellect and preserved learning capacities. Bearing this anatomical information in mind, we associate specific cognitive processes that were impaired or spared in H.M. to particular circuits inside and outside the medial temporal lobe. Many of the findings with H.M. informed ongoing controversies in cognitive neuroscience concerning dissociations of function.

This report extends previous anatomical findings in MRI by revealing more detail and specific anatomy about what structures were removed or spared. The autopsy photographs showed the dense scar tissue in H.M.’s lesion and the marked cerebellar atrophy, while the MRI data, including in situ and ex vivo images, capitalized on improved contrast and resolution to reveal the lesion shape (or remaining tissue shape) and the precise measurements for lesion size. For example, the improved contrast highlighted tissue that may be the gyrus ambiens or a sliver of the anterior uncus. It is difficult to estimate whether this tissue is gyrus ambiens (medial part of entorhinal cortex) or uncal hippocampal tissue (i.e., medial CA1) and this new finding must be evaluated histologically. The high-resolution MRI also showed contrast differences between damaged and undamaged tissue that allowed more precise measurement of overall lesion size and shape. In this report, the lesion, measured from 440 µm 3 MRI, was 6.0 cm on the right and 5.5 cm on the left, suggesting that Scoville ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ) overestimated the lesion at 8 cm while Corkin and colleagues ( Corkin et al., 1997 ) slightly underestimated the right-sided lesion at 5.1 cm. The high-resolution MRI also revealed the shape of the lesions, which exactly followed the contour of the parahippocampal gyrus, wider anteriorly and narrower posteriorly. Previous in vivo MRI images showed that H.M. developed significant white matter damage and cortical thinning as he aged ( Salat et al., 2006 ). The new in situ MRI findings provide evidence of white matter disease progression, showing that at the time of H.M.’s death, his white matter was riddled with white matter signal abnormalities and extensive cortical thinning. Cortical thinning and white matter signal abnormalities were widespread, and no structure was spared. The following paragraphs review how H.M.’s lesions relate to the rich body of behavioral data collected over 55 years.

Lesion Dimensions

Overall lesion size.

At the time of H.M.’s operation, Scoville estimated that the lesion extended 8 cm back from the tip of the temporal lobe. If this had been the case, then the damage would have invaded visual cortex, which it did not. With the advent of MRI, we were able to get a more accurate idea of lesion size. The in vivo MRI estimates in the rostrocaudal extent, based on 1 mm MRI data, were ~5.4 cm on the left and ~5.1 cm on the right ( Corkin et al., 1997 ). The comparable postmortem MRI dimensions were slightly greater, showing that H.M.’s lesion was 6.0 cm on the left and 5.5 cm on the right ( Fig. 7 ). The high-resolution in situ data allowed us to measure the excision and the damaged tissue more precisely. In the left temporal lobe, the excised region measured 4.6 cm, the damaged area an additional ~1.5 cm, and the entire lesion 6.0 cm. On the right side, the excision measured 4.2 cm, the damaged region an additional ~1.4 cm, and the whole lesion 5.5 cm. The ex vivo measures were more accurate because of the superior resolution we could obtain in long scan sessions at 3 T and 7 T that would not have been feasible in vivo. We hypothesize that the greater lesion size was due in part to age- and disease-related degeneration. The in situ MRI findings reported here are the most accurate measures of H.M.’s lesion size because the brain had not yet been distorted by removal and fixation procedures.

Correlation between lesion size, distribution, and severity of amnesia

H.M. had both extensive amnesia and large medial temporal lesions, suggesting that amnesia severity is related to lesion size. His amnesia was more profound than that of Penfield and Milner’s patients F.C. and P.B., whose excisions for epilepsy and pre-existing damage spared a considerable amount of medial temporal tissue ( Penfield and Milner, 1958 ; Milner, 1959 ). More recent findings from Squire’s laboratory extend the evidence concerning correlations with lesion size and support the view that lesions restricted to the hippocampus produce less severe memory loss than lesions of the hippocampus plus other temporal lobe areas. R.B.’s lesion, limited to the CA1 field, resulted in moderately severe amnesia ( Zola-Morgan and Squire, 1986 ), whereas two other patients, G.P. and E.P., with damage to their entire medial temporal lobes bilaterally, were profoundly amnesic ( Stefanacci et al., 2000 ; Bayley and Squire, 2005 ). Notably, E.P.’s lesion included the temporal pole, amygdala, entorhinal cortex, hippocampus, perirhinal cortex, and rostral parahippocampal cortex and also extended into lateral temporal neocortex; his declarative memory was even more impaired than H.M.’s ( Insausti et al., 2013 ).

