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

I am so angry right now. I can’t take another word of this self-righteous, ignorant, judgmental narrative masquerading as compassion. I am close to the end but I can’t bear to finish. I just want to fling my phone (I was taking the audiobook route) to the wall and scream, NO! NO! NO!!! These are people, not freaks, idiots, morons, retards!!!

I know this is how it was in the seventies, but I am reading it now. And even in the seventies - how can a doctor clearly see extraordinarily abilities in someone, and still call them a retard and a freak, because some other abilities are lacking, and because they don’t understand where some behaviors (like tantrums) are coming from? (He is describing someone clearly on the autism spectrum.) show more You have someone with superhuman ability to remember and understand very complex nuances of music, and your conclusion is not that this person is smart and we misdiagnosed him, but that music does not require intelligence? Wtf is wrong with you???

This last chapter is just an avalanche of belittling, terrible language. Defectives, retards, morons, simpletons, freaks. Just so derogatory. It seems too much of this language, and not just used as a clinical term.

The blurb says Dr Sacks talks of people with compassion. Bullshit. Pity is not compassion. He is dripping with condescension, talking of everyone like “it is such a pity that their life is shattered”, always analyzing how terrible it is when this or that ability is missing. He even goes to the point of suggesting that some people with memory loss do not have a soul! WTF! He does not treat the “patients” as people, does not feel like he should help their strengths, special abilities flourish, help them live a full life. Again, I am aware that this was the seventies. But that does not make it right.

This book is dated to the point of blood-boiling. It is not a book we should still be reading. I can’t recommend it to anyone in the 21st century. show less

Ok, io mi entusiasmo facilmente e i miei entusiasmi sono spesso dei fuochi di paglia destinati a spegnersi a una rilettura più attenta, ma credo che questa volta sia diverso. "L'uomo che scambiò sua moglie per un cappello" è uno dei libri più belli che io abbia mai letto, non solo tra i saggi, ma in assoluto.
Questa raccolta di casi clinici affrontati dal Dottor Sacks durante la sua carriera contiene tre elementi che la rendono un'opera eccezionale:(1) l'interesse scientifico suscitato dalle strane anomalie che possono colpire il sistema nervoso umano,(2)l'umanità e la sensibilità dell'autore/medico nell'affrontarle e riportarle a noi lettori e (3), infine, il potenziale narrativo di ciascuno dei casi presenti.
Ogni storia show more descritta è un universo di emozioni e riflessioni che susciteranno in voi un vortice di domande importantissime sulla realtà, l'identità e come le percepiamo, domande che non vi lasceranno neanche quando finirete di libro. show less

I don't have the sort of job that obliges me to write case studies, but I know someone who does, and she tells me that they're an odd, and sometimes weirdly compelling, literary form. Oliver Sacks's "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" is essentially a compilation of extended case studies, and I suppose that the book could be criticized for lacking an overriding theme. At the same time, there's a lot of interesting stuff here, and Sacks seems to have chosen these stories specifically to expand his readers' understandings of the limits and variety of human experience. Most of these conditions that Sacks presents are pretty extreme: we meet a patient who can't remember anything that's happened during the last fifteen years, and show more another who can't visualize her position in space, people who hear songs playing on radios that are not there, and other patients whose conditions are weirder still. Still, while it's impossible to doubt the author's medical bonafides, his real interest here is the nature of consciousness, and many of these bizarre cases serve to illuminate the intricacies of "normal" mental functioning that most of us take for granted. Sacks seems like precisely the man to do this: he's ridiculously knowledgeable about the history of his field and extremely well-versed in literature and poetry, and he often draws on his knowledge to illustrate the points he makes about the nature of human experience and its relationship with neurology. In a sense, this sets him apart from many of today's "popular" science writers, who often come off, for better or worse, as game amateurs willing to try anything to learn about their chosen subject. Of course, this also means that Sacks's work is a bit denser than these writers' works: "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" is consistently interesting, but I wouldn't call it a fun read. I expect that some readers will probably find Sacks a bit stiff and pedantic for their liking. Even so -- and this is important -- Sacks also comes off a a true humanitarian, a compassionate doctor who is willing to empathize with their patients, particularly those who suffer from organic mental disabilities -- in order to understand their problems and worldviews. Indeed, this book might be read as a sort of argument for a less clinical, more holistic approach to neurosurgery that keeps the interplay between the brain and human experience as its central preoccupation. Perhaps for this reason alone, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" might be called a really valuable, important book. show less

I’m on the fence about whether to recommend this.

