Book Bearings
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
- 308 pages · about 5 hours
- First published 1985
- 62 editions
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1 About this book
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, published in 1985, is a collection of twenty-four case histories by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, based on his own patients. They are arranged in four sections. Losses and Excesses describe people whose brains have lost a function or produce too much of one, among them the man of the title, who can no longer recognize faces and objects. Transports deals with visions and reminiscence, and The World of the Simple with people of limited intellect who have remarkable gifts. Sacks presents each of them as a person, not only as a diagnosis.
- Psychology, pathological
- Pathological Psychology
- Science
- Neuropsychology
- Neurology
- Anecdotes
- Nervous system
- Mental Disorders
2 What to expect
Twenty-four short case histories by a neurologist, about patients whose brain disorders have altered memory, perception or the sense of self in strange ways. Each is told as a story, with curiosity and sympathy, and with reflections on what the case shows about the mind. It is humane and readable, with some medical vocabulary and dated terms, and it has since emerged that Sacks embellished some of the cases.
Good for readers who want: the strangeness of the brain, humane case histories, and short, self-contained chapters.
3 About Oliver Sacks
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Oliver Sacks
5 Similar books
- The Human Mind by Karl A. Menninger
- The Autistic Brain by Temple Grandin
- Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters
- How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
- Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman
- Psychopath Inside by James H. Fallon
- Brain, Mind, and Behavior by Floyd E. Bloom
- Biological Psychology by S. Marc Breedlove