"In the late 1930s, in asylums and hospitals across America, a group of renowned neurosurgeons worked to develop and refine a new class of brain operation--the lobotomy--that they hoped would eradicate everything from schizophrenia to homosexuality...The most important test subject to emerge from this largely untold chapter was a 27-year-old factory worker named Henry Molaison...Journalist Luke Dittrich uses his case as a starting point for a kaleidoscopic journey, from the first recorded brain surgeries in ancient Egypt to the cutting-edge laboratories of MIT...It is also, at times, a deeply personal journey: Dittrich's grandfather was the brilliant, morally complex surgeon who operated on Molaison--and thousands of other patients..."--From dust jacket.