H.M. never again! An analysis of H.M.’s epilepsy and treatment

Abstract

On August 25, 1953, the patient H.M., aged 27, underwent a bilateral surgical destruction of the inner aspect of his temporal lobes performed by William Beecher Scoville with the aim to control H.M.’s drug refractory epileptic seizures and alleviate their impact on his quality of life. Postoperatively, H.M. presented for 55 years a “striking and totally unexpected grave loss of recent memories”. This paper reports what we know about H.M.’s epilepsy before and after surgery and puts forward arguments supporting the syndromic classification of his epilepsy. We attempted to elucidate what could have been the rationale, in 1953, of Scoville's decision to carry out a bilateral ablation of H.M.’s medial temporal lobe structures, and we examined whether there was any convincing argument published before 1953 suggesting that bilateral hippocampal ablation could result in a permanent and severe amnesia. Our a posteriori analysis of H.M.’s medical history suggested that he was most probably suffering from idiopathic generalized epilepsy with absences and generalized convulsive seizures worsened by high dosage phenytoin treatment, or less probably from cryptogenic frontal lobe epilepsy. Importantly, he did not have temporal lobe epilepsy. Scoville based his proposal of bilateral mesial temporal lobe ablation on his experience as a psychosurgeon and on the assumption that the threshold of generalized epileptic activity could be lowered by some kind of hippocampal dysfunction potentially epileptic in nature. Given the scanty information on the link between amnesia and medial temporal lobe lesions that was available in humans in 1953, one can understand why Scoville was so surprised by the “striking and totally unexpected” memory loss he observed in H.M. after the bilateral ablation of his mesial temporal lobe structures.