The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks
One of the greatest clinical authors of the 20th century, according to The New York Times, describes the case histories of individuals who became trapped in the strange, seemingly unfathomable realm of neurological illnesses in his most astounding book.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks chronicles the lives of people with incredible perceptual and intellectual abnormalities: patients who have lost their memories and with them the majority of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and everyday objects; who suffer from violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been labelled as retarded but are gifted with talents.
These amazing stories are nonetheless very human even though they are unfathomably weird, thanks to Dr Sacks’s superb and compassionate narration. In addition to allowing us to enter the world of those who are neurologically disabled and understand in our hearts what it must be like to live and feel the way they do, they are studies of life battling against enormous difficulty. Sacks, a master healer, never loses sight of the “suffering, afflicted, battling human subject,” which is medicine’s ultimate job.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks
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The neurologist Oliver Sacks authored a number of best-selling books that dug deeper into understanding the capabilities of the human brain. He used his collection of patient cases who had various neurological problems to write his best-sellers. The book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, which he compiled using his former patients who suffered from a variety of severe neurological problems, is among his greatest sellers. He categorized the cases in his work into four groups: losses, excesses, transportation, and simple.
First off, the title of the book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, perfectly captures the nature of the work. Because the title piques the reader’s interest, they are more likely to read the book because they are curious about the neurological condition that stops the patient from recognizing faces and mistaking their wife for a hat. In the opening chapter, Dr Sacks briefly introduces us to the patient who inspired the book’s title. Since Dr P sets the tone for the other patients in his collection of clinical tales, I believe it’s appropriate that Dr Sacks choose Dr P as the name of his book.
The book had excellent writing and was simple to read. Since the instances either fell into losses, excesses, transportation, or simple category, the book’s division into four different categories allowed for the book to be incredibly ordered. Dr Sacks outlines neurological illnesses that have a specific type of loss in their brain functioning in the first section of the book, titled Losses. A loss might be something like visual agnosia, which in Dr P’s instance made it impossible for him to tell faces apart. Despite his inability to recognize faces, Dr P managed to carry on with his daily activities with little disruption by using music as a guide.