On the one hand, those who are looking for an introduction to the extraordinary things that can happen when brains go bad (damaged by diseases or accidents, genetically miswired …) are likely to be fascinated by these tales of folks coping with extreme memory loss, sensory hallucinations, epileptic seizures preceded by bizarre hallucinations, savantism and, yes – an inability to recognize familiar objects, as in the case study alluded to in the title of the book.

On the other hand, this book is full of problems, many of them having to do with the dated nature of the essays - Sacks penned this back 1970, when neuroscience was in its infancy – but some having to do with Sacks's show more offputting approach to science and storytelling.

The main issue: the science part of this is tremendously dated. As this book captures what one might call the “dawning of neuroscience,” Sacks is writing about hypotheses (logical guesses) rather than scientific certainties. And while he is rightly credited for correctly hypothesizing that encephalitic patients might be roused by the administration of L-Dopa (the plotline of the movie Awakenings, starring Robin Williams), many (many) of the hypotheses he advances in these essays have since been thoroughly discredited. (Moreover, the frequency with which he equates correlation with causation makes me question what they were even calling “scientific method” back in the 1970s!)

Another flaw: the extent to which the patients in this book are treated as the sum of their symptoms rather than as human beings who happen to be suffering from dysfunctions. Sacks pays lip service to the importance of valuing the “personhood” of the folks in these tales … but then goes on question whether this patient’s life has ceased to have meaning, or whether that patient has lost his soul. Wow! As a person who has worked extensively with folks with neurological dysfunctions, I was appalled by his callousness and not in any way assuaged by the philosophical pretentions he uses to justify his often appalling speculations.

Yet another reason I hesitate to recommend this: Sacks’ storytelling, which I found to be unnecessarily dense and presumptuous. His abundant employment of obscure medical terminology is entirely unnecessary (I say this as a scientist myself – the way we talk to each other isn’t the way we should be talking to laypeople, as he should certainly be aware), his digressions are often specious, and his incessant references to obscure philosophical ideas hit as pretentious rather than learned – like a college professor trying way too hard to convince his students of his erudition.

When I first read these case studies back in the late 1970s, they inspired in me a curiosity so profound that they likely influenced my decision to become a biologist. It’s ironic that these same essays now inspire so much frustration. But also, to be fair, they provoke a renewed appreciation for the enormous strides we’ve made in neuroscience since these were penned, and serve as a reminder of the fascinating complexities that we are still struggling to fathom. show less

“Hiya, Doc! Nice morning!”

Once we step past the title on our way through the stories in this book, we can get past the impression that we’ve just seen a poster for a circus curiosity. I call them stories; they can’t be other than composites of case histories used for the purposes of illustration. It just wouldn’t be ethical, would it. And besides, we shouldn’t let truth get in the way of a story. There’s far too much dependence on truth and memoir in the book market at the moment. Fiction is far more interesting. Ethics don’t apply so easily there. And besides, ‘truth tellers’ are a scary bunch, as are highly moralistic writers and thinkers. Perhaps fiction is the last totally free area of human thought. Sacks guides show more us early through this by quoting Luis Bunuel – the Spanish film maker at the beginning:

‘Life without memory is no life at all ... our memory is our coherence”

Now, why would a medical man quote a film-maker!

I’m always a sucker for a story about a misfit or outsider. They are the heart of literature. I love a fictional outsider, hence I adore the writing of Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Salinger, and so on through a long list. The plight of the outsider humanises us. We like to join the herd if we can, then no one can see us. No one wants to be watched and dissected. The herd does all the watching. They also do all the defining as they look out at who isn’t in the herd. “Look at the way he … “, “What is she wearing!” etc. Medical cases are like this too, once you are unwell you are a category of being you may not like the sound of, poked and prodded, your previous rights to anonymity suspended. Once you have a medical condition, you are outside the norm. The language of categories takes over.

