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 193 Arnoldale Road

Dr. Fanny Radom (second from left in photo) was born in the Ukraine on December 28, 1878. She came to Hartford in 1893. At the time there were only about 2500 Jews in Hartford. She graduated from the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy and the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. She was one of the first licensed women pharmacists in the state of Connecticut. This is especially impressive given that there were unspoken quotas to exclude Jews to medical schools and residencies and there were only 28 Jewish physicians in Hartford overall. Despite being one of the few women doctors at the time, she was one of the founding physicians of Mount Sinai Hospital in 1923. At the time Jewish doctors were not permitted hospital privileges at Hartford Hospital or Saint Francis Hospital. Most were forced to practice in smaller community hospitals outside the city even though most of their patients lived in the city. There was no place where Jewish patients felt welcome and Jewish physicians could practice a full range of specialities. Dr. Radom first lived and practiced at 336 Windsor Ave in Hartford. She then had a practice at 2094 Main Street in Hartford and lived at 193 Arnoldale Road in West Hartford. She died September 12, 1948 and is buried at Zion Hill Cemetery.

The Practice of Medicine and Prejudice in a New England Town: The Founding of Mount Sinai Hospital, Hartford, Connecticut

Dr. Fanny Karp Radom

 

 

Walk north on Arnoldale Road until you cross Farmington Avenue. Enter the West Hill Drive loop.

56 West Hill Drive was the home of Edward Lorenz

Edward Norton Lorenz: The Butterfly Effect
Almost everyone is familiar with some notion of the “the butterfly effect”, but few outside the scientific community know the name Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 – April 16, 2008), born in West Hartford, Connecticut. Edward Lorenz was an American meteorologist and mathematician who was the first to recognize chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems which sparked a scientific revolution called chaos theory. This became known as the “butterfly effect” after a 1972 talk at the annual meeting of the AAAS given by Lorenz that was titled “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas.”

A simplified explanation of “the butterfly effect” is that small initial conditions, even far away, can have significant impact on large events through non-linear dynamics. We know very little about Ed Lorenz’ early childhood at 56 West Hill Drive, West Hartford, Connecticut, but we do know it was here that he first became interested in mathematics, chess and astronomy, and … weather. Perhaps these “initial conditions” ultimately resulted in his discovery of a fundamental “chaos theory” underlying much of modern science. This marked the beginning of a new field of study that impacted the fields of virtually every branch of science: mathematics, biology, physics, sociology, etc.

“…the advent of chaos theory in the second half of the twentieth century has brought about a revolution in science; hardly any scientific discipline (whether on the physical or biological side) has been untouched by it. In its essence, this revolution has been brought about by a paradigm shift to rival that of quantum theory, or relativity theory.”

While his discoveries impacted science more broadly, much of Lorenz research centered around weather. After helping the US Army Air Corp pilots forecast weather in the Pacific during WWII, he continued applying mathematics to his pioneering work on weather and climate theory. The ensemble forecast methodologies he created are now being utilized in predicting climate change.

In honor of 100th birthdayl

Biography of Lorenz

 

 

Continue east on Farmington Ave to Highland Street and turn right to 17 South Highland. This was the home of Nobel Prize Winner John Enders.

John Enders was born in West Hartford, CT in 1897. He went to the Noah Webster School at Hartford and St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. He attended Yale University for one year and left to pursue a career as a pilot in the Air Force in 1918. After fighting in World War I, he returned to Yale to finish out his degree. He then went on to study English, German, and Celtic Literature. To finish out his education, he earned his Ph.D. in bacteriology and immunology.

In 1946, after years of research Enders established an infectious disease lab at the Children’s Medical Center in Boston, MA. In 1954, Enders was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He had successfully cultivated the poliomyelitis virus in non-nervous tissue. Enders and his colleagues found changes in cell tissue under a high-powered light microscope. They were able to detect the poliovirus growing which became the new way to confirm the presence of the virus.

