Henry lived a private and highly circumscribed life. Members of my lab and other colleagues who interacted with him, as well as the staff at the MIT CRC and Bickford, were all extremely careful to keep his real identity secret; until his death, he was known to the outside world only as H.M. Over the course of twenty-five years, however, he and his story became increasingly famous. His case intrigued journalists, artists, and the general public, while raising ethical questions about experimental medical interventions. People were fascinated by the story of such profound and ongoing amnesia.
The staff at Bickford knew that Henry had a special importance to the world, and I instructed them not to discuss him and his case outside the nursing home. I received many requests from media outlets to interview and videotape Henry, but I shielded him from too much exposure, and asked my lab members not to take photographs or videos of him. To my knowledge, no videos of him exist. I did allow a science writer, Philip J. Hilts, to meet Henry and spend time in my lab for his 1995 book Memory’s Ghost: The Strange Tale of Mr. M. and the Nature of Memory. Hilts talked extensively with Henry and even had his own desk in my lab while he was gathering information.
Excerpts of my 1992 interview with Henry that appeared in subsequent radio programs helped the public, as well as scientists, put a human voice to the more impersonal language of Henry’s case study. This conversation also revealed his memory deficit unmistakably—he repeated the same thoughts several times and was unable to tell me the current month and year, or what he had for lunch.
I was with Henry when he was admitted to Bickford in December 1980. Mrs. Herrick drove him and his few belongings the fifteen miles from her home in Hartford. He was assigned a room on the second floor of the building, a small facility decorated in pastel greens, flowered wall-paper, and oak furniture. Henry adjusted well to his new life at Bickford, and the staff described him as mild-mannered, cooperative, and compatible with the other patients. After Mrs. Herrick died the following year, the nursing home became the center of Henry’s universe; he spent the final twenty-eight years of his life as a resident there.
At Bickford, Henry had a new lifestyle, one that gave him the constant care of staff members, along with a more social group environment. Over nearly three decades, Henry lived in different rooms (often with a roommate), saw the facility undergo extensive remodeling, and interacted with many different nurses and aides, some of whom stayed there as long as he did. During that time, Henry became a beloved fixture at the home, well known and liked by everyone. Members of my lab sent him pictures of themselves so that his bulletin board would have the same human touch as other patients’ rooms.
For Henry, each encounter was fleeting because of his inability to store memories of events and facts, but although he could not remember names or details, many staff members believed that he had a sense of who they were. Henry was an unusual patient in this setting. At fifty-five, he was younger than most of the other residents when he arrived. In addition, he was intelligent, alert, and in relatively good health. In some ways, however, caring for Henry was similar to managing the patients with dementia. They also forgot recent events and information, such as the nurses’ names, while they could still talk about their childhood and the town where they grew up. Like the demented patients, Henry needed prompting to carry out even the simplest daily activities. He was a mentally alert adult man who nevertheless had to be supervised and directed like a child.
Henry was always courteous toward the staff at Bickford. He greeted them with his wide, dimpled smile and apologized frequently for needing their help. For someone with such a severe memory problem, Henry was surprisingly easygoing. He was cheerful and never seemed uncomfortable or nervous when interacting with nurses and aides, behaving as if everyone were an old friend.
Unlike the simple life he had spent at home with his parents and then with Mrs. Herrick, Henry’s time in the nursing home offered many opportunities for engaging in activities and interacting with lots of people. Overall, he was a sociable person one-on-one but a quiet participant in group situations. He willingly took part in all sorts of activities—choral practice, Bingo, Bible study, film watching, poetry readings, arts and crafts, and bowling. He spent time in the lounge watching TV and liked to sit in the small courtyard in front of the facility. He continued to do crossword and other word puzzles; my lab gave him a monthly subscription to a crossword publication, so he always had a fresh supply. He attended special events held at the home and even danced the hula at a Hawaiian party. With his crafts projects, he was a perfectionist, displaying the attention to detail he had shown in the skilled labor of his younger days. One of my treasured possessions is a wooden spoon that Henry had painted blue and decorated with sponge-texture and small flowers with white petals and red centers. The Bickford staff kindly gave it to me the last time I visited him.
