Luke Dittrich is a National Magazine Award–winning journalist, and a contributing editor at Esquire. Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets (Random House) is Dittrick’s haunting story of the most studied individual in the history of neuroscience, a human guinea pig who would teach us much of what we know about memory today. The center of the story is the amnesic known as Patient H.M., a man who forever altered our understanding of how memory works—and whose treatment raises deeply unsettling questions about the human cost of scientific progress. Dittrich uses the case of Patient H.M. as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, one that moves from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT. Patient H.M. combines the best of biography, memoir, and science journalism to create a haunting, endlessly fascinating story, one that reveals the wondrous and devastating things that can happen when hubris, ambition, and human imperfection collide.
