For my grandfather, the conflict between him and Foster wasn’t just professional, wasn’t even just personal: It was literally a matter of life or death. Exactly what that meant was another story, one that began at a party, a big blowout at my grandfather’s house. He hosted these parties every year for all the neurosurgeons and neurosurgical residents from both Hartford Hospital and Yale–New Haven Hospital. (Not that Collins would ever come, of course. They’d get wild, these parties. Collins wouldn’t have approved.) Anyway, this particular party took place just a few days after my grandfather had bought himself a new motorcycle, a souped-up BMW. His wife was out of town. He wanted to show it off. He got on, and one of the residents got on behind him, and my grandfather started riding the two of them, fast, all over his big front lawn. Then he decided to try doing a wheelie. He wasn’t used to popping wheelies with the weight of somebody else riding behind him, so the front wheel went up, then it just kept going up. Up and over. Bike flipped backward, high speed, dumping the two of them onto the lawn. No helmets, of course. The resident was fine, my grandfather was knocked unconscious, and the bike landed on top of him. Picture a lawn full of inebriated neurosurgeons standing around in sudden shock looking at Wild Bill sprawled there with a head injury.
He came to after a minute or so, and then the ambulance arrived and carted him off to Hartford Hospital, with a whole armada of surgeons following closely behind. He was wheeled straight to a private room, and he said he was feeling fine, but somebody noticed a suspicious swelling in his stomach area. A ruptured spleen is what they suspected. Word spread, and a few minutes later James Foster himself came into the room, looked him over.
“Bill,” Foster said, “you’ve got a busted spleen. I’m gonna have to operate.”
My grandfather, lying there in that hospital bed, looked up at his nemesis.
“Hell no,” he said.
Foster’s eyebrows rose, and my grandfather continued.
“I know what you’re planning,” he said. “You’re planning to let me die on your table. You want me out of the way. That’s not gonna happen. My spleen’s fine. My spleen stays where it is.”
They went back and forth, arguing heatedly, my grandfather refusing to budge, refusing to consent. Eventually Foster left, shaking his head, and told all the neurosurgeons waiting outside that they had to convince my grandfather to consent, that he’d die otherwise. And so they marched in, one after another, trying to persuade my grandfather to let his enemy save his life. Nothing worked until finally Ben Whitcomb, my grandfather’s second-in-command and longtime best friend, pleaded with him. You’ve gotta do this, Bill, he said. You’ve gotta let him operate.
My grandfather looked at Whitcomb with hurt and confusion in his eyes.
“I don’t know what he paid you, Ben, to make you betray me, but you’re my best friend in the world and if I can’t trust you I can’t trust anybody.”
He consented and was wheeled off to surgery. Foster opened him up and removed his spleen, which was indeed ruptured, and it all went smoothly; a couple of hours later my grandfather was in the recovery room, waking up, still groggy, when one of his residents, Norman Gahm, came in holding a glass jar. The jar was full of formaldehyde, and there was something dark and fibrous floating in it, with a long ragged split down the middle.
“See?” Gahm said. “It was ruptured!”
And yeah, that story might sound hard to believe, too, until you saw the glass jar, with its cargo still floating within it, on a shelf in the office of Gahm, who held on to the damn thing for decades: Wild Bill’s ruptured spleen.
Telling the spleen story reminds Spencer of another great story, about the only other time he knows of that my grandfather was himself operated on. It was to treat a slipped disk in his back. Now, my grandfather developed a lot of the basic tools that spinal surgeons use when they’re treating slipped disks. The Scoville retractor. The Scoville clip. He also pioneered the so-called keyhole approach, through a tiny incision, which became the standard. As it happened, keeper-of-the-spleen Norman Gahm was scheduled to perform the disk operation on him, and on the day of the operation my grandfather got to the hospital early and started ordering people around. What he did was he got them to set up this elaborate system of mirrors in the OR so that later, while he was lying on the table, his back cut open and his spine exposed, with only a local anesthetic, he could look over his own surgeon’s shoulder. He supervised his own operation. Spencer never heard of anyone else doing that, before or since.