Henry was an animal lover. I have a touching picture of him as a young teenager, cradling two kittens in his arms. Fortuitously, Bickford was home to a variety of pets. For a while, they had a rabbit that Henry liked to hold in his lap. A singing cockatiel, Luigi, was in residence for more than ten years; other inhabitants included lovebirds, finches, and parakeets. Henry enjoyed watching the birds. A black-and-white dog named Sadie arrived as a puppy and remained there throughout Henry’s stay. In the last years of his life, she often sat next to his wheelchair while he patted her, and she attended his burial.
Although Henry could not form relationships in the usual sense, he did interact with other patients and had an easy rapport with the staff at Bickford. He ate his meals with fellow residents at round wooden tables in the dining room, and he seemed to prefer the company of men. A couple of years into his stay, he made friends with another patient, Charlie, and they often watched TV together. In 1985, staff members reported that Henry enjoyed poker and woodworking groups designed for men only. He told the nurses that he liked to “let his hair down” and be one of the guys. Later in life, he did become friends with a female patient named Peggy, and the two were once crowned Prom King and Queen of the nursing home.
Henry never showed a romantic interest in women, however, and always behaved with propriety. In fact, he once had trouble with an attractive female patient who made sexual advances toward him in public, which embarrassed and confused him. The nurses told me that he would spend time with her only if she avoided using “sexually inappropriate suggestions and language.” At these times, Henry would respond, “Oh, I can’t do that. My doctor told me I can’t do that.” But if she was well behaved, “he would hold hands with her, and they would talk and talk about everything, and it was really nice.”
Life in the nursing home, however, was not always smooth for Henry. His mood was sometimes marked by confusion, frustration, and anger. From time to time, he would become agitated if another patient was loud or wanted to watch a TV show that he did not. He could become irritated easily by noise or other physical discomforts, such as abdominal and joint pain. Although he continued to be a personable, good-humored patient, he sometimes appeared anxious and exhibited bizarre behavior. Much of it undoubtedly arose from his memory impairment and his difficulty communicating with the staff about his needs and wishes. Identifying and fixing the source of his problems was complicated. Henry could become confused and unable to communicate the exact reason for his irritation; instead, he acted out. When he had trouble dealing with anger, pain, sadness, or frustration, he might respond by hitting something, throwing an object, or threatening to jump out the first-floor window.
One night in 1982, Henry left his bed and stumbled out of his room, yelling that other patients were making noise and keeping him awake. He swung at staff members and slammed his hand against the wall, missing a nurse. Two police officers were called to the scene; Henry was given anti-anxiety medication, and began to calm down. The next day, when asked if he remembered what had happened the night before, he answered, “I don’t remember—that’s my problem.” When pressed whether he remembered two bi
g policemen, he said, “Sometimes it’s better not to remember.”
During the autumn of 1982, Henry became angry more often than usual. His displays of strong emotion were reminiscent of his outbursts in 1970 at home with his mother and at the Regional Center where he worked. Henry never exhibited this behavior when he visited us at the MIT CRC, where he had his own room and the environment was more tranquil. There, he received VIP attention and had lots of positive social interactions. His visits with people from my lab kept him in good spirits, bringing out the best side of his personality; he enjoyed the mental and social stimulation. Henry’s emotional episodes and irritability at Bickford forced the staff in October 1982 to consider moving him to a nearby mental health care facility in Newington, Connecticut. Luckily, and for no apparent reason, his behavior returned to normal, so a transfer was unnecessary. After that episode, Henry sometimes went through bad times, but they were never more than the staff could handle.
