Hartford on the Brain

Start at 333 North Steele Road

Suzanne Corkin (née Hammond) was born at Hartford Hospital and was an only child. Dr. Corkin grew up in West Hartford, directly across the street from William Scoville, at 333 North Steele Rd, and was best friends with his daughter, Alison Scoville Dittrich. The two went to school together from third grade until college and stayed very close after that. Dr. Corkin went to the Oxford School in West Hartford. She went to college at Smith College and then received her PhD from McGill University. While there, she read an article about Henry Molaison.  Mr. Molaison received psychosurgery at Hartford Hospital to relieve seizures and was left with a profound memory deficit.  You can learn more about him and the surgery here.  Her dissertation advisor, Brenda Milner, asked if she would like to work with him. Her dissertation was entitled “Somesthetic function after focal cerebral damage” which examined Mr. Molaison’s sense of touch. In 1964 she began working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of Hans-Lukas Teuber. When he died, she became the director of the lab. She devoted her career to working with Mr. Molaison and to studying how human memory works and the brain substrates of memory in a variety of populations.  She discovered that Mr. Molaison had profound short-term memory loss.  He could remember very little from after the time of the surgery for the rest of his life.  According to Dr. Corkin: If you talked to him in the afternoon and said, “Have you had lunch?,” he would say, “I don’t know” or “I guess so,” but he would not remember what he had had. And if you asked, “What was your last meal?,” he wouldn’t know what it was.

She was an early user of functional imaging like MRI and fMRI to help understand how memory works. She published over 150 research articles and was author or co-author of 10 books. She received a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health and the Baltes Distinguished Research Achievement Award from the American Psychological Association, Division on Aging. She also became a committed advocate for increasing women in science, giving talks on the topic, and received the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Undergraduate Advising Award at MIT. After her death, a group of former students published this tribute to her.

We were fortunate to have Dr. Corkin speak at Trinity College. You can watch the full talk here “The Amnesic Patient HM: A Half Century of Learning About Memory.”

Here is a clip where she talks about whether Mr. Molaison has a sense of self.

Short-Corkin-Clip

Suzanne Corkin Obituary

After her death, Dr. Scoville’s grandson, Luke Dittrich wrote a book Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets. In it he claimed that Dr. Corkin tried to hide the existence of a lesion in the orbitofrontal lobe and that she shredded data to cover errors. This was refuted in a letter to the New York Times signed by over 200 scientists, and in the published work. In fact, she had published data that she claimed suggested an orbitofrontal lesion in 1983 (Eichenbaum et al., 1983).

In Defense of Suzanne Corkin

 

Directly across the street at 334 North Steele Road was the home of William Beecher Scoville, the surgeon who performed the surgery on Mr. Molaison.

William Beecher Scoville established the Department of Neurosurgery at Hartford Hospital in 1939. William Beecher Scoville was a descendent of Harriet Beecher Stowe. He was born in Philadelphia in 1905 to Samuel and Katherine Gallaudet (Trumbull) Scoville. His mother was a descendant of Thomas Gallaudet. He attended Loomis School, received his undergraduate degree at Yale University and his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. His first wife was Emily Learned Scoville and they had three children that they raised at 334 North Steele Road in West Hartford, Barrett, Alison, and Peter. In 1941 he developed the first neurosurgery residency program in Connecticut. His students referred to him as “Wild Bill.” ‘Bill drove fast, lived hard and operated where angels feared to tread,” said Dr. David Crombie, former chief of surgery at Hartford Hospital who met Scoville in the early 1960s as an intern at the hospital and became friends with his son. Scoville’s wife had schizophrenia and this may have played a role in his desire to find surgical options for treating mental illnesses. In the book written by his grandson, Luke Dittrick, Dittrick speculates that Dr. Scoville may have actually performed surgery on his wife, Emily Learned Scoville.

