The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

by Oliver Sacks

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.”

39 editions

GenericMoniker reviewed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks

Taking our brain for granted

3 stars

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 Pamplina reviewed El hombre que confundió a su mujer con un sombrero by Oliver Sacks

Amor por sus pacientes

5 stars

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.

spectrumgirl reviewed El hombre que confundió a su mujer con un sombrero by Oliver Sacks

La sensación de conectar con la pasión de tratar a los pacientes.

5 stars

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...).

astar reviewed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks

None

4 stars

3.5

btuftin reviewed The man who mistook his wife for a hat by Oliver Sacks

Review of 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

I've wanted to read this for a long while. It's often referenced in books and texts on the workings of the mind, and Oliver Sacks is a great writer. I was only slightly disappointed.

The book is a bit inaccessible, referencing big names and works in neuropsychology like the reader should be familiar with them. They're not absolutely necessary to understand the content, but the references give you a constantly refreshed sense that you are missing out. It is also a bit dated, reminding you that "idiot" and "retard" used to be clinical designations, but there's no mistaking Sacks as someone who cared more about some of the patients described than the medical community of the day.

And the topic and the way it is handled is definitely fascinating. To truly examine and seek to understand what it is to be a human, we have to look at those who are at the edges or outside, who lack some of the things we take for granted and take for necessary. Sacks does this, and he goes beyond just describing the initial observations, the oddities and strangeness, he seeks to probe what it is "like" to be them and examine and interact with them with that goal in mind.

It is not a book with a lot of answers, but it raises a lot of important questions.

LemmiSchmoeker reviewed The man who mistook his wife for a hat by Oliver Sacks

Review of 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

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...

Balise reviewed The man who mistook his wife for a hat by Oliver Sacks

Review of 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' on 'Goodreads'

1 star

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.

Pentapod reviewed The man who mistook his wife for a hat by Oliver Sacks

Review of 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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!