Medial Temporal Lobe Structures Excised and Spared

After H.M.’s death in 2008, we assessed his lesion using high-resolution in situ and ex vivo MRI. These images showed that the following areas were removed or damaged: substantial portions of the medial temporopolar, piriform, entorhinal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal cortices, as well as the subiculum, presubiculum, parasubiculum, amygdala, hippocampal fields CA1, CA2, CA3, and CA4 (in the hippocampal head and body), and dentate gyrus (posterior head and body). Further, our analyses suggested that a few noteworthy structures survived the medial temporal lobe surgery and may have been more difficult to discern with in vivo MRI scans due to lower resolution ( Corkin et al., 1997 ; Salat et al., 2006 ). Notably, several areas within the amygdala were spared—parts of the amygdalar medial nucleus, cortical nucleus, cortical amygdaloid transition area, amygdala-striatal zone, endopiriform nucleus, and a portion of the central nucleus. Also visible were the hippocampal-amygdalo-transition-area (HATA), a small portion of the uncus, the tail of the hippocampus (~2 cm), a small part of the perirhinal cortex (Brodmann area 35), the entire ectorhinal cortex (Brodmann area 36), and ~2 cm of the posterior parahippocampal gyrus. Although the residual hippocampal, perirhinal, and parahippocampal tissue was first documented in the 1992 and 1993 MRI images ( Corkin et al., 1997 ), the present findings further specify the locus and extent of the spared tissue.

Neural Substrate for H.M.’s Amnesia

Parahippocampal cortices and hippocampal formation.

After his operation in 1953, H.M. could not consolidate and retrieve new facts and events, documenting for the first time that circuits within the medial temporal lobe are necessary for the establishment of long-term declarative memory ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). Memory experiments carried out over the next five decades showed that H.M.’s deficits were severe and extensive, affecting the acquisition of verbal and nonverbal material presented via four sensory modalities ( Milner, 1968 ; Corkin, 1984 , 2002 ). He could not learn new episodic or semantic information ( Gabrieli et al., 1988 ; O’Kane et al., 2004 ), highlighting the critical role of medial temporal lobe structures in all kinds of declarative memory. Further support for this brain-behavior correlation came from MRI studies carried out in the 1990s, which gave a more accurate picture of the specific structures that were excised and spared in H.M.’s brain. The postmortem studies reported here provide new details of his lesions that could not be gleaned from the in vivo imaging studies.

By far the greatest territory removed on the day of surgery was the parahippocampal gyrus, in particular, the anterior parts of the perirhinal cortex and the entire entorhinal cortex. In a normal brain, the entorhinal cortex receives input from several secondary and tertiary association cortices and multimodal areas (in prefrontal cortex and superior temporal association cortex) and acts as the ultimate end station before extrinsic sensory afferents converge prior to entering the hippocampus ( Van Hoesen, 1997 ; Van Hoesen et al., 1972 ). After this convergence on the entorhinal cortex, entorhinal layer II and superficial layer III then project to the hippocampus via the perforant pathway ( Van Hoesen and Pandya, 1975 ).

Scoville’s resection included the mesocortices of the anterior parahippocampal gyrus (entorhinal and perirhinal cortices (perirhinal area 35)) and also the hippocampal head and body. As a result, H.M.’s perforant pathway was destroyed at its origin and termination, thereby eliminating the entire circuitry necessary for long-term declarative memory. The remaining ~2 cm of hippocampal tissue was deafferented, and, therefore, not able to support long-term memory formation, storage, and retrieval. A preliminary histological study showed that the remaining hippocampal tissue contained substantial gliosis, which would further compromise the residual tissue ( Annese et al., 2014 ).

H.M.’s pervasive memory impairment resulted from the removal of a significant portion of his hippocampi, including all CA subfields, the anterior dentate gyrus, anterior subiculum, anterior presubiculum, and prosubiculum. The hippocampal remnants included the hippocampal-amygdala-transition-area (HATA), the tail of the hippocampus, and a small portion of medial hippocampal tissue. Subsequent histological studies will clarify whether the small medial remnant is uncus or gyrus ambiens. Also spared were the posterior portions of the subiculum, dentate gyrus, and hippocampal body and tail. The posterior portion of the subiculum appeared to be intact, possibly leaving the subicular projections to the anterior, lateral dorsal, reuniens, and paraventricular nuclei of the thalamus untouched ( Aggleton et al., 1986 ). It is clear, however, that this modest input, if it existed, was not sufficient to support normal memory function in H.M.

