Patient H.M. by Luke Dittrich

pounded incessantly on the locked door of her room, and ranted in a loud voice. It was, at the very least, a disturbance to the neighboring guests. Attendants soon arrived. They helped her get dressed, took her outside, then escorted her across the campus to a building known as South One. There, that first night, she received her first glimpse of the dark reality that lurked beneath the asylum’s placid surface.

SEVEN
WATER, FIRE, ELECTRICITY
    S outh One was a white-tiled, dimly lit, and sound-insulated room full of exposed plumbing and valves. There were five large tubs in the room, and it was quite likely that at least one of them was occupied by another of the 355 guests currently residing at the Institute of Living. The empty tubs had been scrubbed clean with yellow soap, and one of these tubs was now prepared for my grandmother. A nurse unlocked a control panel on the wall and used the valves and knobs behind it to fill the tub with water. Given my grandmother’s behavior that evening, it is likely that the nurse chose to make the water very cold, as cold water, and its attendant hypothermia, was known to have sedative effects on mammals. Aides stripped off whatever clothes my grandmother still had on, coated her body with oil, then placed her in the tub. If she struggled, and there is no reason to believe she did not, attendants forced her down and strapped a large sheet of heavy fabric over the tub, leaving a small aperture for her head, trapping the rest of her body beneath.
    It is not clear how long they kept her there. A treatment of “continuous hydrotherapy” at the Institute of Living typically ranged from hours to days to, in exceptional cases, weeks. If this session lasted a long time, a staff member would remove my grandmother every four hours and “relubricate” her before returning her to the tub. This was to prevent her skin from becoming excessively dry. Every twelve hours, she would receive an alcohol rub.
    Eventually the staff decided she was calm enough to return to the residential area, where a clinician noted that she was, for the moment at least, much quieter and seemed to be enjoying herself playing the piano.
    —
    Guests at the Institute of Living underwent an extensive series of interviews over the course of their stays, during which psychiatrists probed their life stories for clues to their present conditions. Summations of these interviews were then typed up and placed in the patient’s file. On the first page of my grandmother’s clinical notes, under the heading “Personal History” and the subheading “Intellectual and Social Development,” a psychiatrist wrote the following:
A bright child and adult. Culturally, she is above the average, received high marks at school and at college, graduated from Vassar with a B average. She has an excellent mind, is a great reader of all types of literature, she majored in music and shows considerable ability, both with the piano and slightly on the cello. She has a true love of music, without any sentimental forced feelings towards arts, literature, or culture. Delinquency—none. Neither a model child or any immoral tendencies. Adult intellectual level—markedly above the average, but in a completely feminine fashion. A good mind, a logical mind, an extremely sensitive mind, especially towards the arts and music.
    My grandmother had an unusually privileged upbringing. She grew up in Manchester, Connecticut, where her mother’s side of the family owned a business—the Cheney Brothers Silk Manufacturing Company—that, during her teen years, was the largest producer of silk outside of China and one of the wealthiest corporations in the United States. Manchester was a company town—one in four residents worked for Cheney Brothers, and the company’s campus, which sprawled over hundreds of acres and included its own hospital, school, and power utilities, was in many ways a city unto itself.
    The company peaked when she was fifteen years old