Ethics are not easy to sort out. Although psychologists commonly disagree on complex matters, in the end they try to do the best for their participants. It’s just that sometimes they have a funny way of doing it.
H.M.’s operation is sometimes described as being the only one of it’s kind, but that was not the case. The procedure had been carried out several times before and the results could have been reasonably expected. The surgeon had been pioneering this technique on psychiatric patients and knew the likely consequences. Why he carried it out is not clear, but there are lots of ethical issues here concerning the conduct of doctors and their monitoring by their colleagues.
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