The thing was, he could get away with it. With everything. Partly it was the era—those were different times—and partly it was that Spencer didn’t think there was another neurosurgeon in the state of Connecticut as skilled in the operating room as Bill Scoville. Those hands of his: quick, adroit, steady, creative. Spencer loved to watch him work.
So on that morning in question, the one he wanted to tell me about, after the lady was rolled into the OR and my grandfather was getting all prepped and ready to go, Spencer was eager to watch him do what he was going to do. You could call him wild, you could say he took chances others didn’t, but before you criticized him too harshly you needed to take a look at him scrubbing up. Spencer never saw a surgeon take as much care as my grandfather did scrubbing up. He didn’t just wash his hands, he dipped them in a tub of hydrochloric acid! Spencer had never seen anything like it. Must have been hell on his skin. Also, his surgical mask. Same mask that everyone else wore, paper-thin, with the elastic around the back of the head. But if you looked closely you’d see that underneath the mask my grandfather had two rubber tubes, one in each corner of his mouth, and they snaked out from his mouth and curved around behind the mask like snorkels. So that when he breathed, even through the mask, those exhalations didn’t go anywhere near the exposed insides of his patients. That level of care was rare.
Sometimes things still went wrong, of course. One of the first things Spencer learned when he began his Hartford Hospital residency was that all of my grandfather’s residents were expected to regularly head over to the Hartford veterans’ hospital nursing center and check in on a guy there named Gunner. Gunner had been a patient of my grandfather’s with a ruptured disk. The operation itself was usually easy enough, but in Gunner’s case my grandfather decided to perform it in an unusual way, with Gunner sitting in a chair instead of lying on a stretcher. Which would have been fine except that an air embolism got into his bloodstream and rose up and blocked off Gunner’s basilar artery, causing a massive stroke in his brain stem and obliterating his motor functions. From then on all he could do was move his eyes, right for yes and left for no. He still could think fine, but he was totally locked in. My grandfather would always send residents to check up on him, to make sure he was being tended to. And my grandfather would go himself, too, sometimes. He’d bring flowers.
But back to the story he wanted to tell me. The lobotomy story. So there the woman was, lying on her back, muttering, “Sonofabitchsonofabitchsonofabitch.” And there my grandfather was, scrubbed and ready to go. Spencer watched as my grandfather prepared, watched as he began, watched him slice two little slits right above her eyebrows, watched him pry them open with retractors, exposing the skull beneath. Those eyebrow slits were a bit of a novelty, incidentally. A little tweak: Rather than slicing that half-moon arc across the top of their heads and rolling their foreheads down, like he used to, he’d started making just those two little slits, slits that would be concealed by their eyebrows. That was another example of his constant tinkering, of his constant attempts to improve even his oldest procedures. His orbital undercutting lobotomy was a very old procedure by then, in the mid-1970s. A quarter century old. Not only was it old, it was rare. People weren’t performing many lobotomies by then. They’d fallen out of favor, become stigmatized. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Clockwork Orange, Planet of the Apes: Popular culture, and popular opinion, had turned against it. Even within the medical community, it had become a sort of black sheep. That was anot
her reason for the friction between my grandfather and the Yale chief of neurosurgery: Collins hated lobotomies, and he hated the fact that my grandfather was making his Yale residents, like Spencer, accomplices to them.
As for Spencer, he didn’t know what to think. He was just there to absorb, to learn. He stood on that stool behind my grandfather, watched him bring his trephine drill down onto the woman’s forehead, watched him cut out those two plugs of bone and put them to the side, watched him pick up the suction catheter and the flat brain spatula and lean in and begin the work. He watched my grandfather lesion the right hemisphere of the woman’s brain first, and he listened as she continued her incessant cursing, lying there under the bright lights: “sonofabitchsonofabitchsonofabitch.” Watched as she kept it up throughout the first half of the operation and that first hemisphere. Watched as my grandfather carefully withdrew his tools, then inserted them into the second hole in her head and started in on the left hemisphere. My grandfather carefully measured how far in he’d inserted the suction catheter, then began to slowly pivot the tool, starting to make the second lesion. She was still cursing as he began to cut—“sonofabitchsonofabitchsonofabitch”—and then suddenly—“sonofabitchsonofabitchsonofabi…”—she stopped. My grandfather paused, waited to see if she’d start in again. She didn’t. Then he turned and looked back at Spencer.
