Anne Green’s memory had been turned off and then turned on again.Īs strange as the stories of H.M. Today we describe it as flipping a switch. A pamphlet later circulated about the event described her memory as “a clock whose weights had been taken off a while and afterward hung on again.” The incident illustrated the machine-like quality of memory. She didn’t remember leaving the prison, climbing the ladder, or giving the speech, much less (thankfully) hanging. When Anne Green came to, she began reciting the speech she’d delivered at the gallows. But when they opened the coffin, they heard a rattle in her throat and managed to revive her with water, heat, and herbs. William Petty and Thomas Willis (of the Circle of Willis). After her speech, the executioner kicked the ladder out from under her and she hanged for almost half an hour before they cut her down and sent her body down the street to be dissected for science. She proclaimed her innocence to the crowd that gathered in the courtyard of Oxford Castle to watch her hanging. Thanks to the social mores of the time, she was tried and convicted of infanticide and sentenced to death. In 1650, a young British servant named Anne Green was seduced by her master’s grandson and gave birth to a stillborn baby. The experience also reminded me of a dramatic story I read in the nonfiction book Soul Made Flesh. Time felt continuous, despite the fact that my memory was not. I wonder if the feeling was something like my contradictory experience on the floor, when I lacked memory of the preceding moments and yet felt as if nothing were missing. We learned that his journal was filled with descriptions of waking up as if for the first time and having no recollection of writing any of the prior journal entries, nor of how he came to be where he was. How we always think we’ve caught it but we never have.īack in my grad school days, we studied the case of H.M., the famous amnesic patient who was unable to form new memories. (My prescriptions are to drink more water and maybe eat more salt.) Still, the experience got me thinking about memory and how it’s a strange and elusive creature. After the fall, doctors checked me out and said I was fine. I’ve always tended toward low blood pressure and often felt dizzy when standing up. A bit ethereal, and separated from the present by a gap that didn’t feel odd to me in the slightest. I remembered the minutes leading up to my dramatic tumble, but they felt like long ago. I was only out a few seconds, but it felt like it could have been hours. He held me and said, “Are you all right? Are you okay?” And that was how I awoke, as if from a long dreamless sleep, on the floor beside our front door. My husband, who was halfway out the door when I fell, rushed to gather me up. My forehead struck the lower hinges of the door I bruised my cheek and arm and knee, nothing badly. The next, my eyes had rolled back in my head and I fell face-first into the wall. One moment I was standing by the door to our apartment, wishing my departing husband a good day at work.
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