A new finding in the postmortem scans concerned the medial temporal stem. In 1997, we reported that the temporal stem was intact ( Corkin et al., 1997 ), although Gaffan disagreed ( Gaffan, 2001 ). In the current study, major advances in technology allowed us to examine the temporal stem with greater precision in the in situ and ex vivo images. We noted that this structure was markedly deteriorated in H.M. in situ and showed decreased contrast in MPRAGE (see Figs. 5C–E ). It is unclear whether these lesions dated back to the surgical excision or were caused by degenerative disease late in life, but we favor the view that this damage was due to aging and white matter deterioration as noted in previous MRIs ( Salat et al., 2006 ) and not to Scoville’s original resection. The role of the temporal stem in amnesia has been somewhat controversial ( Horel, 1978 ; Gaffan et al., 2001 ; Gaffan, 2001 ), but a study by Zola-Morgan, Squire, and Mishkin ( Zola-Morgan et al., 1982 ) appeared to be irrefutable. They found that monkeys in whom the temporal stem white matter had been cut bilaterally were unimpaired on a delayed nonmatching-to-sample task, whereas animals with bilateral lesions of the amygdala, hippocampus, and parahippocampal gyrus showed severe impairment. A later study by Gaffan et al. was consistent with this view ( Gaffan et al., 2001 ). On a delayed matching-to-sample task, the performance of monkeys with transection of the anterior temporal stem alone did not differ significantly from their preoperative levels. It is, therefore, unlikely that H.M.’s temporal stem lesions contributed to his declarative memory impairment. Rather, his profound amnesia was caused by the excision of the parahippocampal cortices and hippocampal formation. H.M.’s performance on delayed-match-to-sample and delayed-nonmatch-to-sample tasks was comparable to that of control participants 6 months after learning ( Freed et al., 1987 ; Freed and Corkin, 1988 ), suggesting that his partially intact perirhinal cortex may have been engaged to carry out these tasks.

Aging, Cortical Thinning, and White Matter Damage

Previous in vivo MRIs characterized H.M.’s cortical and white matter damage ( Salat et al., 2006 ). At the time of his death, he was demented, and his entire brain was severely atrophied, with no structure escaping degeneration. As noted previously ( Annese et al., 2014 ), we observed a small lesion in the left orbitofrontal region in the in situ and ex vivo MRI scans that was not described in Scoville’s original report ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). The etiology of this lesion is unclear, but we are confident that planned histological studies will reveal the cause. The possibilities include damage by the retractor used to elevate H.M.’s left frontal lobe, deafferentation of a medial temporal lobe projection, or white matter disease, possibly due to small vessel ischemic disease, such as untreated hypertension. The white matter damage throughout H.M.’s brain was severe in the in situ and ex vivo images, and it was far worse than in other untreated hypertensive cases at his age (JCA and DHS, personal observation) ( Fazekas et al., 1993 ; Young et al., 2008 ). Substantial contrast changes in older adults may be due to significant dysfunction of vascular regulatory mechanisms ( Braffman et al., 1988 ; Breteler et al., 1994b ; Longstreth et al., 1996 ; Erkinjuntti, 2007 ), and given the substantial white matter abnormalities that we observed in H.M.’s brain ex vivo, it is likely that white matter damage caused his dementia.

Neural Substrates for H.M.’s Preserved Memory Capacities

H.M.’s deep and lasting amnesia attests to the fact that the spared medial temporal lobe structures were unable to support normal memory function or anything approaching it. Still, over the years, he occasionally surprised his examiners by retrieving episodic and semantic information that he encountered after his operation. The most astonishing example came from a picture recognition experiment in which we asked him to look at and remember complex colorful pictures for 20 sec each. Not only did he achieve normal recognition at 10 min, 24 hrs, 72 hrs, and 1 wk after encoding, but he also scored within 1 SD of the control mean 6 months later ( Freed et al., 1987 ; Freed and Corkin, 1988 ).

We attribute H.M.’s ability to recognize the complex pictures to the engagement of familiarity–based processes supported by his residual perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices in communication with his preserved cortical circuitry. Our MRI data obtained in vivo and in situ showed some remnants of perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices bilaterally ( Figs. 5E–G ) ( Corkin et al., 1997 ). Evidence accumulated over the last 20 years strongly suggests that recollection and familiarity engage different medial temporal lobe areas, with recollection mediated by the hippocampus and familiarity by perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices ( Aggleton and Brown, 1999 , 2005 ; Yonelinas and Jacoby, 2012 ). H.M.’s ability to recognize complex visual stimuli underscores the point that the hippocampus is not necessary for recognition memory based on familiarity.