In 1961 he was named one of Time magazine’s Men of the Year

He has been called the father of modern vaccines

Nobel prize information

John Enders biography

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

We will begin in the parking lot of the Institute of Living just to your right as you enter from Retreat Avenue.

Founded in 1822, Institute of Living (IOL), The Retreat, was one of the first mental health centers in the United States, and the first hospital of any kind in Connecticut.  The Institute of Living was founded on the premise of “Moral Treatment.” This approach was based on ideas of humane care and the realization that mental disorders were illnesses.  The approach  moved away from the use of restraints and moved toward a therapeutic approach.  The original grounds included a swimming pool, golf course, and fleet of cars that people could take out for drives in the country.  However, they did use the practice of electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) in ways that today would be considered controversial or inhumane.

You can read the account of Dr. Marsha Linehan and her treatment at the IOL in the 1960’s here in a New York Times article. The IOL still uses ECT but there have been many technological advances and it can be the only effective treatment in some cases of severe depression.

 

 

The first Director was Eli Todd.  HIs sister Eunice committed suicide after many years of depression and many attempts at treatment. This led him to the belief that depression was a disease that should be treated medically.  He remained the director until 1833.  You can learn more about him here.

In 1994 the Institute of Living and Hartford HealthCare merged, which allowed the IOL to accept individuals with public health care coverage. Today they are particularly known for their treatment of anxiety disorders, obsessive-convulsive disorder, and hoarding; Eli’s Retreat which still serves as a short-term group home;  the schizophrenia rehabilitation program; the Grace Webb school; and for the research facility, the Olin Neuropsychiatric Research Center. Dr. David Tolin from the Anxiety Disorders Research Center appeared on the television programs The OCD Project, and Hoarders.  The Professionals Program is designed for people with substance abuse or other issues who are working full-time and at one time had a specialization in treatment of clergy. This lead to a controversy when the Catholic Church claimed that they returned some priests with pedophilia to their parishes based on recommendations from staff at the IOL. The IOL countered that they were misled and that information was withheld from them. There is an article on this controversy here.

Take note of the remarkable trees and Frederick Law Olmstead and Jacob Weidenmann landscape architecture that was re-designed in the 1860s.  Olmstead specifically designed the grounds to be restful and beneficial to mental health. You can learn more about Olmstead and the original design of the IOL here.  Numerous signs on the grounds of the Institute represent rare species, many dating back to the 1860s and likely planted by Olmstead.  You can take a tour of notable trees using this guide.  In particular note the Champion Trees: the Sweet Gum (5), Gingko (7), Burr Oak (11), Pecan (19), and Japanese Zelkova (20). 

 

 

As we walk from the parking lot to the Burlingame Building we will see a bust of Olmstead.  We will also see the Kentucky CoffeeTree (1), European Cutleaf Beech (2), and Yellow Bird Cucumber Magnolia (3).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We will now walk to the Burlingame Building (number 3 on this map).  You can learn more about the Burlingame Building and the history of psychosurgeries at the IOL here.  

Surgeries were performed on the sixth floor, postop was on the fifth floor, and they provided vocational and recreational rehabilitation, including home economics, accounting, and commercial art on the fourth floor.  There was room for 37 guests, as they were called, who had been operated on.  A Hartford Courant article from 1949 notes that the program stressed the individual vocational and hobby interests of each person.

 

 

William Beecher Scoville established the Department of Neurosurgery here 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.  He established the first neurosurgery department at Hartford Hospital in 1939. 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. 

Now let’s turn to the surgery performed at Hartford Hospital on Henry Molaison by William Scoville on August 24, 1953.  

Mr. Henry Molaison (known to the world as HM) was experiencing severe epileptic seizures. Mr. Molaison had his first appointment with Dr. Scoville around 1943.  He was admitted several times to Hartford Hospital for pneumoencephalograms that were normal and EEG studies that only showed scattered activity not a single focus.  Dr. Scoville suggested surgery.  Dr. Scoville had performed similar surgeries for people with psychiatric disorders but not for people with seizure disorder, and the results of his surgeries were mixed.  They were mostly performed on women who were confined to state hospitals in Connecticut and diagnosed with schizophrenia, although a few also had epilepsy.  Unexpectedly, the surgery designed to treat the psychosis seemed to make the epilepsy better.  

