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The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And…
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (original 1970; edition 1998)

by Oliver Sacks

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
11,503207574 (3.94)283
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."… (more)
Member:justaminuteplz
Title:The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
Authors:Oliver Sacks
Info:Touchstone (1998), Paperback, 256 pages
Collections:Your library, Currently reading
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Work Information

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1970)

  1. 113
    The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human by V. S. Ramachandran (lorax)
  2. 30
    Blindsight by Peter Watts (hnau)
    hnau: Science fiction inspired by the works of Oliver Sacks (among others).
  3. 20
    Toscanini's Fumble: And Other Tales of Clinical Neurology by Harold L. Klawans (jordantaylor)
  4. 20
    Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (chwiggy)
  5. 20
    Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?: A Neuroscientific View of the Zombie Brain by Timothy Verstynen (Katya0133)
    Katya0133: A humorous and decidedly irreverent take on neuroscience which nonetheless manages to be incredibly informative.
  6. 20
    Fractured Minds: A Case-Study Approach to Clinical Neuropsychology by Jenni A. Ogden (bluepiano)
    bluepiano: I read this for pleasure but have since learned it's used as a textbook. Quite probably it's not got so broad an appeal as Sacks' book but to me the Ogden not only seems more substantial but it's even more the page-turner.
  7. 20
    The Man Who Forgot How to Read: A Memoir by Howard Engel (meggyweg)
  8. 10
    Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin Yalom (clairecc)
  9. 10
    Bomb in the Brain : A Heroic Tale of Science, Surgery, and Survival by Steve Fishman (meggyweg)
  10. 10
    A Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy (meggyweg)
  11. 00
    Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio (ShaneTierney)
  12. 00
    The Burning House by Jay Ingram (geophile)
  13. 00
    The Barmaid's Brain: And Other Strange Tales from Science by Jay Ingram (geophile)
  14. 00
    On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks (chwiggy)
  15. 00
    The Rationality of Emotion by Ronald De Sousa (ShaneTierney)
  16. 00
    The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist (wester)
    wester: I don't know why Sacks' book is not mentioned in the bibliography of McGilchrists book, as it contains many excellent illustrations of its important points. The style is also similar: medical, but personal, poetic and accessible.
  17. 00
    The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean (nessreader)
  18. 15
    One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (lucyknows)
    lucyknows: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey may be paired with The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks or even Awakenings by the same author. All three books explore the idea that once a person becomes ill or is institutionalised, they lose their rights and privileges.… (more)
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» See also 283 mentions

English (183)  Italian (8)  French (3)  Catalan (2)  German (2)  Portuguese (Portugal) (1)  Danish (1)  Swedish (1)  Finnish (1)  Portuguese (Brazil) (1)  Dutch (1)  Spanish (1)  All languages (205)
Showing 1-5 of 183 (next | show all)
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. ( )
  AnniePettit | Mar 16, 2024 |
Interesting, but also boring after a while. Language was VERY outdated. ( )
  AerialObrien | Feb 24, 2024 |
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. ( )
  A.Godhelm | Oct 20, 2023 |
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. ( )
  Joe.Olipo | Sep 19, 2023 |
Totally fascinating. ( )
  ropable | Aug 20, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 183 (next | show all)
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.
added by jlelliott | editNature, Stuart Sutherland (pay site) (Dec 26, 1985)
 

» Add other authors (35 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Sacks, Oliverprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Cassel, BooTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Davis, JonathanNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Goldberg, CarinCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Moll-Huber, P.M.Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Morena, ClaraTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Wensinck, F.Translatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.

- William Osler
The physician is concerned (unlike the naturalist)... with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances.

- Ivy McKenzie
Dedication
To Leonard Shengold, M.D.
First words
Neurology's favorite word is 'deficit', denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties).
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Wikipedia in English (5)

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."

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Book description
Oliver Sacks è un neurologo, ma il suo rapporto con la neurologia è simile a quello di Groddeck con la psicoanalisi. Perciò Sacks è anche molte altre cose: «Mi sento infatti medico e naturalista al tempo stesso; mi interessano in pari misura le malattie e le persone; e forse anche sono insieme, benché in modo insoddisfacente, un teorico e un drammaturgo, sono attratto dall'aspetto romanzesco non meno che da quello scientifico, e li vedo continuamente entrambi nella condizione umana, non ultima in quella che è la condizione umana per eccellenza, la malattia: gli animali si ammalano, ma solo l'uomo cade radicalmente in preda alla malattia». E anche questo va aggiunto: Sacks è uno scrittore con il quale i lettori stabiliscono un rapporto di tenace affezione, come fosse il medico che tutti hanno sognato e mai incontrato, quell'uomo che appartiene insieme alla scienza e alla malattia, che sa far parlare la malattia, che la vive ogni volta in tutta la sua pena e però la trasforma in un «intrattenimento da Mille e una notte». Questo libro, che si presenta come una serie di casi clinici, è un frammento di tali Mille e una notte – e ciò può aiutare a spiegare perché abbia raggiunto negli Stati Uniti un pubblico vastissimo. Nella maggior parte, questi casi – ma Sacks li chiama anche «storie o fiabe» – fanno parte dell'esperienza dell'autore. Così, un giorno, Sacks si è trovato dinanzi «l'uomo che scambiò sua moglie per un cappello» e «il marinaio perduto». Si presentavano come persone normali: l'uno illustre insegnante di musica, l'altro vigoroso uomo di mare. Ma in questi esseri si apriva una voragine invisibile: avevano perduto un pezzo della vita, qualcosa di costitutivo del sé. Il musicista carezza distrattamente i parchimetri credendo che siano teste di bambini. Il marinaio non può neppure essere ipnotizzato perché non ricorda le parole dette dall'ipnotizzatore un attimo prima. Che cosa vive, se non sa nulla di ciò che ha appena vissuto?
Rispetto alla normalità, che è troppo complessa per essere capita, e tende a opacizzarsi nell'esperienza comune, tutti i «deficit» o gli eccessi di funzione, come li chiama la neurologia, sono squarci di luce, improvvisa trasparenza di processi che si tessono nel «telaio incantato» del cervello. Ma queste storie terribili e appassionanti tendono a rimanere imprigionate nei manuali. Sacks è il mago benefico che le riscatta, e per pura capacità di identificazione con la sofferenza, con la turba, con la perdita o l'infrenabile sovrabbondanza riesce a ristabilire un contatto, spesso labile, delicatissimo, sempre prezioso per i pazienti e per noi, con mondi remoti altrimenti muti. Questo è il libro di un nuotatore «in acque sconosciute, dove può accadere di dover capovolgere tutte le solite considerazioni, dove la malattia può essere benessere e la normalità malattia, dove l'eccitazione può essere schiavitù o liberazione e dove la realtà può trovarsi nell'ebbrezza, non nella sobrietà».
L'uomo che scambiò sua moglie per un cappello è stato pubblicato per la prima volta a Londra nel 1985.
Haiku summary
Neurology doctor
Studies people as people
Not sacks for strange brains (Marissa_Baden)

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