The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Twenty four neurological cases written as portraits rather than reports. The book that made the case history readable.
We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative, whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.
Sacks gathers accounts of patients whose neurological damage has altered perception, memory, movement, or the sense of self, and writes each one as the record of a particular life rather than a catalogue of lesions. A music teacher can no longer recognise faces or objects yet navigates the world through song; a man severed from new memory rebuilds a self from fragments of the past. In each, Sacks asks what remains of the person when a faculty is lost, and where identity relocates itself when its usual supports fail.
The clinical value lies in his refusal to let the deficit stand for the patient. He treats symptom and biography as inseparable, attending to how someone inhabits an affliction, adapts to it, sometimes finds compensation or even meaning in it. For a clinician, the book models a case history that holds the whole person, tracking the work of adaptation and the self that persists beneath disorder.
About the author
Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks (1933 to 2015) was a British neurologist and writer who worked for many years in New York. In books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he wrote about patients with unusual neurological conditions, restoring the clinical case history as a humane narrative form. He treated the people in his care as individuals rather than diagnoses, and his writing reached readers well beyond medicine.
Details
- 1985
- Picador
- Picador
- 288
- 9781529077292