Dr. Scoville, after exhausting other treatments, decided to surgically remove two finger-like appendages from the brain tissue of HM. Seizures decreased, Removal of the hippocampus left the patient totally changed. After the operation, H.M. He was unable to remember anything that happened to him.
Alarmed by these facts, Dr. Scoville consulted with a famous Montreal surgeon, Dr. Wilder Penfield of McGill University, who, along with psychologist Brenda Milner, had already studied memory disorders in two other patients. Dr. Milner began traveling from Canada to Hartford to visit Molaison, who performed numerous memory tests. It was this collaboration that would modify forever the understanding that the scientists had about learning and memory.