In addition to the surgery on Mr. Molaison, Dr. Scoville is known for a coiled aneurysm clip that he invented. His second marriage was to Helene Deniau Scoville, with whom he had two children Sophie and William. Dr. Scoville’s brother was Rev. Gordon Scoville, the founding pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in West Hartford. Dr. Scoville had a life-long interest in cars and was known for driving his red Jaguar or motorcycle on Steele Road and tinkering with cars in his spare time. He was an early proponent for motorcycle helmets but never wore one himself. Scoville was killed in 1984, at the age of 78, when he backed up his car on the highway to get to an exit he had missed.

 

 

 

 

Start at the American School for the Deaf on 139 North Main Street. You can learn more about the American School for the Deaf here in this video from the West Hartford Historical Center.

 

Turn right (south) on North Main Street and continue to Fern Street.  Turn right on Fern Street until you come to Walden Street.  218 Walden was the home of Alan Hart.

Alan Hart was a professor in psychology at the University of Hartford, he gave countless community lectures, and he published an article in the Hartford Courant advocating against racism as the city grew more diverse. During his time in Hartford, he played a very important role in the medical response to tuberculosis, and he worked for the state tuberculosis commission. He is the first known person to undergo gender affirming surgery in 1917 in the United States, and most likely, his was the first known gender affirming surgery, period. These two experiences are deeply intertwined, both in Hart’s own lived experience and the histories of gender affirming care and infectious diseases. Alan Hart made concerted efforts throughout his life to distance himself from the life he lived before his gender affirming surgery. Thus, we can ask, what are the ethics of digging so deeply into Hart’s life, pre-transition, when he so clearly wanted to separate himself from it? That said, Alan was born in Kansas, and he moved frequently. He found himself between New York and Stanford University for his undergrad, in Oregon for medical school, and in Hartford in 1947. Much of Alan’s movement across the states was more than a search for job opportunities. Hart intentionally distanced himself from New York and other places where his gender left him victimized at the hands of colleagues looking to reduce his credibility, and at the hands of a society which was equally unwelcome. For Alan, leaving the state of New York was more akin to an act of necessary escape, which frames Hartford as a place of safety in that era of the mid 20th century. Hart was also affected by the period’s concerns of gender and sense of place in biology. Alan’s identity as a man played an important role in his acceptance into the field of medicine. It often came down to a piece of paper signed by Alan Hart’s professor-turned-psychiatrist, J. Allen Gilbert.

Gilbert published a case study of Hart in 1920 titled “Homo-sexuality and its Treatment”. He emphasizes Hart’s childhood as “proof” of the inborn nature of his gender/sexuality deviancy; this is reflective of the switch occurring during this era of an acts-based model of sexuality to an identity-based model. Hart did not come to Gilbert out of concern for his gender/sexuality; he had no problem with it; “[he] knew nothing of psychopathy and did not realize that [his] own condition was abnormal”. He sought Gilbert’s help for a phobia of a particular noise – which Gilbert of course attributed to his “homosexuality”. Gilbert does not entirely pathologize Hart. For what it’s worth, he did allow the hysterectomy to go forward (instead of attempting to “cure” the gender deviance) and commended Alan’s bravery and respectability.

After the initial controversy about his identity at the San Francisco hospital, it was a document signed by Dr. Gilbert that made the media accept his manhood; it is notable that it was not his own identification that cemented the legitimacy of his gender, but an official statement from the medical field.

In the 1920s, Hart conducted groundbreaking research on tuberculosis, utilizing X-ray technology for early detection. In 1948, Hart was appointed director of hospitalization and rehabilitation for the Connecticut State Tuberculosis Commission. As in Idaho, Hart took charge of a massive statewide X-ray screening program for TB, emphasizing the importance of early detection and treatment. He held this position for the rest of his life, and is credited with helping contain the spread of tuberculosis in Connecticut.  Hart was an advocate for public health in many ways beyond his impressive research.  He advocated for reforms in healthcare, including socialized medicine.  Hart’s role as a pioneer in radiology revolutionized medical diagnostics, and in the case of the diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis, Alan’s work has had waves of importance for the LGBTQ+ community throughout the AIDS crisis. Of the 1.3 Million people who died of tuberculosis in the past year, just under two hundred thousand were people who also had HIV, putting them at an increased vulnerability to TB. Alan Hart’s contributions saved countless lives. In Hartford, in the LGBTQ+ community, and throughout the world.

