Man with No Memory | The Accident

November 11, 2021·41 min·4 clips

Nine-year-old Henry Molaison is hit by a bicycle while chasing a baseball, an accident that will change his life forever.

A boy misses a catch. On a warm summer evening in 1935, nine-year-old Henry Molaison tries to track a baseball thrown by his father, Gus. His mother steps in. Lizzie means to protect him, but Henry hears pity, and that is what hurts. He wants to be seen as older and tougher. When Gus asks him to play catcher, Henry ignores his mother's warning and waits for the next instruction from his father. The story then jumps to March 1953. Henry is twenty-seven, sitting in William Scoville's office at Hartford Hospital. The room does plenty of talking before Scoville arrives. Leather-bound medical volumes, journals, coffee mugs, and an oversized plastic model brain sit around a patient who studies the walls. The diplomas catch Henry's attention. Yale and Penn make Scoville look official, but the photographs give the office a stranger charge. There is a Jaguar. There is a tropical island. There is Scoville in a bullring in Spain, waving his suit jacket at a charging bull. Then Scoville walks in. His tailored suit, paisley yellow tie, thin dark mouth, and hooded eyes make the scene feel less like a consultation and more like an entrance. The episode knows how to stage a room without losing Henry inside it. The strongest thread is the contrast between the boy who hates being pitied and the adult patient surrounded by surgical prestige. Scoville comes through as brilliant, polished, and showy, but the focus keeps returning to the person across from him. The credits point listeners to historical research, including Sam Kean's The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, while Steven Johnson keeps the story close to Henry.

As heard by us

A careful, grounded look at Henry Molaison's story.

American Innovations treats Henry Molaison's story as a careful look at memory, medicine, and the cost of trying to solve one problem by creating another.

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Why you'd press play

You want the human story behind Henry Molaison's famous memory case.

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