Beginning in the 1980s, Henry consistently identified me as a friend from high school. The most likely explanation for this false recognition is that during his multiple visits to MIT, which took place on a regular basis from 1966 through 2002, he steadily built up a mental schema incorporating and linking my face, name, profession, and the CRC. He must have felt a vague sense of familiarity for me. If I gave him a list of last names all beginning with C and asked which one was my name, he chose Corkin. In 1984, I posed the question, “Who am I?” and Henry replied, “Doctress . . . Corkrin.” (He used that unique Henryism, “Doctress,” on several occasions.) When asked where he knew me from, he replied, “East Hartford High School.” I had the following exchange with Henry during our 1992 conversation:
SC: Have we ever met before, you and I?
HM: Yes, I think we have.
SC: Where?
HM: Well, in high school.
SC: In high school.
HM: Yes.
SC: What high school?
HM: In East Hartford.
SC: And what year was that—about?
HM: 1945.
SC: Have we ever met any other place? . . .
HM: Or ’46. See, I come way back myself in a way, because I remember I skipped a year in school.
SC: Right. Have we ever met anyplace besides high school?
HM (pause): Tell you the truth, I can’t—no. I don’t think so.
SC: Why am I here now?
HM: Well, you’re just having an interview with me, I say. That’s what I think right now.
During the interview, I neglected to ask him what my name was, so I asked him on the way back to his room. He first said, “I don’t know,” but then said, “I think of Beverly.” I said, “No, it’s Suzanne.” Then he said, “Suzanne Corkin.” In May 2005, a nurse at Bickford said to Henry, “I was just talking to a friend of yours in Boston, Suzanne,” and he immediately said “Oh, Corkin.” Although he had formed an association between my first and last names, when asked explicitly who I was, he did not know.
One name, Scoville, did stick in his mind because he had learned it before his operation. At Bickford, Henry often referred to Dr. Scoville, and he linked the name to the sense he had of his own importance to medicine. He even exploited the connection to try to get his way, telling people that “Dr. Scoville said you should do this,” or “Dr. Scoville says it’s supposed to be this way.” Once, Henry’s roommate got fed up and said he was tired of hearing about “Dr. Screwball.” Henry quickly corrected his roommate’s pronunciation.
In addition to his memory impairment, Henry began to deal with the degradations of old age, developing an increasing number of physical complaints and struggling with simple daily tasks. He had numerous falls, some followed by unconsciousness or injury; in 1985, a tumble resulted in the fracture of his right ankle and left hip. The following year, at age sixty, he had his left hip joint replaced. After both incidents, he went through several weeks of physical therapy until he could use a walker on his own. Henry had a history of difficulties with locomotion, and always walked with a slow, awkward gait. Even so, he was able to master the walker—a testament to his ability to learn new motor skills—but he occasionally forgot he needed the walker and tried unsuccessfully to walk on his own. On a few occasions, these attempts resulted in more falls. The contrast between the integrity of his nondeclarative memory and his lack of declarative memory was striking—and in this case dangerous.
During his hip-replacement hospitalization in July 1986, he had a grand mal seizure and a transient fever. His doctor wrote to me that after the surgery Henry was “troubled by insomnia, nocturnal anxiety, and fear of being alone.” He would complain of an upset stomach and buzzing in his right ear, as well as pain in his hip area. It took him some time to recover fully from the surgery. In September 1986, when he visited the MIT CRC, the nursing staff noted that Henry was behaving strangely; he rang his bell frequently with complaints, slept restlessly, made nonsensical comments, and had a “wild-eyed expression.” One nurse noted that Henry was not smiling and telling his usual stories and jokes. This temporary alteration in Henry’s behavior was probably a side effect of the anesthesia administered during his hip replacement. Older individuals do not process anesthetics as well as young adults, and the residual substances may have interacted with pain medications given to Henry after his operation. Anesthesia side effects may last three months or longer in older adults because of the longer time needed for the drugs to clear out of their bodies. Eventually, the odd behavior stopped and Henry returned to normal.