“The ugly things that have grown up in medicine are the result of the ugliness and falsity of society as a whole, of our American preoccupation with success and making money, of our concentration of effort on the production of things rather than their use for a fuller human life. These things are not the fault of the individual physician; and neither can they be remedied by him. So long as the American people are permeated with the spirit of ‘I’m going to get mine, no matter how,’ just so long will that attitude filter into all the professions; doctors are people first and are affected by the current ideals just as other people are.” –Alan Hart

Learn more here:

Trailblazing Transgender Doctor Saved Countless Lives, Scientific American, June, 10 2021

And here:

Alan L. Hart: Pioneer in Medicine and Transgender History

 

 

 

 

Roger Sperry once lived at 39 Robin Road.

Roger Wolcott Sperry was born August 20, 1913 to Francis Bushnell and Florence Kraemer Sperry. His father died when he was 11 and he moved with his mother and brother to the Elmwood section of West Hartford. His mother became the assistant to the principal at Hall High School which Dr. Sperry would attend.  In his autobiography he notes that he collected and raised large American moths in grade school, that he ran a trap line and collected live wild pets during junior high school years and that he was a three-letter man in varsity athletics in high school and college (baseball, basketball, and track).  

He attended Oberlin College on a 4 year Amos C. Miller Scholarship originally intending to go into coaching.  He received an AB in English in 1935.  But he had become interested in Psychology, however, after a course in Introduction to Psychology with Professor Raymond Stetson, and so he stayed on 2 years at Oberlin to earn an MA in Psychology, under Professor Stetson and then an additional third at Oberlin to prepare for a switch to Zoology for Ph.D. work under Professor Paul A. Weiss at the University of Chicago. After receiving the Ph.D. at Chicago in 1941, he did a year of postdoctoral research as a National Research Council Fellow at Harvard University under Professor Karl S. Lashley.

He was a Biology research fellow at Harvard University, at Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology (1942-46); Assistant professor, Department of Anatomy, University of Chicago (1946-52); Associate professor of psychology, University of Chicago (1952-53); Section Chief, Neurological Diseases and Blindness, National Institutes of Health (1952-53); Hixon professor of psychobiology, California Institute of Technology (1954-1994).  He received numerous awards besides the Nobel, including being Elected American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963), the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association (1971); Honorary Doctor of Science degree, Cambridge University (1972); Ralph Gerard Award of the Society of Neurosciences (1979); and the American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award (1980)

He married Norma Gay Deupree, December 28, 1949. They had one son, Glenn Michael (Tad), born October 13, 1953 and one daughter, Janeth Hope, born August 18, 1963. He notes in his autobiography that through middle life he continued evening and weekend diversionary activities including sculpture, ceramics, figure drawing, sports, American folk dance, boating, fishing, snorkeling, water colors, and collecting unusual fossils – among which he had a contender for the world’s 3rd largest ammonite.

He described his work as occurring in four “turnarounds” which were: 1. Nerve regeneration & chemo-affinity studies; 2. Studies involving equi-potentiality; 3. Split-brain studies; and 4. Consciousness and values.  

Sperry studied optic nerve regeneration and developed the chemoaffinity hypothesis. The chemoaffinity hypothesis stated that axons, the long fiber-like part of neurons, connect to their target cells through special chemical markers. That challenged the previously accepted resonance principle of neuronal connection.

