The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 by Mary Roach

weep, drops of water streaming from its eyes. Did seasonal moisture variations and the way the wood responded to them cause the tears? Probably. That or magic. My grandfather had appreciated the totem's beauty but was unsentimental about its emotions. When he brought it home, he had someone polish it before he hung it on the wall. It never cried again.
    Brain surgery is an ancient craft—there is a four-thousand-year-old hieroglyphic text describing successful operations—and among my grandfather's most interesting artifacts was a collection of premodern and tribal neurosurgical instruments. As a kid, I found those picks and blades fascinating and terrible to contemplate. It wasn't just the age of the tools, it was the acts they were intended for. Brain surgery, whatever the era, always requires at least two frightening qualities in its practitioners: the will to make forcible entry into another's skull and the hubris to believe you can fix the problems inside.
    He was always a risk taker. During medical school he'd climbed, on a dare, one of the suspension cables of the still-under-construction George Washington Bridge and had spent the night shivering in a crate up top, waiting for the dawn. Once, while attending a neurosurgical conference in Spain, he visited a small bullring where toreadors were practicing their craft, threw off his jacket, and stepped into the ring himself. He loved cars, loved driving them as fast as they'd go. He loved tinkering with them, too. He always told people he'd have been a mechanic if he hadn't become a brain surgeon.
    In 1939, a year after he completed a residency at Mass General, he cofounded the Department of Neurosurgery at Hartford Hospital. It was an interesting time for an ambitious young doctor to be entering his particular field, since a new kind of brain operation was on the verge of becoming a worldwide sensation. The operation had originated in Europe, pioneered by Egas Muniz, a Portuguese surgeon, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for his efforts. Dr. Muniz called his operation leukotomy, but in the United States it came to be known by another name: lobotomy. The operation was crude—the surgeon would drive a skinny ice pick up through the thin bone behind his patient's eyeballs, then quickly swish the pick back and forth, cutting a messy swath through the frontal lobes—but it was inarguably effective at transforming otherwise difficult and uncontrollable individuals into placid, carefree creatures.
    My grandfather had no problem with the basic idea of treating psychiatric problems through brain surgery. He believed that psychosurgical procedures might eventually, as he once wrote, relegate "psychoanalysis to that scientific limbo where perhaps it belongs." But he didn't like the lobotomy. It was too blunt, too imprecise, knocked everything out, the good with the bad. It makes people "easy to control and easy to handle," he said, "but, God forbid, at what a cost!" There had to be a better way. Some way to achieve the lobotomy's beneficial effects—the calming, the reduction in anxiety—without the lobotomy's attendant insidious, zom-bielike stupor.
    So he tinkered. He began experimenting, at asylums in and around Hartford, with procedures he called "fractional lobotomies," attempting to target only the specific brain structures he believed were implicated in a particular patient's problems. Soon he was reporting a "most gratifying improvement in depressions, psycho-neuroses and tension states without any gross blunting of personality." And he mused about possible future advances and refinements to his approach, wondering whether his experiments in targeted brain lesioning might "bring us one blind step nearer" to the locations of the "fundamental mechanisms of mental disease and of epilepsy."
    Around this time, Henry showed up in his office for a consultation.
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    When Henry Molaison is seven, a bicyclist collides with him, knocking him out cold for