The Strange Patient M: The soldier who started seeing the world upside down after being hit on the head

A new investigation brought from oblivion the strange case of “patient M”: a young soldier wounded in the Spanish Civil War that literally rocked the world.

The young man was 25 years old when in the spring of 1938 a bullet on the battlefield, most likely fired by Franco, it went through his head. It didn’t kill him though.

When he regained consciousness two weeks later, that Republican soldier had undergone a startling change: under certain conditions he saw the world upside down.

The soldier was treated in a military hospital by a named doctor Right Gonzalothen 28 years old, who would in time become one of the eminent medical specialists in brain function.

Gonzalo verified that the bullet had partially destroyed the convolutions of his cerebral cortex in the left parieto-occipital region. However, the wounded miraculously survived without surgery no special care.

The unusual case allowed Gonzalo, born in Barcelona in 1910, to deepen and study the functioning of the human brain. I thought I could give you a lot of information. Something he ended up checking.

The doctor and patient M, as Gonzalo said, survived the war and they continued to see each other for nearly half a centuryuntil the death of the famous neurologist in 1986.

Now, the investigator’s daughter, Isabel, has dusted off her father’s files – boxes with hundreds of documents and photographs – to rediscover that case together with the neuropsychologist Alberto García Molina.

According to the newspaper VillageGonzalo was a disruptor in his field at a time when the scientific community was divided between those who saw the brain as a whole and those who drew rigid boundaries between brain regions.

Gonzalo postulated an intermediate hypothesis with patient M as the cornerstone: the theory of brain dynamicsaccording to which the organ has its functions distributed in gradients, with gradual transitions.

The patient’s ability to adapt was amazing, as described by the doctor in his book Cerebral Dynamics, published between 1945 and 1950. M “was surprised by his abnormalities, for example, seeing some men work upside down on a scaffold.”

“In general, it appears that the ailments go completely or almost unnoticed by the wounded themselves and, even later, when they are discovered, they do not seem to care, rather they regard them as something temporary that does not affect or jeopardize their daily life,” the doctor was surprised. M himself minimized his symptoms: “These are things that sometimes come to mind”.