In 1981 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres.”  He is the only person with a degree in Psychology to have won this prize

image from Nature.com

In a series of important studies he was able to demonstrate the differences in the functioning between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  Using people who had had the corpus callosum (the fiber tract that connects the two hemispheres) severed to help treat seizure disorder, he would present information to either the right or the left visual field.  He demonstrated, among other things, that for most right-handed people the majority of language functions are mediated by the left hemisphere of the brain.  When information was presented to the right visual field (left brain), the person could name the object, however when presented to the left visual field (right brain) they could not.  Fascinatingly, however, despite saying they saw nothing, they could draw the object with their left hand.

Summing up his split-brain studies he wrote: “When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres.”

In the final phase, he wrote about human values.  In his paper “Science and the Problem of Values” he states “the trends toward disaster in today’s world stem mainly from the fact that while man has been acquiring new, almost godlike, powers of control over nature , he has continued to wield these same powers with a relatively shortsighted, most ungodlike set of values.” These writings led to the development of the Declaration of Human Responsibilities by a group of distinguished scientists from around the world. The document is being considered by the United Nations as the step following the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights.

He died in 1994 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). You can see a short documentary on Sperry here

and a discussion of his split-brain work by his student Michael Gazzaniga here with some original footage. 

The neuroscience building at Oberlin is named after him.

“Before brains there was no color or sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion.”—Roger Sperry

 

Continue up Robin Road and turn right on Fern St.  In two blocks you will see the elementary school named for Edward Morley on your right.  

Continue on Fern St. to Prospect Avenue. 

On the NW corner (what is now 777 Prospect) is where Yung Wing’s house once stood.  You can learn more about him by using the Cedar Hill Cemetery information-dial (860) 760-9979 and press #21, or by watching this video from the West Hartford Historical Society.

Yung Wing was born in 1828 in China and died in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1912. As a child in China his father sent him to a missionary school.  At this school he met a minister from Connecticut, S.R. Brown, who brought Yung Wing back with him in 1847.  He attended the Monson Academy in Massachusetts and, in 1854, graduated from Yale University, becoming the first Chinese student to graduate from a university in the United States. He obtained U.S. citizenship at this time.  Yung Wing wanted to improve engineering and infrastructure in China. With the help of funding from the Chinese government and the establishment of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which allowed Chinese residents to have rights in the United States, he founded The Chinese Education Mission.

In 1872, 30 students arrived in Hartford, Connecticut, where they stayed with host families, were immersed in American culture, and attended local public schools, including Hartford Public High School. These students then went on to attend many prestigious U.S. universities. The plan was for them to return to China after their education and 15 years in the country.  The educational Mission’s main office was on Collins Street in Hartford.

Yung Wing met Mary Kellogg from Avon who had become involved in helping to educate some of the students.  They married on February 24, 1875 and they had two children. They lived for a time in a mansion on the corner of Fern Street and Prospect Avenue.  Mary Kellogg became Yung Wing’s assistant and was involved in the running of the Mission.  Sadly, she died in 1996 of what was then called Bright’s disease but is now known as acute glomerular nephritis.  She was 35 years old and their sons were 10 and 7 at the time of her death.

The Mission ended when when the first prospective group of students to Annapolis and West Point were refused entrance. This represented a breech on the part of the United States of the Bulingame Treaty.  As a result, the Chinese government withdrew support for the Mission and ordered the students and Yung to return to China. The students returned home in 1881, and Yung Wing returned to China. Despite the closing of the school,  students who returned to China became educators, engineers, and physicians.  However, as discrimination and bigotry grew in the United States, The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, one of the first laws restricting immigration into the United States, was passed. The United States revoked Yung Wing’s citizenship, and all remaining students were forced to return to China.

In the summer of 1898, a coup by the Empress Dowager Cixi reacted to modernization reforms, and the leaders of the reforms were arrested and executed. Yung Wing fled to British Hong Kong from Shanghai.

Yung returned to America in 1902 to see his younger son graduate from Yale and remained in the country with no legal status, living with his sons and dying at his home in Hartford in 1912.  He is buried at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Section 10, Lot 6.

