The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

by Sacks, Oliver W

In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders.

Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.

If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility: "the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject."

• ISBN10: 0684853949
• ISBN13: 9780684853949
• Publish Date: 2 April 1998 (first published 9 October 1986)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 13 April 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Imprint: Pocket Books
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 243
• Language: English

Reviews

[celinenyx]

Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a collection of case studies on people with a neurological disorder. Every chapter - some only a few pages, some spanning up to twenty - describes a certain person whose brain acts in an unexpected way. What could have been a cold collection of symptoms is turned into a warm, human collection through Sacks' empathy for his patients.

I found these anecdotes highly intriguing. Though psychology and neurology have done much to describe what the brain does and how it does it, there is still so much we do not understand, and Sacks' cases show what can go wrong. Sometimes the stories are tragic, as one might expect with severe brain damage, but many of them show strength in adversary, perseverance, and a reverence and appreciation for human life, however lived. For me Sacks' musings on what it means to live a different existence - for example, a life without an idea of one's past - were especially interesting, though others might prefer to skip these sections as they can be quite dense.

My only gripe with this book is that I felt the cases could have been rewritten more to fit the book format. Sometimes passages are repeated unnecessarily, and the jumps from one case to another can be quite stilted and abrupt. On the whole, I think The Man Who Mistook holds up well, even though science has advanced quite substantially since it was written, because of Sacks' scientific enthusiasm and sincere compassion with his subjects.

Wow, what a great book! Though I'm not very knowledgeable about neurology, this book was extremely compelling and a fairly quick read too. Sacks is an excellent and vivid writer and observer. My only regret is that I haven't read him sooner. I borrowed this book from my brother after hearing about Dr. Sacks on Radio Lab (an NPR podcast I highly recommend). Unfortunately he passed away recently but his stories there were very interesting and prompted me to read this book. The tales in this book are so amazing that's it almost hard to believe them all. Dr. Sacks delivers everything in engaging prose that's sufficiency non medical while remaining intellectual. I'm very interested in reading some of his other books and if you're considering picking this one up I'd highly recommend it (though be prepared to look up plenty of definitions).