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Loading... The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (original 1970; edition 1998)by Oliver Sacks
Work InformationThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1970)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I love this series of short stories. The human body is a fascinating thing and to hear real life stories of all the ways our body makes mistakes is funny and intriguing. I’ve collected the entire series of books and love them all. ( ) A book that really suffers from age. Sacks was a pioneer writing about a lot of these issues, but unfortunately this also means the observations and primarily the techniques for investigating the various cases described are in their infancy. Consequently a lot of the information presented here is wrong. The terminology is dated and now wrong. Even Freudian psychology is used as if it were a legitimate tool for understanding human development instead of being resigned to the historical trashbin where it belongs. The breadth of case studies is as interesting as ever of course, from phantom limbs to visual hemi-inattention, and the anecdotes from patients about their conditions are if not enlightening, interesting. Fortunately we've come a long way and have technological tools they could only dream of when this was written - Sacks has also continued writing in the same style and his latter book Hallucinations (2012) was a lot more up to date in that regard. Likely the best effort in the genre. Well-read, empathic physician composes a series of vignettes which appear to arise from actual clinical encounters (!). Commentary on most encounters is entertaining, if not groundbreaking, though often characterized by hypostatization. An axiomatic bend toward humanization, which should not be discounted.
In addition to possessing the technical skills of a 20th-century doctor, the London-born Dr. Sacks, a professor of clinical neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, sees the human condition like a philosopher-poet. The resultant mixture is insightful, compassionate, moving and, on occasion, simply infuriating. One could call these essays neurological case histories, and correctly so, although Dr. Sacks' own expression -''clinical tales'' - is far more apt. Dr. Sacks tells some two dozen stories about people who are also patients, and who manifest strange and striking peculiarities of perception, emotion, language, thought, memory or action. And he recounts these histories with the lucidity and power of a gifted short-story writer. The book deserves to be widely read whether for its message, or as an easy introduction to neurological symptoms, or simply as a collection of moving tales. The reader should, however, bring to it a little scepticism, for outside Sack's clinic, things do not always fall out quite so pat. Belongs to Publisher SeriesGli Adelphi [Adelphi] (190) Biblioteca Adelphi (174) Perennial Library (PL7079) rororo sachbuch (18780) Is contained inAwakenings, A Leg to Stand On, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks Der Tag, an dem mein Bein fortging. Der Mann, der seine Frau mit einem Hut verwechselte by Oliver Sacks ContainsInspiredHas as a studyHas as a student's study guideDistinctionsNotable Lists
In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th 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." No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)616.8Technology Medicine and health Diseases Diseases of nervous system and mental disordersLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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