In 1886 the first surgery was done to treat seizures by Victor Horsley in London.  The area of the brain that was causing the seizure was removed.  A part of the brain would be stimulated electrically to determine where the seizure was coming from and then that focus would be removed. This work was greatly improved by the cortical localization studies of Harvey Cushing at Johns Hopkins in 1908.  In 1928 Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute developed the temporal lobectomy to remove a part of the right or left temporal lobe to control seizures. Penfield concluded from his research on brain mapping that temporal lobe seizures originated in the amygdala and hippocampus. 

At age 27 Mr. Molaison agreed to have surgery done in the hopes of having some relief from the seizures.  Before the surgery he was given a series of psychological and cognitive tests by clinical psychologist Dr. Liselotte Fischer at Hartford Hospital. Unfortunately he experienced several absence seizures during the testing so it is unclear how accurate the testing was. Although he was given many EEGs, a specific focus for his seizures was not able to be identified. This led Scoville to decide to do a more radical surgery then had been done previously.  In Mr. Molaison’s chart Dr. Scoville admitted him for “new operation of bilateral resection of medial surface of temporal lobe, including uncus, amygdala, and hippocampal gyrus following recent temporal lobe operations done for psychomotor epilepsy”  which he described as a “frankly experimental operation” (Scoville & Milner, 1957).

Then Dr. Scoville used a technique called resection that involved drilling a hole in the skull and then guiding an instrument into the brain and applying a fine suction to extract small pieces of brain at a time.  Scoville drilled two holes in Henry’s skull, each an inch-and-a-half in diameter and five inches apart and he used these holes as the entranceway to Henry’s brain. He operated first on one side, and then the other. He inserted a brain spatula, or a retractor, to lift up the frontal lobe on the side where he was operating. And when he did that, he could then see into the tip of the temporal lobe. Scoville extracted the uncus, the front half of the hippocampus, some of the entorhinal cortex, the perirhinal cortex, and most of the parahippocampal cortex, and most of the amygdala on both sides of the brain.  At the time these regions were known collectively as Papez circuit and believed to be involved in emotion.

 

 

Following the operation, Henry’s seizures were greatly reduced.  However, he now experienced a severe anterograde amnesia.  Dr. Scoville noted the operation “resulted in no marked physiologic or behavioural changes, with the one exception of a very grave, recent memory loss, so severe as to prevent the patient from remembering the locations of the rooms in which he lives, the names of his close associates, or even the way to toilet or urinal” (Scoville, 1954).  According to Dr. Suzanne Corkin who worked with him: 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.

Here is a transcript of a recorded conversation with Dr. Corkin:

“What do you do during a typical day?”

“See, that’s tough–what I don’t….I don’t remember things.”

“Do you know what you did yesterday?”

“No, I don’t.”

“How about this morning?”

“I don’t even remember that.”

“Could you tell me what you had for lunch today?”

“I don’t know, tell you the truth. I’m not—”

“What do you think you’ll do tomorrow?”

“Whatever’s beneficial” he said in his friendly, direct way.

“Good answer.”  I said.  “Have we ever met before, you and I?”

“Yes, I think we have.”

“Where?”

“Well, in high school”

“In high school?”

“Yes.”

“What high school?”

“In East Hartford.”

“Have we ever met any place besides high school?”

Henry paused.  “To tell you the truth, I can’t–no.  I don’t think so.”

“At the time of our interview, I had been working with Henry for 30 years.  I first met him in 1962, when I was a graduate student.  We had not met in high school as Henry firmly believed.”

We will listen to this conversation with  Mr. Molaison and Dr. Corkin here. on an episode of Fresh Air.

You can hear more of Mr. Molaison from this episode of Weekend Edition.

