born 1918, Manchester · neuropsychologist, Montreal

he English-born neuropsychologist Brenda Milner (born Langford) studied at Cambridge, moved to Montreal, and took her doctorate at McGill under Donald Hebb while working with Wilder Penfield's patients.

what she did

In the mid-1950s she was asked to test a young man from Connecticut, Henry Molaison, known for more than fifty years only as H.M. The surgeon William Beecher Scoville had removed much of the medial temporal lobe on both sides to stop his seizures. They stopped, and he could no longer form new lasting memories of events. Scoville and Milner (1957) tied the loss to the hippocampal region. She then showed that he could still learn a skill, drawing in a mirror, while remembering nothing of the practice: memory was not one thing. See the archive page.

what is argued about

The ethics of the operation, and of a lifetime of study of a man who could not remember consenting. After his death in 2008 his brain was cut into thousands of sections (Annese et al., 2014). A 2016 book (Dittrich, L., 2016) raised questions about consent and records kept by Milner's student Suzanne Corkin; colleagues answered them in public (MIT News, 2016). Both sides are set out on the archive page.

why she is here

H.M. is the case that split memory into kinds, a distinction now borrowed, often loosely, for the memory of machines.

in the tour: the room called "The patients' room" has a placard called "Henry Molaison, 1926–2008" ···

Primary works and sources

1. Scoville & Milner (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry. doi:10.1136/jnnp.20.1.11
2. Annese et al. (2014). Postmortem examination of patient H.M.’s brain based on histological sectioning and digital 3D reconstruction. Nature Communications. doi:10.1038/ncomms4122
3. Dittrich, L. (2016). Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets. New York: Random House.
4. Corkin (2002). What's new with the amnesic patient H.M.?. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. doi:10.1038/nrn726
5. MIT News (2016). "Faculty at MIT and beyond respond forcefully to an article critical of Suzanne Corkin." MIT News Office, August 2016, with a statement by James DiCarlo. news.mit.edu/2016/faculty-defend-suzanne-corkin-0809

see also

	archive: H.M.
	timeline: memory
	the engram