Word: hewitt
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When Melvin Eugene Hewitt got into a brawl outside a Long Beach (Calif.) bar 2½ 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...
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...
Math v. Fairy Tales. Last week the university had to admit that it had been the victim of one of the strangest academic hoaxes in history. Yates, it seemed, was not the real Yates at all, but 31-year-old Marvin Hewitt of Hempstead, N.Y. He had never gone beyond high school, had never been to Wooster or Ohio State, and the Christie Co. that recommended him simply did not exist. Why had he taken on another man's name and record? It was, said Hewitt, "a compulsion. I always wanted to teach...
...compulsion, according to Hewitt, came to him early. The son of a Philadelphia laborer, he had begun "taking math books out of the library when the other kids took out fairy tales." At ten he was reading books on Einstein's theory of relativity, later became interested in psychology because "I recognized myself as a brilliant child." In his teens Hewitt claims to have mastered engineering, once wrote a paper for a state engineering society that was "so complicated that no more than three men in the room understood it." It did not really bother him that his father...
Quantum Electro-Dynamics. Since then, Hewitt has been playing a constant masquerade. Though he refuses to name them, he claims to have had professorships at five campuses before coming to New Hampshire. Each time, he says, he has assumed the name and identity of some scientist working in another part of the country. Apparently it was no trick at all to send for photostatic copies of the necessary academic records, to make up plausible recommendations, and to be put on the list of the American Physical Society in New York. Wherever he went, he claims to have been a success...