Mostly memoir, to all appearances, atonement for the sins of the (grand)father. If Dittrich has turned up the heat on his grandfather's legacy, it didn't seem like much and has probably not met with much resistance given general public consensus about the grotesqueness of lobotomies. Jack the Ripper comes more easily to mind than Dr. Edward Jenner or Alexander Fleming. But the gloves really come off in his handling of Suzanne Corkin, author of Permanent Present Tense (2013) and MIT neuropsychologist who studied and closely guarded Henry Molaison for 46 years until his death in 2008. The drama kicks into high gear in the last ten percent of the book as we learn of Corkin's caustic dealings with Jacopo Annese, computational neuroanatomist who was charged with the neuroimaging of H.M.'s brain post mortem in an unbelievable 2401 slices.
The moral? Science is messy. Science gets personal. I have had trouble getting a hold of Corkin's book which I was more inclined to read, at first. I felt the same for the first half of this book, but I'm not so sure now.