Henry still had occasional seizures, but major attacks came infrequently—only once or twice a year—and some years were seizure-free. He saw a local doctor every other month and occasionally went to Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford for emergency care. Sometimes, during visits to MIT, he consulted with and had procedures performed by doctors in Cambridge. Henry’s memory loss made it impossible for him to give an accurate account of his physical complaints, creating an extra challenge for the doctors who evaluated and treated him. A neurologist at the Mass General who examined Henry in 1984 noted that he tended to downplay the significance of his medical problems. He sometimes worried about being a bother to people, and this attitude may have led him to gloss over his physical ailments.
One symptom that regularly plagued Henry was his tinnitus, a ringing in the ears, which is a common side effect of Dilantin. He gave the neurologist the gist of his tinnitus but could not recount specific details about when it occurred or got worse. One nurse at Bickford gave us a fuller account, however, describing the devastating recurring episodes Henry had suffered for three to four months in 1984. At first, they occurred several times a week, and then once a day. They began early in the morning when Henry was still in bed. The nurses often found him with a pillow over his head, irritable and refusing to be touched or helped. On several occasions, he asked for a gun so he could kill himself to end the suffering. During these episodes, he reported a high-pitched, shrill sound that persisted for two to eight hours. They were not seizures, and an examination by an ENT doctor did not uncover a trigger in his inner ear. The Mass General neurologist instructed Bickford to substitute Tegretol for Dilantin to control Henry’s seizures, and the torturous episodes decreased.
Although subdued, Henry’s tinnitus persisted and contributed to his bouts of discomfort and agitation. He had a particular sensitivity to noise, complaining often about the racket from other patients and the air conditioner in his room. The Bickford staff found him several times putting cotton balls in his ears to relieve the ringing, and when it was particularly bad, he would refuse meals—a noteworthy occurrence, given Henry’s healthy appetite. In addition to his tinnitus, Henry complained of vague symptoms such as stomach pain or neck discomfort. The staff found that simply asking him to identify the problem was not helpful because he had already forgotten the source; instead, they had to ask him specific yes-or-no questions to find a remedy. Sometimes he would stay in bed, and the discomfort would resolve itself.
Henry was part of my life for decades, and although I had to maintain my unbiased role as a researcher, it was impossible not to care about this pleasant, gentle man. In 1986, when Henry celebrated his sixtieth birthday at MIT, members of my lab and the CRC staff organized a party in his honor; our rendition of “Happy Birthday” brought a big smile to his face—as did the cake and ice cream. We always tried to make him feel like a member of our team by remembering his birthday, sending him Christmas presents, and making sure he always had his crosswords. Toward the end of his life, I contacted the staff at Bickford on a weekly basis to check up on him.
Throughout the 1990s, Henry had good and bad days at the nursing home. On good days, he greeted the aides with his characteristic wink and smile; on bad days, he moaned about pain or discomfort. His usual pace became more sluggish, he spoke and moved slowly, and he needed help with everyday tasks. He became less willing to move about on his own, sometimes traveling to the dining room for his meals in a wheelchair. In 1999, a fall led to another broken ankle, which further hampered his independence. Still, he remained relatively well through 2001, after which he was beset by further maladies. He developed osteoporosis, suffered from sleep apnea, and had intermittent high blood pressure. After he died, we learned from his autopsy report that, despite regular medical care, he had been afflicted with several undiagnosed disorders: atherosclerosis, kidney disease, and colon cancer. One or more of these conditions may have been the source of his incontinence and constant need to use the bathroom as he got older. At age seventy-five, he became fully dependent on a wheelchair to move from place to place. Even then, however, his intellect and sense of humor remained intact. In March 2002, during a visit to MIT, a researcher asked Henry whether he had slept well. “I didn’t stay awake to find out,” he replied.
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