The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 by Mary Roach Page A

five minutes, leaving him with a deep gash in the left side of his forehead.
    After that, the seizures begin.
    They are minor at first but gradually increase in severity. At the age of sixteen, he experiences the first seizure of the type that used to be called grand mal and is now called tonic-clonic. He attends Windham High School in Willimantic, Connecticut, is smart, sharper than most. But the other students—watching him seize up ten or more times a day—tease him without mercy. Henry drops out of high school for a while but eventually goes back, struggles his way through to a diploma.
    The seizures keep getting worse. He is in his early twenties, foggy-headed, living at home with his parents, no social life, barely holding down a job as a motor winder, when he has his first appointment with my grandfather.
    My grandfather prescribes him Dilantin, phenobarbital, Tridione, Mesantoin, the best anticonvulsants of the day, in maximal doses. They don't work.
    Henry's epilepsy is severe, horrible, intractable.
    My grandfather suggests they try something else. Henry and his parents agree.
    They are willing to try anything.
    Â 
    August 25, 1953. Henry lies on his back on an operating table in the Hartford Hospital neurosurgery suite. At the head of the table, flanked by scrub nurses and assistants, my grandfather leans over Henry with a trepan in his hand. Henry has been sedated and given a local anesthetic, and the flesh has been peeled down from his forehead, but he is conscious. A trepan is a sort of wide-mouthed serrated drill. The particular trepan he's using, like a lot of his surgical instruments, and like the operation itself, is of his own invention. To make this trepan, he bought a hole saw from a local autosupply or machine shop for about a dollar, then attached it to a standard Hudson drill handle, the kind you crank by hand. Now he places the trepan down on Henry's exposed skull, just above one of his eye sockets, and bears down. It grinds through, extracting a button of bone roughly the size of a poker chip. He moves the trepan over a few inches, to the same spot above the other eye socket, and repeats the process. Scrub nurses flush the holes, exposing Henry's pale frontal lobes to the harsh light of my grandfather's headlamp. He puts the trepan aside, picks up a slightly curved metal retractor, inserts it into one of the holes, then levers Henry's frontal lobe up and out of the way, so he can reach the hidden structures deeper in the recesses of Henry's brain.
    Once he finds what he's looking for, the sea horse–shaped hippocampus and its adjacent organs—the hook-shaped uncus, the almond-shaped amygdala—he proceeds with the extraction. He has performed variations of this operation on a number of asylum residents but never on an epileptic. Still, he knows that the hippocampus—an organ whose precise function is a mystery to him, as it is to everyone else in 1953—has been implicated in some forms of epilepsy, and other surgeons have had success reducing seizures by removing one half of it, performing a so-called unilateral resection. With Henry, however, he decides to see what happens if he takes out both sides, not just one. He uses an electric cautery to cut the tissue and a skinny vacuum to suck it out, leaving behind just a negligible stump. Then he repeats the procedure on the other side. In all, taking both hemispheres into account, he removes several tablespoons of neuronal tissue.
    Before he plugs the holes, he uses another tool to snap a few tiny metal clips onto the frayed far frontier of the fresh lesion. The operation is, as he will later write, a "frankly experimental" one, and these clips, visible in X-rays, will help him document its parameters.
Researcher: Do you know what you did yesterday?
Henry: No, I don't.
R: How about this morning?
H: I don't even remember that.
R: Could you tell me what you had for lunch today?
H: I don't know, to tell you the truth.
    April 25,