> "On August 25, 1953, with a cheap jury-rigged hand drill, Scoville carved two holes in Molaison’s skull, one just above each of his eyes. Molaison was given o

> "On August 25, 1953, with a cheap jury-rigged hand drill, Scoville carved two holes in Molaison’s skull, one just above each of his eyes. Molaison was given only a local anesthetic, so that he could be awake to report on his sensations when different cerebral areas were stimulated. Scoville lifted up Molaison’s frontal lobes with a spatula and reached far into the center of his brain. Then, using a silver straw, Scoville sucked out fist-size chunks of the medial temporal lobes on both sides of Molaison’s brain. The excised tissue included most of the sea-horse-shaped structure called the hippocampus, as well as the parahippocampal gyrus, the uncus, the anterior temporal cortex, and the almond-shaped amygdala." This is horrifying on an extremely deep and unsettling level. It's easy to forget how recently "medicine" was just another name for barbarism.