The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales

The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales
Oliver Sacks
209 pages

Summary: Direct from Oliver Sacks webiste http://www.oliversacks.com/books-by-oliver-sacks/man-mistook-wife-hat/

Here Dr. Sacks recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders: people 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.

Opinion:
Wow! This book amazed me with the amount of neurology problems that can or are commonplace. I did not know about any of those technical terms except for autism, tumors, etc. Everything else was a completely new concept to me. The brain fascinates me. Its territory is still in the beginning stages. I do not know when we will completely understand the brain, but I know it is not anytime soon.

Agnosia and proprioception were the most fascinating to me. I am going to look more up on those subjects. The stories were interesting, especially Part One. I liked The Man who mistook his wife for a hat, The lost mariner, The dismembered lady, Hands, The president's speech, Cupid's disease, A master of identity, Reminiscence, A passage to India, The dog beneath the skin, Murder, and The twins were my personal favorites. Lol! That is almost about the whole book. The part I did not like was when they referred to some of the patients as idiotic, dumb, or stupid. That is not right or moral in my opinion. They are people too and using those word to describe their conditions as wrong. It is full of 24 short stories. Dr.Sacks himself is a very interesting character. In the stories, you can see his growth as a neurologist, as the time range varies. Besides all the technical terms, the stories themselves are the best part. In my opinion, just skip straight to the stories and do not read the post publications. I recommend this to everyone just for the experience.


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