Patient H.M. Read Online Free Page B

papyrus, nobody had found the word
brain
in any prior hieratic or hieroglyphic documents. In this one, however, they didn’t just name the brain, they described it in vivid poetic detail—with its “ripples [like] those that occur [in] copper in the smelting process”—along with the membranes and cerebrospinal fluid that swaddled it. The brain, the ancients clearly understood, was a delicate and important organ. It was also an organ that, in general, should be protected and not actively messed with. In the case of a patient with a fractured skull, you might “clean it for him with a swab of linen until you see its fragments of bone,” but the brain itself should remain untouched.
    After the revelations of the Edwin Smith Papyrus, some Egyptologists argued that the Egyptian ankh—which represents the human spinal column—would make a more historically accurate symbol for the medical arts than the traditional snake-twined staff. (That symbol derived from myths about the staff-wielding, snake-revering Greek doctor-god, Asclepius, who was so good at keeping people alive that Zeus killed him to prevent overpopulation.) In any event, the papyrus seemed to prove that modern medicine had begun far earlier than was previously thought, and the cautious treatments it prescribed indicated that at least some ancient doctors were adhering to the central tenet of the Hippocratic oath more than a thousand years before Hippocrates’s birth.
    “Abstain from doing harm….”
    A simple principle, and an enduring one.
    For most of the long history of the healing arts, that principle has guided the care and treatment of our most mysterious and delicate organ.
    Protect it when possible, keep it clean, don’t muck about inside.
    That was the status quo for thousands of years.
    Until suddenly it wasn’t.

THREE
DREAM JOBS
    I n the lab at MIT, Henry was explaining, again, the many moves his family had made when he was a child. Even the scientists found his odyssey confusing. Dr. William Marslen-Wilson, a British psychologist who was interviewing him, worked hard to follow Henry’s story.
    “I see,” Marslen-Wilson said at one point. “Right. It’s all becoming clearer now. A lot of schools, a lot of houses, difficult to sort out.”
    “And from there,” Henry continued, “we moved from Franklin Avenue out to South Coventry, Connecticut. And I had to take a school bus, which stopped—I was the last one to get on it in the morning—and take me home, take me from South Coventry to Willimantic, and I think it was exactly five miles, right from our house to Willimantic.”
    “And you were in…what sort of school were you in?”
    “That was in a high school. Windham High.”
    “Windham?”
    “Windham High School.”
    “Do you remember how to spell Windham?”
    “Well, it’s W-I-N-D-H-A-M.”
    “And what grade were you in there?”
    “Second year of high…and well, half of the third year.”
    “Why only half of the third year?”
    “Because we moved from South Coventry back to Hartford, and I quit school.”
    “Yes.”
    “And it was then…well, then after that we moved from light-housekeeping rooms that we had….”
    “Lighthouse-keeping?”
    “Yes.”
    “Uh, I don’t really understand about this lighthouse-keeping. You mean your parents were working in a lighthouse?”
    Henry’s parents had not worked in a lighthouse. His father was an electrician, his mother a housekeeper. They didn’t make much money. Their savings, small to begin with, had been hammered down to almost nothing in the stock market crash of 1929. A light-housekeeping room was mid-twentieth-century American shorthand for a partly furnished tenement apartment. When Henry was a teenager, his family put their furniture into storage and lived in a string of light-housekeeping rooms in and around Hartford.
    To supplement the family income, Henry took on part-time jobs. He worked as an usher in a movie theater, a stock boy in the shoe department of