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  • Patient H.M.

  • A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets
  • Written by: Luke Dittrich
  • Narrated by: George Newbern
  • Length: 14 hrs and 34 mins
  • 4.7 out of 5 stars (6 ratings)

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Patient H.M.

Written by: Luke Dittrich
Narrated by: George Newbern
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Publisher's Summary

“Oliver Sacks meets Stephen King”* in this propulsive, haunting journey into the life of the most studied human research subject of all time, the amnesic known as Patient H.M. For listeners of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks comes a story that has much to teach us about our relentless pursuit of knowledge.

Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner

Named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post , New York Post, NPR, The Economist, New York, Wired, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage

In 1953, a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison - who suffered from severe epilepsy - received a radical new version of the then-common lobotomy, targeting the most mysterious structures in the brain. The operation failed to eliminate Henry’s seizures, but it did have an unintended effect: Henry was left profoundly amnesic, unable to create long-term memories. Over the next 60 years, Patient H.M., as Henry was known, became the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today. 

Patient H.M. is, at times, a deeply personal journey. Dittrich’s grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison - and thousands of other patients. The author’s investigation into the dark roots of modern memory science ultimately forces him to confront unsettling secrets in his own family history and to reveal the tragedy that fueled his grandfather’s relentless experimentation - experimentation that would revolutionize our understanding of ourselves. 

Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. He takes listeners inside the old asylums and operating theaters where psychosurgeons, as they called themselves, conducted their human experiments, and behind the scenes of a bitter custody battle over the ownership of the most important brain in the world. Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide.

“An exciting, artful blend of family and medical history.” (The New York Times)

* Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

©2016 Luke Dittrich (P)2016 Random House Audio

What the critics say

"Oliver Sacks meets Stephen King in a piercing study of one of psychiatric medicine's darker hours.... A mesmerizing, maddening story and a model of journalistic investigation." (Kirkus Reviews)

"Patient H.M. tells one of the most fascinating and disturbing stories in the annals of medicine, weaving in ethics, philosophy, a personal saga, the history of neurosurgery, the mysteries of human memory, and an exploration of human ego." (Sheri Fink, MD, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Five Days at Memorial)

“In prose both elegant and intimate, and often thrilling, Patient H.M. is an important book about the wages not of sin but of science. It is deeply reported and surprisingly emotional, at times poignant, at others shocking.... A scintillating book, infused with humanity.” (The Washington Post)

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