Lingering Damage

When Melvin Eugene Hewitt got into a brawl outside a Long Beach (Calif.) bar 2 1/2 years ago, nothing was further from his mind than a contribution to medical research. But in his misfortune he made one. After he banged his head on a car and hit the sidewalk, Hewitt's heart stopped, and it was 15 minutes before doctors could restart it by massage. It seemed unlikely that Hewitt could live after such a long stoppage of circulation to the brain. Hewitt surprised his doctors.

He spent weeks in a deep coma and recovering, bit by bit, the power to focus his eyes, speak, understand and remember things. Within a year, he was back at his mother's home (TIME, Aug. 18. 1952), but as he learned to walk and talk better and coordinate more efficiently, he became restless and overactive, sometimes violent. So he was admitted to the V.A.'s Brentwood Neuropsychiatric Hospital.

There, Dr. Sidney Cohen reports, innumerable drug treatments seem to have made no difference to Hewitt, now 30, and neither do efforts to retrain him. He can remember nothing of the recent past, but "his recall of the ancient material learned during his youth is phenomenal." He can sing ballads popular 20 years ago, recite the Gettysburg Address, play checkers and do grade-school arithmetic. He can name the first but not the present President of the U.S. Hewitt's overall I.Q. has gone up from 52 after the injury to 71, but nearly all the gain is from improvement in his control of movements and using his sense of sight.

Says Dr. Cohen in summary: "He remains disoriented, with poor judgment, flattened [emotional responses] and a profound amnesia. The outlook is poor, but not completely without hope that he may some day be able to ... manage outside the hospital." Cases like Hewitt's will become more common, Dr. Cohen points out (Brentwood already has two more), as the practice spreads of opening the chest to massage a stalled heart.

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