H.M. was also able to recognize and provide a few distinguishing details about celebrities and politicians who rose to fame after his operation, such as JFK, Ray Charles, and Liza Minnelli ( Gabrieli et al., 1988 ; O’Kane et al., 2004 ). We attribute these glimmers of memory formation in part to processing in preserved medial temporal lobe structures seen in the in situ and ex vivo MRI images: part of perirhinal cortex, posterior parahippocampal cortex, dorsal-most amygdala, and the medial-most uncus. It is possible that these small pieces of medial temporal lobe that remained, especially posteriorly, helped support declarative memory formation on rare occasions. H.M. spent a lot of time watching television and leafing through magazines, which exposed him to a wealth of information about celebrities. This repeated stimulation over months and years enabled him to build up meager representations of a handful of famous people; he acquired this knowledge slowly over time and not via the fast declarative memory processes that healthy individuals would employ.

H.M.’s preserved memory capacities also included those now classified as nondeclarative. Milner’s 1962 groundbreaking report that he showed procedural learning over three days introduced the idea that the human brain houses dissociable memory circuits ( Milner, 1970 ). Subsequent experiments extended this result, showing that H.M. could acquire a variety of motor skills ( Corkin, 1968 ). Studies in patients with Parkinson disease, Huntington disease, and cerebellar degeneration later indicated that the striatum and cerebellum mediate motor skill learning ( Sanes et al., 1990 ; Knopman and Nissen, 1991 ; Pascual-Leone et al., 1993 ; Breteler et al., 1994a , b ; Corkin, 2013 ). Our in vivo MRI results confirmed that the striatum was not damaged in H.M.’s operation, and although his cerebellum was atrophied, it did not appear grossly abnormal.

Subsequent studies evaluated H.M.’s performance on other kinds of nondeclarative memory tasks. In a series of eyeblink classical conditioning experiments, he acquired conditioned responses in both the delay and trace paradigms ( Woodruff-Pak, 1993 ). Although he required more trials to reach criterion than his control, the fact that he showed any conditioned responses is a challenge to explain because previous research has established that the cerebellum, hippocampus, and amygdala play a major role in eyeblink conditioning (Woodruff-Pak et al., 1985; Weisz et al., 1992 ; Thompson and Kim, 1996 ; Clark et al., 2002 ; Christian and Thompson, 2003; Thompson and Steinmetz, 2009). In H.M.’s brain, the hippocampus and amygdala were extirpated, and the cerebellum was markedly atrophied. Still, it is possible that his cerebellum and deep cerebellar nuclei supported the learning, and we will examine these structures microscopically in hope of uncovering clues about his ability to acquire conditioned responses.

Repetition priming refers to a kind of learning in which recent incidental exposure to test stimuli, such as words, pictures, and patterns, facilitates subsequent processing of that information. Priming is evidence that past experience can influence memory unconsciously, that is, when participants are not trying intentionally to recall the past, and it is mediated by cortical pathways undamaged in H.M. In several experiments, he demonstrated intact performance on perceptual and conceptual priming tasks ( Gabrieli et al., 1990 , 1995 ; Keane et al., 1995 ). Companion studies in patients with cortical lesions indicated that conceptual priming is mediated by lateral temporal and parietal circuits, while perceptual priming depends on occipital circuits ( Keane et al., 1991 , 1994 , 1995 ; Gabrieli et al., 1994 ). These cortical networks were intact in H.M. and likely the underpinnings of his intact priming performance. This finding of preserved nondeclarative memory considered side by side with his impoverished declarative memory, measured by tests of recall and recognition, established the validity of cognitive and neural dissociations among memory processes.

Neural Substrates for H.M.’s Nonmnemonic Behavioral Deficits

Examination of H.M.’s fresh brain at autopsy indicated that his olfactory bulbs and tract were undamaged, but the surgical removal did include primary olfactory cortex in the temporal lobe (piriform cortex and periamygdaloid cortex). As a result, H.M. was anosmic. Extensive behavioral testing uncovered limited preserved function and severe deficits on several olfactory tasks ( Eichenbaum et al., 1983 ). His detection of weak odorants was normal as was his threshold for discrimination of intensity differences, and he showed normal adaptation to a strong odor. In contrast, his ability to discriminate odor quality was completely absent on three different measures: signal-detection testing, the triangle match-to-sample task, and a common-odor-matching task, likely due to the absence of piriform and periamygdaloid cortices ( Eichenbaum et al., 1983 ). This striking dissociation of olfactory perceptual capacities established that odor quality discrimination and recognition are not necessary for detection, intensity discrimination, or adaptation.

