num_pages: 233
description: In Awakenings Dr. Oliver Sacks, whom The New York Times Book Review called “one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century”, recounted the life stories of twenty patients, all afflicted by a single though extraordinary disease. Here, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Others Clinical Tales, he casts his net even wider and explores a greater variety of neurological disorders and their no less extraordinary effects upon the minds and lives of those affected. Dr. Sacks shows us predicaments almost inconceivably strange, but he also eloquently describes the resilience and resourcefulness of the human spirit and shows us how, in the face of almost impossible odds, we may still achieve a sort of accomodation and affirmation. For here we en-counter “The Lost Mariner”, who has lost his memory and with it the greater part of his personal history; patients who are convulsed by epileptic memories from the past; patients with remarkable perceptual and intellectual aberration–like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”; others with extraordinary perceptual amplifica-tions and gifts. We encounter patients–the opposite of those in Awakenings–who are galvanized by incessant tics, imitations, explosions of passion and imagery. We encounter patients who feel partly or wholly desembodied, others who feel phantom limbs or bodies. We encounter every sort of excess and defect, every sort of aberration and transformation–patients who become, briefly under the spur of neurological disorder, flirts, visionaries, murderers, or dogs…. These brillant tales are not simply studies of disease but of life itself struggling against extra-ordinary adversity. And this exploration is always leavened by a deep human symphaty and feeling so that these men and women, however strangely afflicted, are felt as intensely real and human. Dr. Sacks enables us to enter their strange situations and imagine with the heart, if not with the mind, what it must be to live and feel as they do. Implicit in these tales is a plea for a deeper and more humane science–while these tales themselves are exemplars of such a science.
language: English
title: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
titlecomplete: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
genres: Medicine, Short Stories, Mental Health, Science, Neuroscience, Psychology, Nonfiction, Health, Essays, Medical
ratings_count: 213689
publisher: Summit Books