It’s been four decades since that day in the OR, and though Spencer went on to have a long and illustrious career, eventually becoming the head of the Yale department of neurosurgery and the president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, he’ll always remember exactly what my grandfather said to him then, back in that long-gone era when giants like Wild Bill still roamed the earth, leaving all those great stories in their wake.
“Spencer,” he said, “we’ve just found the son-of-a-bitch center!”
TWENTY-FOUR
THE MIT RESEARCH PROJECT KNOWN AS THE AMNESIC PATIENT H.M.
My mother remembers spending many nights sitting by her bedroom window holding an empty tin can to her ear. Her bedroom was on the second floor of their house, 334 North Steele Road, in a tree-shaded neighborhood of West Hartford, Connecticut. She had removed the top of the can and nailed a hole through the bottom of it, then inserted a thick string, which she tied into a fat knot so that even when she tugged on it, it wouldn’t come loose. The string extended from the bottom of the can and stretched across North Steele Road to a house directly opposite hers and into another second-floor bedroom window, where one of her best friends, Suzanne, would be speaking into a tin can of her own. The two houses were identical to each other, designed by the same architect, mirror images on opposite sides of the street. Suzanne’s words vibrated along the taut string, then resonated in the can and thrummed in my mother’s ear.
They became neighbors in first grade and stayed neighbors through high school, and neither Suzanne nor my mother remembers exactly how old they were when they began making those tin can telephones, or when they outgrew them. They don’t remember the specifics of their conversations. They might have talked about friends, movies, music. My mom’s dog, Wiggles; Suzanne’s dog, Skippy. The latest radio episodes of The Shadow and The Lone Ranger. Maybe, eventually, boys.
Two young girls in suburban postwar America, proto-texting deep into the night.
In the winter, on weekends, my grandfather would often take Suzanne and my mother and my uncles Peter and Barrett along on ski trips, driving to and from the mountains at his usual breakneck speeds. Suzanne’s house and my mother’s were identical, but their fathers were very different: Suzanne’s was an unassuming engine-parts salesman; my grandfather was a dashing neurosurgeon with a rotating fleet of sports cars. From an early age, Suzanne decided she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up. She began assembling her own first-aid kits and taking them off to summer camp with her so she could tend to any skinned knees or bee stings she encountered among her camp mates.
Whatever admiration Suzanne felt for my grandfather, there is evidence it was not mutual. Once, during high school, my uncle Barrett got into a fistfight in their backyard with another boy. A crowd of children gathered, and my grandfather watched, too. Suzanne was there. She was rooting for the other boy. When Barrett lost, my grandfather grabbed Suzanne by the arm and dragged her off the property, telling her she was no longer welcome in his home. It was the only time my mother ever saw her father engaging in an act of physical aggression against another person.
In 1955, two years after Henry’s operation, my mom and Suzanne both graduated from the private Oxford School in West Hartford, and the following fall both of them enrolled at Smith College. Suzanne studied premed, but her first chemistry course dissuaded her from her childhood goal of becoming a medical doctor, so she shifted to psychology. My mom studied English. Postcollege, the paths taken by the two of them diverged. After a stint as an Avon Lady, my mom discovered a passion for early childhood education and opened a series of progressively minded daycares, models of socioeconomic and racial integration. Suzanne, meanwhile, stayed in the world of higher education and became a university professor and a PhD. But they remained friends. They both eventually settled in the Boston area, where I was born. Growing up, I saw Suzanne now and then. My mom would have her over for dinner, or we’d all go out to eat. Suzanne had gotten married and divorced by then and changed her last name to Corkin. She had three kids, two boys and a girl, all roughly my age.
I knew Suzanne was my mom’s oldest friend, but I didn’t know much about her beyond that.
I know a lot more now.
