LONG MEMORY LAPSE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 198, 19 May 1936, Page 9

LONG MEMORY LAPSE

New Zealander Busily Bridging Gap Melbourne, May IS. The New Zealand engineer, John O'Sullivan, whose case of mental blankness is puzzling the authorities at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, did not know that there had been a depression, that King George was dead, or that there had been a war in Abyssinia. He is at present reading avidly in order to bridge the seven years’ gap in his memory.

A Melbourne cable published on Friday stated that a mystery concerning a patient brought to a Melbourne hospital over a week previously, who was unable to remember anything of the past seven years, and who was found unconscious in a street in the suburb of Preston, had been solved. Tlie man had been identified as John O’Sullivan, of Napier, New Zealand. Tie is an engineer, but is unable to remember anything about his training. When he recovered consciousness he refused to believe he was at Melbourne, but he recalled that he had worked on a rubber plantation in Malaya and contracted malaria. He also recollected that be had lived bofh as O’Sullivan and as Fitzgerald somewhere. Doctors believe it to be a genuine ease of a dual personality.