The in situ and ex vivo MRI studies described here brought to light the details of H.M.’s extensive amygdala resection, which included the lateral, basolateral, accessory basal, and paralaminar nuclei, a portion or all of the central nucleus, and the anterior amygdala area. The result was that most of H.M.’s amygdala output was silenced, and it is likely that the amygdala resection explains a cluster of behavioral abnormalities. H.M.’s perception of pain was diminished in the laboratory and in daily life, he showed no change in his ratings of hunger and thirst from before to after a meal, he was asexual, and he was not fearful of anything ( Hebben et al., 1985 ; Corkin, 2013 ). Nevertheless, he could experience and display a range of emotions, such as happiness, friendliness, sadness, worry, guilt, and aggression, and he was able to label the emotion in various facial expressions ( Corkin, 2013 ). The emotional response system is complex, and the underlying brain mechanisms connecting inputs and outputs engage cortical and subcortical circuits beyond the amygdala ( Price, 2003 ). A goal of future histological studies will be to examine the integrity of these connections and remnants of the amygdala in H.M.’s brain.

Neural Substrate for H.M.’s Preserved Cognitive Capacities

The MR images collected from H.M. in 1992 and 1993, four decades after his operation, showed that his frontal, parietal, and occipital cortices were normal for his age, as was the lateral temporal neocortex. At that time, it was unclear whether the subcortical white matter associated with the most anterior portions of the superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyri was damaged, but our in situ and ex vivo images confirmed that these tracts were abnormal. Nevertheless, the vast expanse of cortex on both sides of H.M.’s brain likely functioned near optimally, allowing the engagement of multiple specialized circuits to support his performance on a broad spectrum of cognitive tasks.

Milner conducted H.M.’s first postoperative psychological examination in 1955, 2 years after his operation ( Scoville and Milner, 1957 ). On the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Scale, he achieved an IQ of 112, but on the Wechsler Memory Scale, his MQ was only 67, indicating normal intelligence coupled with markedly impaired long-term memory ( Wechsler, 1945 ). On subsequent testing with different forms of the Intelligence Scale and Memory Scale, he maintained this pattern of performance through 2000 ( Kensinger et al., 2001 ). This longitudinal analysis firmly established that medial temporal lobe structures are not necessary for optimal performance on IQ tests, indicating a clear dissociation between high-order cognition and long-term declarative memory.

The high-resolution, high-contrast MRI methods highlighted here confirmed that H.M.’s cortical and subcortical language areas remained intact following his surgery, and the results from numerous experimental measures and standardized tests showed that his language functions were largely spared ( Kensinger et al., 2001 ). He successfully completed seven lexical memory tasks: spelling; picture naming, name recognition, and information retrieval; Boston naming test; picture naming; picture judgment; category identification; and landmark identification, and on tests of morphology, he was able to produce and judge regular and irregular inflectional or derivational forms, including plural production, past-tense production, past tense judgment, and derivational morphology production. Two additional tasks measured his syntax processing, and he performed them normally. In general, H.M. maintained his preoperative lexical knowledge without explicit retraining, indicating that medial temporal lobe structures are not necessary for the retention of already learned lexical information. They are, however, critical for the acquisition of new lexical information (e.g., new vocabulary, celebrities) ( Gabrieli et al., 1988 ; Postle and Corkin, 1998 ). Notable exceptions in the language domain were H.M.’s impaired performance on fluency tasks and uneven success in detecting linguistic ambiguities ( Lackner, 1974 ; Corkin, 2013 ). These deficits likely stemmed from a combination of factors: minimal surgical damage to anterolateral temporal cortex, slow responding, substandard education, and lower socioeconomic background ( Kensinger et al., 2001 ; Schmolck et al., 2002 ).

Evidence of preserved problem solving and working memory processes came from H.M.’s consistently excellent performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test ( Milner, 1968 ). During each administration of the task over years of testing, he quickly changed to a new sorting category as needed and had very few perseverative errors, but he was always unaware that he had done the test before. To perform this complex task, H.M. had to recruit multiple cognitive processes and engage circuits in prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex, areas that were spared in the 1953 surgery ( Corkin et al., 1997 ; Salat et al., 2006 ).