 

He lost some of his memories from before the surgery, called retrograde amnesia, but it was surprising that he retained most of them.  He knew his parents, facts about the world, how to talk, read, and write.  Dr. Corkin notes “He could tell us about – you know, he knew where he was born, his father’s family came from Thibodaux, Louisiana, his mother’s came from Ireland. He talked about the towns in Hartford where he lived, and about his specific neighbors. He knew the schools he attended, some of his classmates’ names and, you know, the kinds of things he did for fun. So he had quite a lot of memories, but none of them were unique episodes.”

His IQ actually improved (perhaps because he no longer had seizures). Because of HM, researchers realized that there were multiple memory systems and that memories for personal events (episodic memory) involved different brain regions and cognitive processes than memories for facts and general knowledge (semantic memory).

He could also hold information in his short-term or working memory. So if given a list of numbers to recall he could repeat them back accurately. For example, if you gave him a phone number he would remember it for as long as it was in his short-term memory, but as soon as he was distracted with something else, he would forget it.  It was because of him and this finding that support was gained for the understanding that we have two different memory processes: short-term and long-term.

Henry was also able to do kinds of memory we refer to as implicit or procedural. He was able to learn to do motor tasks like a mirror-drawing task, despite not remembering doing it before. This task involves looking in a mirror and trying to trace a figure while seeing your hand in the mirror. He improved on this task with practice. Because he could do these things he taught us that they do not rely on the hippocampus. 

 

His memory was initially assessed by Brenda Milner in 1955, but then Suzanne Corkin began to work with him for her dissertation.   

 . 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 and his memory deficits after psychosurgery and was intrigued.  Shortly thereafter, 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 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

 

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 In Defense of Suzanne Corkin.  In fact, she had published data that she claimed suggested an orbitofrontal lesion in 1983 (Eichenbaum et al., 1983).

We will now head back to Retreat Avenue.   In 2016 The Ayers Neuroscience Institute was formed with neurosurgery at 100 Retreat Ave.  This is where awake craniotomies are currently performed.    Current treatments for epilepsy include medications, diet, behavioral health care, as well as surgical procedures like laser ablation, surgical resection, neurostimulation, vagus nerve stimulation, and deep brain stimulation.  

Continue down Retreat Ave until it ends at Maple Ave.  Turn left on Maple Ave, bearing right on Wyllys.  Take an immediate right on Congress Street.  

2 Congress Street was a home of Mr. Molaison when he was a teen.  His family likely was renting a few rooms in the house.

 

 

Above is his draft registration card showing his address at 2 Congress Street in Hartford.

 

 

Mr. Molaison was born on February 26, 1926 in Manchester, CT. As a child he began to have absence seizures.  His mother attributed the onset of seizures to a bicycle accident he had when he was ten, but there was also a family history of epilepsy on his father’s side.  On his fifteenth birthday he experienced his first tonic-clonic grand mal seizure.  After that his seizures made it difficult for him to participate in social activities, to drive, or to finish school.  He started at Willimantic High School but dropped out.  He then enrolled at East Hartford High but did not partake in any extracurricular activities besides Science Club. 

Attitudes about epilepsy were mostly negative at that time and he was often singled out by teachers and administrators because of his disability.  In 1947, at 21, he graduated from East Hartford High but the superintendent would not allow him to participate in the ceremony because of concerns that he would have a seizure.   

After graduation he had various jobs, including at the Underwood Typewriter Company on Arbor Street in Hartford (where Real Art Ways currently is).  He took large doses of anti-seizure medications.

After the surgery he lived at 63 Crescent Drive in East Hartford and he could accurately draw the floor plan of that house.  He had been very close to his parents and was upset each time he was reminded they had died, but then they would soon slowly come back to life in his mind. For a while, Henry made a habit of carrying around a little scrap of paper reminding him that his father was dead.

He died December 2, 2008.  He is buried in Hillside Cemetery at 162 East Roberts Street in East Hartford.  As you enter the cemetery stay to the right and his gravestone will be on your left in Section A.

