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

by Oliver Sacks

Overview

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' 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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060970796
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/01/1990
Edition description:	1st Perennial Library ed
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.35(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.64(d)

About the Author

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London and was educated at Queen's College, Oxford. He completed his medical training at San Francisco's Mount Zion Hospital and at UCLA before moving to New York. Familiar to the readers of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Dr. Sacks spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia, and Hallucinations, about the strange neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. The New York Times referred to him as "the poet laureate of medicine," and over the years he received many awards, including honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal College of Physicians. His memoir On the Move was published shortly before his death in August 2015.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

1933

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

B.M., B.Ch., Queen's College, Oxford, 1958

Table of Contents

Preface

PART ONE: LOSSES

Introduction

1 The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

2 The Lost Mariner

3 The Disembodied Lady

4 The Man Who Fell out of Bed

5 Hands

6 Phantoms

7 On the Level

8 Eyes Right!

9 The President's Speech

PART TWO: EXCESSES

Introduction

10 Witty Ticcy Ray

11 Cupid's Disease

12 A Matter of Identity

13 Yes, Father-Sister

14 The Possessed page

PART THREE: TRANSPORTS

Introduction

15 Reminiscence

16 Incontinent Nostalgia

17 A Passage to India

18 The Dog Beneath the Skin

19 Murder

20 The Visions of Hildegard

PART FOUR: THE WORLD OF THE SIMPLE

Introduction

21 Rebecca

22 A Walking Grove

23 The Twins

24 The Autist Artist

Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

Dr. Sacks' most absorbing book... His tales are so compelling that many of them serve as eerie metaphors not only for the condition of modern medicine but of modern man.

New York Magazine

"Insightful, compassionate, moving . . . the lucidity and power of a gifted writer."
—The New York Times Book Review

"A provocative introduction to the human mind."
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Dr. Sacks's best book. . . . One sees a wise, compassionate and very literate mind at work in these 20 stories, nearly all remarkable, and many the kind that restore one's faith in humanity."
—Chicago Sun-Times

"Dr. Sacks's most absorbing book. . . . His tales are so compelling that many of them serve as eerie metaphors not only for the condition of modern medicine but of modern man"
—New York Magazine

“This book is for everybody who has felt from time to time that certain twinge of self-identity and sensed how easily, at any moment, one might lose it.”
—The Times

“Oliver Sacks has become the world's best-known neurologist. His case studies of broken minds offer brilliant insight into the mysteries of consciousness.”
—The Guardian

“Populated by a cast as strange as that of the most fantastic fiction . . . Dr Sacks shows the awesome powers of our mind and just how delicately balanced they have to be.”
—Sunday Times
 
“Sacks explores neurological disorders with a novelist's skill and an appreciation of his patients as human beings.”
—Publishers Weekly
 
“Sensitive yet lively. . . . This book ranks with the very best of its genre. It will inform and entertain anyone, especially those who find medicine an intriguing and mysterious art.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher