Most of this interview was conducted on July 19th. Following a New York Times excerpt published on August 7th, and the book’s release two weeks later, many neuroscientists have expressed “outrage” at Dittrich’s portrayal of Corkin. The controversy culminated in a statement from MIT, where Corkin was based, rebutting three allegations in the book. Dittrich has himself responded to the rebuttals, and at the end of this interview, I talk to him about the debate.

Ed Yong: Given your family connections to the story, were you aware about ‘Patient H.M.’ growing up?

Luke Dittrich: It’s one of those odd facts about my relationship to the story: I don’t have a clear episodic memory about when I first learned about Patient H.M. I think I was told about him at one point by my mother but I don’t clearly remember when that was. I had a brief textbook understanding of the case, and my grandfather’s involvement intrigued me.

Yong: How well did you know Scoville, your grandfather?

Dittrich: He died when I was 10, so not very well. He was always this larger-than-life figure to me, as many grandfathers are to 10-year-old boys—but he really was a larger-than-life figure in many ways. He was by all accounts a brilliant neurosurgeon, but he occupied this morally nebulous middle ground between medical research and practice. He was one of the most prolific lobotomists of all time. And as I discovered, he was driven by this passionate quest to develop a surgical cure for madness, because his wife—my grandmother—was herself mentally ill. Very few people knew about that, even within the family. Mental illness has always been stigmatized and even more in the 1940s and 50s than today.

Yong: The relationship between your grandfather and grandmother forms some of the most shocking parts of the book. You reveal her history of mental illness, describe the horrible ‘treatments’ she endured, and suggest that Scoville was motivated to lobotomize other patients in an attempt to find a cure for her. Did you agonize about whether to delve so deeply into your own family history?

Dittrich: I struggled with it. I’ve done quite a bit of investigative journalism but this was the first time I’ve experienced finding things out and knowing that they would hurt my mother. That wasn’t easy in any way. I loved my grandmother and she was a very private person. I certainly had reservations about dragging her most painful moments into the light.

But ultimately, I decided that it was a story worth telling. It’s really impossible to understand the story of Henry without understanding this long period of psychosurgery that led up to the experimental operation my grandfather performed. Given that my grandfather was this crusading psychosurgeon and his motivation was in large part my grandmother’s mental illness, she was an odd and unexpected part of the story. What she went through in the asylum is what tens of thousands of people endured.