 

“Right now, I am wondering if I have done or said anything amiss,” Henry once told a researcher. “You see, at this moment everything looks clear to me, but what happened just before, that’s what worries me. It’s like waking from a dream I just don’t remember.”

On December 4, 2008 the New York Times ran this obituary of HM.

After he died his brain was sliced via livestream and logged 400,000 viewers. Jacobo Annese et al. published high resolution photos and a 3-D reconstruction in Nature in 2014.  The slices have been digitized and can be viewed on this website patienthm.org.   During the silent feed, Annese placed little Post-it notes on the slicer, giving viewers a feeling of what it was like to be in the lab, such as “Playing the White Album now.” 

 

From Annese et al. (2014): The fixed specimen was photographed after removal of the leptomeninges. Evidence of the surgical lesions in the temporal lobes is highlighted by white geometric contours (a, b). A mark produced by the oxidation of one of the surgical clips inserted by Scoville is visible on the parahippocampal gyrus of the right hemisphere (black arrow). (c) encloses a lesion in the orbitofrontal gyrus that affects the cortex and WM. Marked cerebellar atrophy is consistent with H.M.’s long-term treatment with phenytoin. 

Of note: White matter lesions, frontal lobe lesion, cerebellar atrophy that all could contribute to observed symptoms

 

 

 

A final quote from Dr. Suzanne Corkin:

“Henry Molaison was much more than a collection of test scores and brain images.  He was a pleasant, engaging, docile man with a keen sense of humor, who knew that he had a poor memory and accepted his fate.  There was a man behind the initials, and a life behind the data.  Henry often told me that he hoped that research into his condition would help others live better lives.  He would have been proud to know how much his tragedy has benefited science and medicine.”

 

We invite anyone from the community to add to this tour, or to add their own pin to our History Pin collection here.  

 

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For future tours:

Myths, Minds, Medicine: Two Centuries of Mental Health Care exhibit (not currently open).  This exhibit located on the second floor of the Commons Building reviews the past 200 years of treatment for people with mental illness.  The exhibit also looks at current treatments including a look at research on brain chemistry and a human brain on display.  

Article from the Hartford Courant:

References:

Annese, J., Schenker-Ahmed, N., Bartsch, H. et al. Postmortem examination of patient H.M.’s brain based on histological sectioning and digital 3D reconstruction. Nat Commun 5, 3122 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms4122

Corkin S. (2002). What’s new with the amnesic patient H.M.?. Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 3(2), 153–160. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn726

Corkin, S. (2013). Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M. New York: Basic Books. 

Dittrich, L. (2016). Patient H.M: A story of memory, madness and family secrets.  New York: Random House.

Eichenbaum, H., Morton, T., Potter, H., & Corkin, S. (1983). Selective olfactory deficits in case H. M. Brain, 106, 459–472.

Hilts, P. J. (1996). Memory’s Ghost: The Nature Of Memory And The Strange Tale Of Mr. M. United Kingdom: Simon & Schuster.

Scoville, W. B. (1954). The Limbic Lobe in Man, Journal of Neurosurgery, 11(1), 64-66. https://doi.org/10.3171/jns.1954.11.1.0064

Scoville, W. B., & Milner, B. (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry, 20(1), 11–21. https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.20.1.11

 

 

Pictured above is Alice Cogswell in one of the only recorded portraits of her. Alice Cogswell lost her hearing at the age of two from an illness. This did not stop her or her friend Thomas Gallaudet from showing the world that deafness was not a mental illness. Gallaudet went to England to find the best methods for deaf education and would not stop until he could prove that Alice and everyone in the deaf community is just as intelligent as anyone else.When Thomas Gallaudet returned home and opened the American School for the Deaf, Alice Cogswell was one of the seven students to be enrolled in the first class. She attended the American School for the deaf from 1817-1824, eventually graduating at the age of 19. During her time at school she made many great accomplishments. At the time she received an education, the United States had no standardized sign language that existed. From Gallaudet’s research with Laurent Cler, a French teacher, the American School for the Deaf created the new standardized language, American Sign Language. This made Alice Cogswell the first on the list for learning American Sign Language. She was also the first person to be taught the manual finger spelled alphabet. However, Alice communicated with a combination of American Sign Language and verbal speaking.