H.M.’s bilateral medial temporal lobe resection was circumscribed, and the resulting amnesia was pure. He revolutionized the science of memory through his participation in numerous behavioral and imaging studies, and he continues to illuminate the science of memory. During his lifetime, neuroimaging advanced with specialized sequences and sophisticated multichannel array coils that enabled high resolution MRI. These tools allowed a final and riveting inspection of H.M.’s lesions and remaining anatomy. This postmortem research is consistent with his wishes: He knew he was contributing to science and gladly donated his brain for future study. His mantra was, “Whatever is beneficial.” It is fitting that the field of neuroscience continues to benefit from his contributions, even after his death.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to H.M. and his conservator for the generous tissue donation. The authors also thank M. Dylan Tisdall, Jonathan R. Polimeni, and Thomas Witzel for technical assistance in developing protocols to accommodate extremely large data files and Kristen Huber for photographing the blockface images and laboratory preparations.

Grant sponsor: National Center for Research Resources; Grant number: P41-RR14075; Grant sponsor: NCRR BIRN Morphometric Project; Grant numbers: BIRN002 and U24 RR021382; Grant sponsor: National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; Grant number: R01EB006758; Grant sponsor: National Institute on Aging; Grant numbers: AG022381 and 5R01AG008122-22; Grant sponsor: NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research; Grant number: 5U01-MH093765; Grant sponsors: Part of the Multi-Institutional Human Connectome Project and National Science Foundation; Grant number: NSF-SGER0714660; Grant sponsor: Dana Foundation; Grant number: 2007-4234.

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The Neuroscience of Behavior: Five Famous Cases

Five patients who shaped our understanding of behavior and the brain..

Posted January 16, 2020 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

“Considering everything, it seems we are dealing here with a special illness… There are certainly more psychiatric illnesses than are listed in our textbooks.” —Alois Alzheimer (In: Benjamin, 2018)

Once thought to be the product of demonic possession, immorality, or imbalanced humors, we now know that psychiatric symptoms are often caused by changes in the brain. Read on to learn about the people who helped us understand the brain as the driving force behind our behaviors.

Phineas Gage

In 1848, John Harlow first described the case of a 25-year-old railroad foreman named Phineas Gage. Gage was a "temperate" man: hardworking, polite, and well-liked by all those around him. One day, Gage was struck through the skull by an iron rod launched in an accidental explosion. The rod traveled through the prefrontal cortex of his brain. Remarkably, he survived with no deficits in his motor function or memory . However, his family and friends noticed major changes in his personality . He became impatient, unreliable, vulgar, and was even described as developing the "animal passions of a strong man." This was the first glimpse into the important role of the prefrontal cortex in personality and social behavior (David, 2009; Thiebaut de Schotten, 2015; Benjamin, 2018).

Louis Victor Leborgne

Pierre Broca first published the case of 50-year-old Louis Victor Leborgne in 1861. Despite normal intelligence , Leborgne inexplicably lost the ability to speak. His nickname was Tan, after this became the only word he ever uttered. He was otherwise unaffected and seemed to follow directions and understand others without difficulty. After he died, Broca examined his brain, finding an abnormal area of brain tissue only in the left anterior frontal lobe. This suggested that the left and right sides of the brain were not always symmetric in their functions, as previously thought. Broca later went on to describe several other similar cases, cementing the role of the left anterior frontal lobe (now called Broca’s area) as a crucial region for producing (but not understanding) language (Dronkers, 2007; David, 2009; Thiebaut de Schotten, 2015).

Auguste Deter

Psychiatrist and neuropathologist Aloysius Alzheimer described the case of Auguste Deter, a 56-year-old woman who passed away in 1906 after she developed strange behaviors, hallucinations, and memory loss. When Alzheimer looked at her brain under the microscope, he described amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that we now know are a hallmark of the disease that bears his name. This significant discovery was the first time that a biological molecule such as a protein was linked to a psychiatric illness (Shorter, 1997; David, 2009; Kalia & Costa e Silva, 2015).

In 1933, Spafford Ackerly described the case of "JP” who, beginning at a very young age, would do crude things like defecate on others' belongings, expose himself, and masturbate in front of other children at school. These behaviors worsened as he aged, leading to his arrest as a teenager . He was examined by Ackerly who found that the boy had a large cyst, likely present from birth, that caused severe damage to his prefrontal cortices. Like the case of Phineas Gage, JP helped us understand the crucial role that the prefrontal cortex plays in judgment, decision-making , social behaviors, and personality (Benjamin, 2018).

HM (Henry Gustav Molaison)

William Scoville first described the case of HM, a 29-year-old man whom he had treated two years earlier with an experimental surgery to remove his medial temporal lobes (including the hippocampus and amygdala on both sides). The hope was that the surgery would control his severe epilepsy, and it did seem to help. But with that improvement came a very unexpected side effect: HM completely lost the ability to form certain kinds of new memories. While he was still able to form new implicit or procedural memories (like tying shoes or playing the piano), he was no longer able to form new semantic or declarative memories (like someone’s name or major life events). This taught us that memories were localized to a specific brain region, not distributed throughout the whole brain as previously thought (David, 2009; Thiebaut de Schotten, 2015; Benjamin, 2018).