Language takes me straight to the case of Jimmy G, who cannot form new memories. When Sacks encounters him, he appears to behave as though he recognises his doctor, he’s chatty, affable, engaging. We discover this ‘performance’ of sorts as a remnant of the little language still available to Jimmy G. The extent of his brain damage has not affected his procedural memories, including the stylistic elements of social interactions formed in words, all those throw away “hello, how are you” type of phrases. Once this performance ends and there's nothing else there, we share in the grief for the lost identity hiding behind the shadow of the person that is there. Sacks describes a tension in Jimmy, a recognition of his condition when he runs out of procedural phrases. He ceases to be other than a series of scripted performances. The moment feels tragic, and it is. We want to believe Jimmy is still there. He seems such a nice guy.

Jimmy G’s story becomes a story of the human condition. No one wants to disappear. If we had a grim choice what would we offer to lose: hand, foot, sight, hearing, touch? Think about it… the sense of who we are; memory forms the person who we think we are. It’s like death while living. Who wants purgatory? Sacks offers us this existential illustration, through this character of Jimmy G. Was he real or actual? It matters little, he could be a variant on a theme that we all believe we have a concrete idea of our own integrity as a person, our likes, dislikes, behaviours. Jimmy has none of these after a certain point. And yet, he is like us in every way – he performs the ritual greetings – what else can he do – he goes on - as Samuel Beckett reminds us of what we all do.

I wasn’t looking at the outlier in Jimmy G, I was looking at myself, my alternate self, perhaps, there but for the grace of god self, fellow traveller. We are all an accumulation of atoms, formed in a slight variance to the other. Individual, but not free of our shared human elements. Odd, instead of unique I like to think, we need to be in the herd, but don’t like being there. Jimmy doesn’t have that dilemma any more.

Bunuel again: “I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life…”

Except, Jimmy G might just escape the final amnesia. He lives. Or the many Jimmy G’s that went into making up this one Jimmy G story. Oliver Sacks, I take off my hat to you. You’ve given Jimmy G a memory. show less

I picked this up at a railway station, shortly after it was published, not quite knowing what to expect. Frankly, I think it was the extraordinary title (and my lack of time) that made me grab it.

All these years later, I remember it well. It was my first introduction to all sorts of bizarre psychological, psychiatric, and neurological conditions that are now more widely known to the general public, and left me amazed at the power and quirks of the human brain. And it was my first introduction to Sacks himself.

Sacks could have presented a Victorian freak show in book form, and I did occasionally feel a twinge of guilt at my interest in such devastating personal medical problems (this was before Miserly Lit was big).

But that's not what show more he wrote.

This is sensitive, educational, affectionate, and, yes, amusing. Tragic, but never sentimental, Sacks writes with engaging charm. I think this is a force for good. show less

A few quick notes. I picked this up as an audiobook from Kindle Unlimited and although some of the medical terminology was beyond my normal understanding I found the book fascinating, but probably not in the way it was intended. Our senses take in all of the information we use and it is the brain that takes that information and puts it into, what we think is, normal perspective. There are common things like color blindness which leads me to wonder how that world would look. It is not devastating unless you work in electronics. Cases here are different. The title case is a man who no longer recognizes faces is also the man who mistakes his wife for his hat...or at least her head for his hat. We depend on our brains to take in information show more constantly and translate that information into something useful to us; something that reflects reality. The idea that this system can become flawed is terrifying. So much more than the results of the defects, but in that the person affected doesn't realize the problem. His brain tells him everything is right as he experiences it. Those around him tell him different. This is certainly the making of a living horror story. Your brain tells you one thing those around you say different. Even if you believe those around you, how can you go through life questioning everything you experience? Perhaps one of the most terrifying, but completely real, books I have read. show less