The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

The first clinical tale that I chose was Reminiscence. In this tale Mrs. O'C constantly hears songs from her childhood in Ireland. Twenty-four/seven the songs are playing until one day they just stop. It first starts one night after she dreams about her home in Ireland. She wakes up, wondering who could be blasting a radio at such a late hour, but soon realizes it is all in her head. Due to and EEG the doctors find out that the songs are coming from her temporal lobe. This makes them think that the songs are merely hallucinations that will go away as a small thrombosis in part of her right temporal lobe goes away also. In time, the infarction resolves itself and the songs stop along with it. I believe that if it was not in her temporal lobe than it would have most likely been in her auditory cortex. There could have been something going wrong that caused the cortex to think that it was hearing something that actually wasn't there at all.

The second clinical tale that intrigued me was Murder. In Murder a man named Donald kills his girlfriend under the influence of PCP. To make matters worse, after it happens Donald has absolutely no memory of him committing the crime. The evidence though is overwhelming, so Donald is incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. I believe that something had to be wrong with his hippocampus. The hippocampus is in the temporal lobe of the brain and is responsible for a persons memory. With it being damaged, whether by the PCP or by something that happened that night that he cannot remember, Donald would have very little memory or the event.

Awakenings

In the movie Awakenings,  Dr. Sayer gets a job at a medical facility. At first he believes he is applying for a job in research, but in truth it is for a job as a regular doctor. His research background begins to show when he starts questioning why some patients were simply part of "the garden" and did not interact at all. Instead of bypassing them like all of the other doctors, Dr. Sayer begins to form a theory. He thinks that the patients have an extreme case of Parkinsons disease. Parkinson's disease is a progressive disorder of the central nervous system that impairs the motor skills and speech of the patient. Dr. Sayer then forms a hypothesis: If he gives the patients a drug called L-dopa then they will wake up. When his superiors give him permission to only start one patient on the drug, with the consent of the family, Dr. Sayer begins a case study on Leonard Lowe. At first, Leonard does not react to the drug so Sayers response is to up the dosage. When Leonard finally does wake up and starts to function like a normal adult, permission is granted to give L-Dopa to all of the other patients in "the garden." After a extended amount of time, Leonard's condition starts to go down hill. He begins losing control of his arms and facial muscles and often has trouble doing regular tasks. This continues until Leonard is back to where he started.

Dr. Sayer discovered something medically very important, but ethically I would say that the experiment was wrong. Yes, Leonard was woken up for a period of time, but he was fully aware of decent back into his coma and knew that there was a good possibility that he might not wake back up again or if he did it might be in another thirty years.