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

By: Oliver Sacks

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction

Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

In his most extraordinary book, "one of the great clinical writers of the 20th century" (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks' 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' 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".

PLEASE NOTE: Some changes have been made to the original manuscript with the permission of Oliver Sacks.

©1970, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1985 Oliver Sacks (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Dr. Sacks's best book.... One sees a wise, compassionate and very literate mind at work in these 20 stories, nearly all remarkable, and many the kind that restore one's faith in humanity." ( Chicago Sun-Times)

"Dr. Sacks's most absorbing book.... His tales are so compelling that many of them serve as eerie metaphors not only for the condition of modern medicine but of modern man." ( New York magazine)

Hats off to you...

“Intensity of concentration fullness and totality of a feeling no forgetting absorb in a act of his entire being an organic continuity unity seamless reality of absoluteness in spiritual attention
Sequence and memory traces fallible mechanisms
Absorb by a feeling seamless found himself
A man doesn’t consist of memory alone Feeling , will , moral being it is here you may touch him and see a profound change
Stilled in music and art. Each moment contains many moments organized stable as art or will endured and survived.
Emotional and spiritual attention concentration deeply attentive to the beauty and soul of the world
Rich in Kierkegaard categories dramatic religious aesthetic
Mood quietude
Mental challenge falls apart
Empirical science empiricism doesn’t take into account the soul, what constitutes and determines personal being
A philosophical and clinical lesson here
No matter how great the Organic damaged is there remains the possibility of reintegration by art, communion by touching the human spirit and this can be persevered in what seems like at first a hopeless state of neurological destruction “
#PastMeetsPresent #Heartfelt #Animal #tagsgiving #sweepstakes

Wasn’t what I expected, but still good.

I anticipated this book would be about psychology, but it focused more so on the physical. This book looks at the neurological conditions, symptoms, and causes that create such curious conditions, as a man who cannot recognize his own wife as a person, let alone his longtime partner

Enlightening!

This book was incredibly intriguing, as a psychology student with some background in numerology. The only troublesome thing for me was the outdatedness of some of the content, especially the passages on autism. That however, is to be expected from a book from the 70s. It was reassuring to hear that he holds a fairly positive outlook on autism for the time. Be advised that the r word is used frequently, but in a medical context, along with some other now outdated descriptors.

dated material, but interesting cases

cases were interesting, but treatment of things like autism are dated. Also used offensive words no longer considered acceptable, such as idiot. Still interesting in general.

Amazing!

This book was recommended to me by the guidance counselor at my school after I discussed a different book I was reading at the time. Little did I know that it would have me hooked from the very beginning. The human mind is so complex. The narration was wonderful too.

Fascinating

This book covers some very interesting topics of neurology. I am by no means a scientist nor do I have medical training or knowledge. But I was interested and able to understand a lot of what was shared. It is quite fascinating to hear of these various people and the worlds they now live in.

It is well performed too. A soothing pleasant voice.

food for thought

intriguing accounts of medical cases from a human caring individual. eye opening for someone without formal education in neuroscience

a classic.

regardless of your profession, if you work with people, you should listen to this book. yes, some of the terminology is dated, but the ideas are not.

Very interesting

Makes you think and hopefully look at people individually and consider their inner struggles. What goes on day to day outwardly and within themselves.

Highly technical

The examples of patient curiosities were fascinating but the level on which this was written made me wish I were reading it on a Kindle so I could get instant definitions of the vocabulary being used. There was a lot of "doctor talk" which makes it challenging for those not in the medical field.