I know, for example, that when my grandfather died and my mother was helping settle his estate, she chose to give Suzanne an unusual memento: the anonymous human skull that he’d kept in his home office.
I also know that Suzanne inherited much more than that skull from my grandfather.
Decades before my grandfather died, she’d already taken possession of his most famous patient.
—
After graduating from Smith, Suzanne Corkin moved to Montreal to pursue a doctorate in psychology at McGill. It was 1960, and shortly after she arrived she read a recent paper in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry and realized that the William Beecher Scoville who co-authored it was the same William Beecher Scoville she’d grown up across the street from, the dashing neurosurgeon who was the father of one of her oldest friends. The other author, of course, was Brenda Milner. A year later, Corkin had the opportunity to join Milner’s laboratory at the Montreal Neurological Institute, and she took it. She began working on her PhD thesis there, an exploration of the effects of different types of brain lesions on somesthetic function, otherwise known as sense of touch. Most of Corkin’s research subjects were patients of Wilder Penfield’s, men and women he’d operated on to treat their epilepsy. Corkin would run them through various tasks, such as trying to identify common objects—a comb, a bottle cap, a book of matches—simply by handling them, or trying to see at which moment, when she moved two sharp points slowly together on their skin, the two points became indistinguishable from each other. Like her mentor Milner, Corkin became a meticulous investigator, keeping careful notes, always trying to determine whether some sensory deficits might have been caused by aspects of the patients’ personal histories rather than their brain lesions, such as one subject whose dulled sense of touch Corkin assumed was “probably attributable to calluses on both thumbs, a result of the patient’s janitorial work.”
Although memory wasn’t Corkin’s focus, one of the tests in her arsenal did relate to memory. It was called a tactually guided maze, and it was supposed to measure a research subject’s ability to learn to navigate a labyrinth by touch alone. The maze was cut into a sheet of aluminum over a wooden box and hidden behind a curtain. Subjects would reach their hands through the curtain and use a stylus to try to get from the beginning to the end of the maze, and Corkin would ring a bell every time the stylus hit a dead end. Using a stopwatch, she would time how long it too
k subjects to reach the finish, then she would run them through the maze again and again, seeing if they eventually got faster and made fewer errors. Her main intention was to measure the subjects’ ability to learn the route, but of course this was also a sort of memory task: If the subjects got better at solving the maze, it was because they were remembering the correct path. Most of Penfield’s patients had no trouble with the task. Whatever small unilateral lesions he’d made in their brains did not at all compromise their ability to learn by touch or any other sense.
Then, in May 1962, Henry visited the Montreal Neurological Institute. Milner had organized the visit, and it was the first time she had an opportunity to observe Henry outside of my grandfather’s office in Hartford. Henry rode the night train up with his mother, Lizzie. They stayed for a week, spending their nights at a rooming house near the Neuro. Lizzie, who’d spent most of her life in sleepy Connecticut and rural Louisiana, seemed intimidated by the bustle and tumult of Montreal. Milner encouraged her to get out and explore the city, but Lizzie chose not to and instead spent most of her days sitting on a bench in a hallway at the Neuro, waiting for the scientists to finish doing whatever they were doing to her son. Milner worried that Lizzie was going to get bored, but she had no such worries about Henry. For one thing, it seemed unlikely that when every minute was entirely new to you, detached and separate from the endless chain of minutes that preceded it, boredom was even possible. For another thing, they kept him busy.
During that week, Henry submitted to a huge number of tests. Many were repeats of ones he had taken before, though he didn’t recall having done so. Milner and her graduate students retested his IQ, his immediate recall of numbers, and his ability to trace a star in a mirror, among other things. Milner wanted to see if the passage of time had caused any changes to Henry’s condition. It had not, in any significant way. Milner also allowed her graduate students their own time with Henry, to present him any new tasks that they thought might be illuminating. Henry was not quite famous yet, but his unique importance as a research subject was becoming clear. Even at the Neuro, where working with lesion patients was routine, Henry stood out, his lesions bilateral, his amnesia deeper, his scientific utility unquestionable.
Patient H.M. Page 27