After graduation, Alice continued to work to break standards of deafness. She loved to travel and was very social. Though it is unknown what she did exactly to promote deaf education, she is still an inspiring figure. She broke down many stereotypes of deafness and intelligence, as she was very bright herself. Although she was obviously skilled at American Sign Langue, but she had many other capabilities. Alice also had an interest in drawing and writing. Pictured below is a page from the handwritten Catechism that she kept. I took this image at the museum at the American School for the Deaf that is still open today in West Hartford, Connecticut.

Katherine Carver, who has lived in Hartford for about 50 years now, is working on research about Alice Cogswell. In an interview I had with Katherine, who attended Gallaudet University and who also has a hearing impairment, she said she is connected to Alice in that they both never gave up. When talking about perspective on life and whether the glass is half full or half empty, Katherine responded with “mines always overflowing.” Alice was able to have a similar positive perspective on life because of her family dynamic. Alice had two caring parents, Dr. Mason Finch Cogswell, and Mary Austin Ledyard. She had three sisters and one brother, have an amazing relationship with her sisters. However, at a young age her siblings did not speak to her much, as she had little ways to communicate with them. They had a few personalized hand symbols that would not be understood outside the household, but Mason Cogswell was adamant on finding what was best for Alice.

Mason Cogswell played a significant role in Alice’s story. He was a member of the Connecticut Society and was the foster son Samuel Huntington, president of the Continental Congress and governor of Connecticut.  Mason was a notable physician and an accomplished surgeon. He was determined to help Alice, which is why he used his connections and raised lots of money in order to send Gallaudet to England to do research. Without Mason Cogswell, Gallaudet would have never been able to do research, come back and open the American School for the Deaf, and start a new beginning for Alice. Alice had a strong relationship with her father, but when he passed away on December 17, 1830, at the age of 69, Alice was heartbroken. Alice then passed away 13 days later on December 30, 1830, at the age of 25. Both Mason and Alice Cogswell are buried in The Old North Cemetery on Main Street in Hartford, Connecticut. Pictured below is an image I took at their grave site in Lot A of The Old North Cemetery.

In addition to the Old North Cemetery, there are a few more sites that are in Connecticut and other states that recognize Alice Cogswell. Pictured below is a statue of Alice and Gallaudet in front of the American School for the Deaf today. Another statue of Alice can be found in Gallaudet Square on Farmington Ave and Asylum Ave in West Hartford. Asylum Ave is named after the original name for the America School for the Deaf which was the American Asylum for the Education and Instruction for Deaf and Dumb Persons. This same statue below is also located at Gallaudet University in Washington D.C.

In conclusion, Alice Cogswell was a prominent figure when it comes to the deaf education system we have today, especially at the American School for the Deaf. Being one of the first students at the American School for the Deaf and one of the first students to learn the American Sign Language were amazing accomplishments that broke many standards of deafness at the time. She was a person who never gave up and continued to break down stereotypes even after graduating. Although her perspective one life kept her going, she would not have been able to do it without great support from her friends and family. In particular, Mason Cogswell and Thomas Gallaudet played a significant role in beginning Alice’s journey. Although her journey ended at the young age of 25, it is still inspiring to hear her story and know that she grew up, lived, and learned right here in Hartford, Connecticut.  

 

William Beecher Scoville was a descendent of Harriet Beecher Stowe.  He was born in Philadelphia in 1905 to Samuel and Catherine (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.  He established the first neurosurgery department at Hartford Hospital in 1939. His first wife was Emily Learned Scoville and they had three children that they raised on North Steele Road, 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.  See this post about Henry Molaison for a description of the surgery that Dr. Scoville performed.  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.