Dittrich shifts between Molaison’s and his grandfather’s disturbing stories, detailing ethical dilemmas alongside scientific history ... Admirably, Dittrich bares family secrets — including a stunner late in the book — and doesn’t flinch from his grandfather’s flaws ... Beautifully told, Patient H.M. should remind us how close we are in time to gargantuan errors in the practice of medicine.
Patient H.M. is part pop science book, part family history, and part worrying essay about the ethics of medical research ... Most readers won't be in a position to judge the science (I'm not), but the writing is satisfying and graceful, with a flair for dramatic emphasis that only occasionally veers into showiness ... The person of H.M. remains necessarily hazy, but Dittrich writes a vivid and painful story of the dark tension between desire for knowledge and that most basic tenet: First, do no harm.
[The first two-thirds] are an exciting, artful blend of family and medical history — expertly structured, told in a jiggly, vérité style. They make clear that H.M.’s surgery did not happen in a vacuum. It was part of a much larger and unseemly trend ... Any book with neuroscience this complex and content this provocative really needs footnotes. This book has none. Zero. And that’s just weird. If Mr. Dittrich is going to insist on stringent documentation from M.I.T., he ought to do the same himself. This controversy, however, should not obscure the fine personal and historical story Mr. Dittrich tells, which remains the most interesting material in the book.
Surgical procedures are described in almost excessive detail. The book is replete with invented dialogue...It’s even more frustrating that the book is reference-free, so there is no way of checking what is invented, or the sources for what is not. But such digressions are only minor irritations compared with the many disconnected detours the book takes.
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 ... Patient H.M. is a scintillating book, infused with humanity.
...what Dittrich shows through painstaking and thorough reporting is how ego and self-regard fueled questionable scientific and ethical decisions, not only through the heyday of lobotomy, but long after.
Patient H.M., the overstuffed result of Dittrich’s six years of reporting, tries to be many things at once: a lyrical meditation on the nature of memory, an excavation of a disturbing and dark family history, and a damning illustration of the consequences of sacrificing ethics in the name of scientific inquiry. The end result is both spellbinding and frustrating, a paradox of a book that is simultaneously conscientious and careless, engrossing and digressive, troubling and troublesome.
Mr Dittrich has honed the narrative to a fine edge by the time his grandfather is standing over H.M.’s brain, scalpel in hand, unable to find the epileptogenic focus, the brain region responsible for the seizures ... H.M.’s fate is not the book’s only shocking tale. The family secret referred to in the book’s subtitle is foreshadowed early on, but its revelation is no less powerful when it comes.