Facebook /LinkedIn image: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

Benjamin, S., MacGillivray, L., Schildkrout, B., Cohen-Oram, A., Lauterbach, M.D., & Levin, L.L. (2018). Six landmark case reports essential for neuropsychiatric literacy. J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci, 30 , 279-290.

Shorter, E., (1997). A history of psychiatry: From the era of the asylum to the age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Thiebaut de Schotten, M., Dell'Acqua, F., Ratiu, P. Leslie, A., Howells, H., Cabanis, E., Iba-Zizen, M.T., Plaisant, O., Simmons, A, Dronkers, N.F., Corkin, S., & Catani, M. (2015). From Phineas Gage and Monsieur Leborgne to H.M.: Revisiting disconnection syndromes. Cerebral Cortex, 25 , 4812-4827.

David, A.S., Fleminger, S., Kopelman, M.D., Lovestone, S., & Mellers, J. (2009). Lishman's organic psychiatry: A textbook of neuropsychiatry. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kalia, M., & Costa e Silva, J. (2015). Biomarkers of psychiatric diseases: Current status and future prospects. Metabolism, 64, S11-S15.

Dronkers, N.F., Plaisant, O., Iba-Zizen, M.T., & Cabanis, E.A. (2007). Paul Broca's historic cases: High resolution MR Imaging of the brains of Leborgne and Lelong. Brain , 130, 1432–1441.

Scoville, W.B., & Milner, B. (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiat., 20, 11-21.

Melissa Shepard, MD , is an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

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Famous brain surgery patient h.m. retained a chunk of hippocampus.

Amnesia probably due to the loss of other regions, connections

MEMORIES ON ICE  Embedded in a frozen gelatin block, Henry Molaison’s brain is about to be sliced and imaged.

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By Laura Sanders

January 28, 2014 at 6:24 pm

After a brain surgeon accidentally took away his memory in 1953, 27-year-old Henry Molaison became one of the most informative cases in psychology. For the rest of his life, the patient known as H.M. donated time to scientists who used the tragedy to study his amnesia. Now, five years after his death, Molaison is still teaching scientists about how the brain makes and stores memories.

A detailed analysis of Molaison’s postmortem brain, generously donated to scientists, reveals a surprising amount of brain tissue in the memory-forming structure known as the hippocampus, scientists report January 28 in Nature Communications . This result shows that Molaison’s severe deficits can’t be pinned exclusively on the loss of the hippocampus, as some scientists previously thought, says neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum of Boston University, who wasn’t involved in the study.

To ease Molaison’s frequent and severe seizures, surgeon William Beecher Scoville attempted to remove parts of the medial temporal lobe, which includes the hippocampus and other nearby regions. The procedure calmed the seizures but left Molaison largely unable to form new memories. As scientists realized they could link Molaison’s impairments to his drastically altered brain, patient H.M. began to show up in a growing number of research papers.

“The studies on H.M. began the present era of research on how the brain supports memory,” Eichenbaum says.

Because of Molaison’s importance to memory research, Jacopo Annese of the Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego and colleagues decided to study Molaison’s brain after his death using a technique that provides a level of detail surpassing methods used on living brains.

About a year after Molaison died, his brain, fixed in formalin, was flown to the Brain Observatory. There, scientists froze it, sliced it into 2,401 paper-thin wisps and photographed them. With these images, Annese and colleagues created a 3-D model of Molaison’s brain.

Scoville’s postsurgical drawings indicated that the entire hippocampus and nearby structures on both sides of the brain had been removed. The new 3-D model showed otherwise.

Molaison retained a surprisingly large amount of what appeared to be healthy hippocampus, the team found. The lingering tissue was the back end of the hippocampus, where the structure curved up toward the top of the head. Scoville may have missed this bit because the suction tube he used to remove brain tissue didn’t follow the bend, Annese proposes. MRI scans from when Molaison was alive revealed some hippocampal tissue, but not as much as the current study finds. Those scans lacked the anatomical precision of the newer method, Annese says.

Because Molaison retained some hippocampus and yet suffered from severe amnesia, other brain structures were probably needed for his memory, Eichenbaum says. Molaison lacked a brain region called the entorhinal cortex, which serves as a signal relay station between the hippocampus and the rest of the brain. The missing entorhinal cortex probably had a big role in Molaison’s impairment, Eichenbaum says.

