The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales - Oliver Sacks, 256 pages (November 7, 1986), Picador, ISBN: 0330294911
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"At the end of the interview, P. grasped his wife's head and tried to lift it up and place it on his own. He had mistaken his wife for a hat!"
Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England and earned his medical degree at Queen's College, Oxford. Since 1965, he has held the position of clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. His second book, Awakenings. inspired a movie of the same name starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks explores a wide variety of neurological disorders. These include: memory loss, failure to recognise words, failure to recognise objects, chorea, tics, Tourette's syndrome and Parkinson's disease. He relates the stories of people with these disorders in prose that is almost poetic. Indeed, Rockefeller University awarded him the Lewis Thomas Prize, recognizing him as a poet.
Oliver Sacks relates his patient's encounters with hallucinations, transports, visions, and other symptoms of neurological disorders. Sacks bemoans the stress on computational and abstract modelling at the expense of emotional empathy and clear-sighted, humane judgement. Therapy for brain-damaged patients should, he asserts, be designed to help restore the individual by using the full spectrum available to the therapist, including: medication, accommodation, music and art. This should be geared to the individual and focus on their interests and passions. For example, he relates the story of one brain damaged woman who was fed-up with performing boring "remedial" tasks and wanted to go to the theatre more often.
These brilliant tales enable us to enter the world of the neurologically impaired and to imagine what it must be like to live and feel as they do.
Oliver Sacks: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is
- In summary, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks is essential reading for anyone who may suffer neurological problems (and, ultimately, that's all of us).