“The race prejudice against the Chinese was so rampant and rank that not only my application for the students to gain entrance to Annapolis and West Point was treated with cold indifference and scornful hauteur, but the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 was, without the least provocation, and contrary to all diplomatic precedents and common decency, trampled underfoot unceremoniously and wantonly, and set aside as though no such treaty had ever existed, in order to make way for those acts of congressional discrimination against Chinese immigration which were pressed for immediate enactment.”–Yung Wing

Hartford Courant, January 30, 1906, Page 1 details some of the discrimination he encountered

You can learn more here:

Yung Wing’s Dream: The Chinese Educational Mission, 1872-1881

and here:

Yung Wing

 

 

 

Benjamin Whorf was a linguist and a fire prevention engineer. Benjamin Whorf was born on April 24, 1897, in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Benjamin had been an intellectual from the start, it seems. He would conduct experiments with chemicals from his father’s photographic equipment. He was also an avid reader, interested in botany, astrology, and Middle American prehistory. Benjamin had studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in chemical engineering. He was particularly good at the job and was highly commended by his employers. His job required him to travel to production facilities throughout New England to be inspected. One anecdote describes him arriving at a chemical plant in which he was denied access by the director because he would not allow anyone to see the production procedure which was a trade secret. Having been told what the plant produced, Whorf wrote a chemical formula on a piece of paper, saying to the director: “I think this is what you’re doing”. The surprised director asked Whorf how he knew about the secret procedure, and he simply answered: “You couldn’t do it in any other way.” To support his wife and three kids at the time, he had taken a position as an inspector to the Hartford Fire Insurance Company(Wikimedia, 2021). Although chemical engineering was his career and he was labeled a scientist, he was a very spiritual man. Around 1924, Benjamin first started delving into linguistics when he was seeking to uncover the mysteries of biblical texts. Whorf attended Yale when Sapir (2nd author of Sapir-Whorf Theory) became a professor there. Benjamin enrolled in a graduate studies program not for his Ph.D. in linguistics but for the intellectual company. He joined a circle of other linguists under Sapir and was very well respected. At Yale, Whorf also took numerous projects as a workload to understand linguistics more and clearly come up with ideas. Not only did Saapir have a profound undertaking to him, so did many other scientists who showed that Whorf by some measure was brilliant. Whorf did not see it this way always. As Whorf became more influenced by positivist science he also distanced himself from some approaches to language and meaning that he saw as lacking in rigor and insight. Although works were dissatisfied, it was not till 1929 when the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis became known and it showed many people how human flaws can’t also affect many intrinsic and extrinsic factors.

Understanding Benjamin Whorf, we first need to understand Edward Sapir. Under the influence of Edward Sapir, at Yale University, Whorf developed the concept of the equation of culture and language, which became known as the Whorf hypothesis, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Sapir was one of the foremost American linguists and anthropologists of his time, most widely known for his contributions to the study of North American Indian languages. A founder of ethnolinguistics, which considers the relationship of culture to language, he was also a principal developer of the American (descriptive) school of structural linguistics(Britaannica, 2021). Whorf maintained that the structure of a language tends to condition the ways in which a speaker of that language thinks(Britannica, 2021).  Through Sapir, Benjamin Whorf not only conducted the works of the Hopi Controversy but found that he started writing a hypothesis with him. Edward Sapir and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf developed the hypothesis that language influences thought rather than the reverse(Wright, 2015). This paper had a lot of backlash from
the linguistic community and impune slander on Benjamin Whorf’s name. Even if it will ever be
proven wrong, The Whorfian Hypothesis on a timeline will be a monumental step towards
linguistics and how we see it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited:

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2021, July 22). Benjamin Lee Whorf. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Benjamin-Lee-Whorf

Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia (2021, January 31). Edward Sapir. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Sapir

Wright, J. D. (2015). International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, September 4). Benjamin Lee Whorf. Wikipedia. Retrieved December 13, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf.

Hartford has been the home to ground-breaking discoveries in science, medicine, and education.  We are especially excited about the brain-related work that has happened here in Hartford.