The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat
And Other Clinical Tales
Book - 1998
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."
- Details
- Full Record
- Additional Info
Searching for more content…
Searching for more content…0684853949
Opinion
From the critics
Community Activity
Summary
Add a Summary
mariednguyen
Sep 27, 2013
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing the case histories of some of his patients. The title of the book comes from the case study of a man with visual agnosia. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat became the basis of an opera of the same name by Michael Nyman, which premiered in 1986.
The book comprises twenty-four essays split into four sections which each deals with a particular aspect of brain function such as deficits and excesses in the first two sections (with particular emphasis on the right hemisphere of the brain) while the third and fourth describe phenomenological manifestations with reference to spontaneous reminiscences, altered perceptions, and extraordinary qualities of mind found in mentally retarded people.
Comment
Add a CommentFascinating cases (and some philosophical musings), told in clear prose. I've encountered some of these exact same cases before, in other books, but it's interesting reading nonetheless because of the author's extended discussions.
Very interesting cases written in a clear and easy to understand style.
If you find this collection of case studies interesting, I highly recommend A.R. Luria's The Mind of the Mnemonist (1968) .. a fascinating ~30-year case study of Russian patient Solomon Shereshevsky's prodigious eidetic memory and synaesthesia. Luria's other famous case study The Man with a Shattered World (1987) is less remarkable.
Un homme peut décrire les caractéristiques d'une personne ou d'un objet sans pouvoir l'identifier. Un autre ne peut pas se rappeler où il se trouve, ce qu'il vient de faire ou de dire ou à qui il parle pour plus de quelques minutes. Une femme cesse de voir la moitié gauche des choses, ce qui l'amène par exemple à manger uniquement la moitié droite de son assiette. Dans ce livre, Oliver Sacks fait découvrir des troubles neurologiques intrigants mais qui ont des effets terribles pour les patients et leurs familles.
Normally I'm not super into idea of "founding fathers," but Oliver Sacks is a very important figure in the field of neuroscience, and his books are simultaneously entertaining, accessible, and educational.
An intriguing collection of case-studies from the famed neurologist. Contains a nice combination of medical science and philosophical musings about each extraordinary case.
A very interesting compilation of clinical cases. I skipped the introductions, which were rather scholarly and didn't add much for me, but I enjoyed the stories. What struck me about each of them was the fact that every single patient still retained their humanity; they didn't become faces in the crowd, having their suffering impersonally analyzed. Sacks manages to make each person come alive in their own way. Very intriguing and sympathetic.
In the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, the author, Oliver Sacks, shares with us some of the strangest quandaries from his neuroscience practice. Yes, the very first story is about a man who did indeed mistake his wife for a hat and the rest of the stories are just as bizarre. The writing is a little wordy and is exhausting at times but overall the actual content of the case histories more than makes up for the pacing because these are real people with real, albeit very rare, disabilities.
I thought this book was quite good; and actually quite scary. The book details what happens when the mind gives up, but when the body isn't ready to go along for the ride.
Full review here:
http://www.671books.net/non-fiction/the-man-who-mistook-his-wife-for-a-hat/
The good: many of the tales were very interesting and I did a lot of thinking about how I would feel if I had to deal with some of these problems. The bad: the writing was NOT for laypeople -- it was very clinical and there was way too much jargon. Further, it needed a better editing job because Sacks would make prolific use of some term, like "proprioception" (which means the awareness of where one's body is in space) and not define it until many pages or chapters later. Also, Sacks had published a very successful book Awakenings prior to this one and he very frequently referred to patients and situations from it, essentially presupposing that you had read Awakenings already. It was definitely interesting, but I had to bull through to the end. If you want a more accessible introduction to Sacks and some of his fascinating patients, seek out some of his radio work. He gives interviews about his books for NPR and often plays the neurological expert on a great show called Radiolab.