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

Summary (from the publisher): In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth 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."

 

Review: In this book, neurologist Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of twenty-four patients suffering from rare and baffling neurological disorders. These range from the titular story, about the man who gradually lost the ability to discern faces or common objects to a man who no longer recognized his own leg as his own to patients with strange and compulsive tics and a patient trapped in the past to individuals with seemingly low IQs who are still blessed with remarkable artistic or mathematical abilities.

 

Similarly to the other two Sacks' books I have read, The Island of the Colorblind and An Anthropologist on Mars, I found this more anecdotal than clinical in nature. Sacks offers no cure or solution for the vast majority of the patients describes and, in many cases, offers scarce details on the actual neurological diagnosis. Rather than a neurologist examining patients from a clinical perspective, it reads almost like field notes on strange species of people. In addition, as this was originally published in 1970, it is significantly dated, particularly in the language used by the author, who frequently uses words like "idiot," "simpleton," and "retarded" to describe patients.

 

The stories recounted in this work of non-fiction reveal the complexity of the human brain and the wide range of disorders that can transform our behavior and actions. Sacks describes the horrifying nightmares any of us could wake up to, such as the elderly woman who woke up from a dream of Irish music from her childhood only to still be hearing loud music in her head, as if a radio played for her alone. This music went on for weeks and made it difficult for her to carry on a conversation or sleep and was apparently the result of a small stroke, the effects of which eventually subsided with time. Or the man who committed a gruesome murder while under the effects of drugs. While he had no memory of his crime, he was later in a car wreck that resulted in a coma. This car wreck seems to have triggered the remembrance of the crime, which gave him vivid memories of the murder and provoked horror and nightmares in the patient.

 

For those looking for purely descriptive examples of neurological oddities rather than medical insight, this is a fascinating look at the range of functions of the human brain. While dated, it still holds relevance in describing possible disorders and conditions that can afflict the human race.

 

Stars: 3

 

Related Titles:

• An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks
• The Island of the Colorblind by Oliver Sacks