paperback, 256 pages
Published Sept. 14, 2021 by Vintage.
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 …
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.”
The case studies of patients who had strange neurological conditions was fascinating -- people who couldn't sense their bodies, people who couldn't form new memories, a pair of twins who could perceive numbers of things without counting them and several others. The author's philosophizing was less interesting.
El doctor Sacks dedicó su vida a estudiar a personas con graves problemas neurológicos. Se podría pensar que una actividad así haría que viera a sus pacientes como especímenes, objetos de estudio a diseccionar. Nada más lejos de la realidad. Este libro está lleno de amor, amistad y empatía hacia todos sus pacientes. Los retrata describiendo sus patologías con tal delicadeza y calor humano, que llegamos a comprender (hasta el punto donde eso es posible) su visión del mundo y vivencias como si fueran nuestras. Un conjunto de relatos maravilloso; el testamento de un científico excepcional.
Es un libro básico para quienes quieren curiosear en los casos neuroclínicos más excpecionales y no es para menos. La verborrea es exquista. Una pena que el que escribe es un hombre de su tiempo (con todo lo que eso conlleva). Centra el aprecio a sus pacientes basado en la inteligencia, aunque creo que aprendió un poco cuando se abrió un poco en su carrera. Y se dota de una sensibilidad para comprender lo que pasa que creo que en esa época no abundaba. Ojo es un libro que triggea en ciertas actitudes por el poco conocimiento que se tiene de ciertos colectivos en esa época (autismo, discapacidad intelectual...).
This, I think, is the book that made Sacks famous and that led to the filming of his earlier novel Awakenings.
It's a fascinating and touching collection of short anecdotes about patients with rare neurological problems. His solutions are often as impressive as the syndromes themselves, and one finds oneself wishing to have an equally sympathetic doctor if the need should ever arise...
And then I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. I really didn't like it.
It's a collection of "weird" neurological cases, including, well, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
In a way, it's kind of scary - because it shows that sometimes, brains do really weird stuff, and that it may happen for what seems to be little to no reason at all. It's also quite fascinating, for the same reasons. And obviously, the answer to the question "but... why? how?" is probably not something that we (we the humanity?) actually know, but it's consequently quite frustrating as well - "this guy has this and this symptoms/behavior - next!"
To me, the whole book felt more like a rambling ringmaster presenting his freak show - I was actually quite unsettled by that. I was also uncomfortable at the idea of …
And then I read The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks. I really didn't like it.
It's a collection of "weird" neurological cases, including, well, the man who mistook his wife for a hat.
In a way, it's kind of scary - because it shows that sometimes, brains do really weird stuff, and that it may happen for what seems to be little to no reason at all. It's also quite fascinating, for the same reasons. And obviously, the answer to the question "but... why? how?" is probably not something that we (we the humanity?) actually know, but it's consequently quite frustrating as well - "this guy has this and this symptoms/behavior - next!"
To me, the whole book felt more like a rambling ringmaster presenting his freak show - I was actually quite unsettled by that. I was also uncomfortable at the idea of "this guy clearly has a soul, that guy doesn't seem to" that come in the early chapters - it made me cringe a lot.
I don't know, maybe I'm missing something there, because most of the comments on the intarwebz talk about how "beautiful" and "touching" this book is, and... well, no. (Well, I have some hypothesis about that "beautiful"/"touching", but they may be a tad too cynical to apply to people I really know nothing about :P.)
So... definitely NOT recommended.
An absolutely fascinating collection of clinical tales describing a wide variety of strange symptoms caused by different types of brain damage and disorder. It gives you a new perspective on how fragile our perception of reality really is, and little how the idea of "normal" really means. This book is a great insight into how our minds work and should be required reading for everyone who has one!
