for what we’d done for him. “Just happy to be alive.” He kept thanking us each time we told him, over and over, what had happened. “Just happy to be alive,” he kept saying.
The neurologist who came to check on him was one of my heroes, a compact, perpetually smiling guy named John Coronna, who had been studying the neurological damage done by cardiac arrest and coma. He entered the room with his assistant to administer a standardized research questionnaire that was meant to uncover damage to the medial temporal lobes, the place that seems to serve as the clearinghouse for memories. It is also the area of the brain most susceptible to low blood flow.
John began with the standard questions: “Name? Where are you from? What kind of work do you do?” All went well. The silver fox lived in LA. He was a lawyer. Then John started in on the orientation questions.
“Who is the president?”
“Eisenhower.”
Caught off guard, Coronna said, “It’s not Eisenhower. Ford is the president!”
“What? That’s not possible.”
“I assure you, it’s Ford.”
“Gerald Ford,” the fox said, “ that idiot? I went to law school with him. He couldn’t possibly be president.”
It was amnesia—Korsakoff’s syndrome—a retrograde and anterograde amnesia, a permanent amnesia caused by the low blood flow to his medial temporal lobe during the cardiac arrest. He was now all finished as a lawyer, his memory had stopped, and for him it was 1960. We were stunned. The guy couldn’t remember what had happened, could not retain our names for more than thirty seconds, didn’t remember the girlfriend at all, and had no interest in who she was. She was in her thirties, nice-looking, and when she figured out what was going on, she packed up and left.
His wife had to be told, not every detail of course, and I wasn’t about to do it myself, so I handed it off to a junior resident, a guy from the Deep South named Lamont Schellerman, who possessed an odd combination of New York cynicism and southern gentility. After a long, heated, and one-sided conversation with the wife, he came back to me and said, “Do I need this?”
From that day forward, the silver fox would live in a world of past memories, unaware that he had a problem forming new ones. By way of compensation, like many Korsakoff’s sufferers, he would fill in gaps by confabulating plausible but nonetheless crazy stories. “I think I saw you at the ball park,” he might say to someone he had just met. “That hot dog was great, wasn’t it?” The urge to fabricate experiences probably grows out of a need to save face. Many alcoholics do it in the early stages of the syndrome, and while it is an interesting component of memory loss, it is not a necessary one.
C. Miller Fisher, one of my professors at Massachusetts GeneralHospital at the time Godfrey’s car took a spin around Leverett Circle, was the consummate observer. He insisted on reasoning backward from the minutiae of a neurological exam to further his understanding of how the brain works and how disease destroys it. In an obituary I wrote at the time of his death, I called him the grand master of detailed neurological observation. I did not mention the fact that his equanimity was sustained by two extracurricular passions: watching professional football, and the television show Car 54, Where Are You? It was Fisher, along with one of my other mentors, Raymond Adams, who had given transient global amnesia its name.
On a Sunday afternoon in November, Dr. Fisher had just settled into his favorite easy chair to watch the New York Giants play the Cleveland Browns when the telephone rang. On the line was an apologetic junior resident who had drawn the short straw, and had been stuck with the job of disturbing the great doctor at home.
“This had better be good,” Fisher said.
It seems that the mother of one of the hospital’s directors had suffered a fall and was confused. The bigwigs insisted that Dr.
The neurologist who came to check on him was one of my heroes, a compact, perpetually smiling guy named John Coronna, who had been studying the neurological damage done by cardiac arrest and coma. He entered the room with his assistant to administer a standardized research questionnaire that was meant to uncover damage to the medial temporal lobes, the place that seems to serve as the clearinghouse for memories. It is also the area of the brain most susceptible to low blood flow.
John began with the standard questions: “Name? Where are you from? What kind of work do you do?” All went well. The silver fox lived in LA. He was a lawyer. Then John started in on the orientation questions.
“Who is the president?”
“Eisenhower.”
Caught off guard, Coronna said, “It’s not Eisenhower. Ford is the president!”
“What? That’s not possible.”
“I assure you, it’s Ford.”
“Gerald Ford,” the fox said, “ that idiot? I went to law school with him. He couldn’t possibly be president.”
It was amnesia—Korsakoff’s syndrome—a retrograde and anterograde amnesia, a permanent amnesia caused by the low blood flow to his medial temporal lobe during the cardiac arrest. He was now all finished as a lawyer, his memory had stopped, and for him it was 1960. We were stunned. The guy couldn’t remember what had happened, could not retain our names for more than thirty seconds, didn’t remember the girlfriend at all, and had no interest in who she was. She was in her thirties, nice-looking, and when she figured out what was going on, she packed up and left.
His wife had to be told, not every detail of course, and I wasn’t about to do it myself, so I handed it off to a junior resident, a guy from the Deep South named Lamont Schellerman, who possessed an odd combination of New York cynicism and southern gentility. After a long, heated, and one-sided conversation with the wife, he came back to me and said, “Do I need this?”
From that day forward, the silver fox would live in a world of past memories, unaware that he had a problem forming new ones. By way of compensation, like many Korsakoff’s sufferers, he would fill in gaps by confabulating plausible but nonetheless crazy stories. “I think I saw you at the ball park,” he might say to someone he had just met. “That hot dog was great, wasn’t it?” The urge to fabricate experiences probably grows out of a need to save face. Many alcoholics do it in the early stages of the syndrome, and while it is an interesting component of memory loss, it is not a necessary one.
C. Miller Fisher, one of my professors at Massachusetts GeneralHospital at the time Godfrey’s car took a spin around Leverett Circle, was the consummate observer. He insisted on reasoning backward from the minutiae of a neurological exam to further his understanding of how the brain works and how disease destroys it. In an obituary I wrote at the time of his death, I called him the grand master of detailed neurological observation. I did not mention the fact that his equanimity was sustained by two extracurricular passions: watching professional football, and the television show Car 54, Where Are You? It was Fisher, along with one of my other mentors, Raymond Adams, who had given transient global amnesia its name.
On a Sunday afternoon in November, Dr. Fisher had just settled into his favorite easy chair to watch the New York Giants play the Cleveland Browns when the telephone rang. On the line was an apologetic junior resident who had drawn the short straw, and had been stuck with the job of disturbing the great doctor at home.
“This had better be good,” Fisher said.
It seems that the mother of one of the hospital’s directors had suffered a fall and was confused. The bigwigs insisted that Dr.
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