Comparing Molaison’s memory deficits with those of people known to lack just the hippocampus might help scientists tease apart the jobs of the various brain structures involved in memory, Eichenbaum says. 

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Patient H.M. & Neurology Research: Ethical or Not?

Although tremendous advances in research and medical ethics have been made since the mid-20th century, questions continue.

The author of a recently published book questions ethics of research involving one of the best-known neurology patients, evoking a passionate response from both the public and the research community.

The positive impact of medical research on the quality of life today is undoubted. Along with the victories, medical research had its failures, such as devastating consequences of early-day psychosurgery, but lessons from these early failures contributed to success of modern research just as much. The case of Henry Molaison, formerly known as Patient H. M., is one of such therapeutic failures that taught us so much. Breakthroughs in understanding of memory aside, an important lesson learned from this and similar cases was that of ethics. Although tremendous advances in research and medical ethics have been made since the mid-20th century, it continues to be questioned. Most recently, the issue came up in Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets , a book by Luke Dittrich. 1

Briefly, in a fragment of his book published in The New York Times Magazine , Dittrich suggests that Suzanne Corkin, PhD, a researcher who dedicated her life to studying Patient H. M., destroyed research data, opposed publication that could question the validity of her work, and violated research ethics principles. 2 The fragment and, shortly after, the book evoked a range of responses from the public, research community, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Corkin conducted her research.

The public found Corkin’s actions, as described by Dittrich, disturbing, judging by the comments on The New York Times website such as “Dr. Corkin comes across as evil!” Many were convinced by Dittrich’s story, which he, as a journalist, so skillfully tells. (I was unable to confirm whether Dittrich has any medical or research background.) In a follow-up interview to The New York Times , Dittrich shares his reasons for telling the story: “I believe Henry’s story is important … because of what his case can teach us about our sometimes ruthless pursuit of knowledge.” 3

Even if we assume for a second that Corkin indeed pursued her research interests ruthlessly, this lesson has been learned many times over, and multiple measures are now in place to minimize the risk to research participants. Thus, Dittrich’s motives for telling his version of this story are unclear to me, as is its educational value. In fact, his mention of “researchers who’d built their careers on [Henry] and who had an interest in presenting his story in a particular way” made me wonder about Dittrich’s interest in telling the story in the way he does.

Unlike the public, I was not disturbed by Corkin’s actions because I am familiar with research practices. I found her actions not only acceptable but perhaps even appropriate, and my opinion echoed that of the research community’s. 4 As I am not currently involved in research and do not represent interests of any research institution, my opinion lacks bias the public might suspect in opinions of researchers.

What I did find disturbing was the fact that the book was published shortly after Corkin’s death, when she could no longer defend her work and remediate the damage the book did to the public perception of research. I was very pleased to see the research community take on this role by sending an open letter to The New York Times . 5 As long as journalists with little knowledge of research practices feel the need to tell their stories, researchers must continue to tell theirs to help the public to form an educated, unbiased opinion. 

References:

1. Dittrich L. Patient H.M.: a Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets. New York: Random House; 2016.

2. Dittrich L. A brain that could not remember. The New York Times Web site. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/magazine/the-brain-that-couldnt-remember.html?_r=1 Accessed October 16, 2016.

3. Carey B. A Brain Surgeon’s Legacy Through a Grandson’s Eyes. The New York Times Web site. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/health/brain-patient-hm-book-dittrich.html Accessed October 16, 2016.

4. Hurley D. New allegations in book about patient HM kick up controversy on medical, scientific ethics . Neurology Today. 2016;16(19):48-50.

5. International Community of Scientists. Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Magazine. The MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Web site. https://bcs.mit.edu/news-events/news/letter-editor-new-york-times-magazine Accessed October 16, 2016.

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THE CASE STUDY OF H.M.

• Cognitive Psychology
• Created by: val16
• Created on: 28-02-16 16:52
• >Henry Molaison (H.M) suffered from severe epilepsy.
• >Surgical procedure was carried out to remove his hippo-campus (learning, emotion and language)
• >Reduced the epilepsy
• >However he was left with severe amnesia- anterograde amnesia - He was unable to form new memories while memories before the incident remained intact.
• >He also suffered from retrograde amnesia- he could not remember events before the operation (11 years)
• >He could no longer form new episodic memories but his ability for procedural learning remained intact
• >Supports the idea that we have a long term memory
• >Supporting the idea that we do have separate STM that is needed to make LTM
• >Suggests our LTM has different components, one part deals with episodic memory (events) and procedural memory (motor skills)

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