The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
Oliver Sacks
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0684853949
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.”
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the height of cruelty had there been any possibility of Jimmie’s remembering it. ‘Here,’ I said, and thrust a mirror toward him. ‘Look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?’ He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of the chair. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered. ‘Christ, what’s going on? What’s happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?’— and he became frantic, panicked. ‘It’s okay, Jimmie,’ I said soothingly.
stronger than disease. Health, health militant, is usually the victor. PART THREE TRANSPORTS Introduction While we have criticized the concept of function, even attempting a rather radical redefinition, we have adhered to it nevertheless, drawing in the broadest terms contrasts based on ‘deficit’ or ‘excess’. But it is clear that wholly other terms also have to be used. As soon as we attend to phenomena as such, to the actual quality of experience or thought or action, we have to use terms more
tendencies to this in Martin A. (Chapter Twenty-two), in Jose (Chapter Twentyfour), and especially the Twins (Chapter Twenty-three), exaggerated, especially in the Twins, by the demands of public performance, coupled with their own obsessionalism and exhibitionism. But of much greater interest, much more human, much more moving, much more ‘real’—yet scarcely even recognized in scientific studies of the simple (though immediately seen by sympathetic parents and teachers)—is the proper use and
is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs. What we see, fundamentally, is the power of music to organize—and to do this efficaciously (as well as joyfully!), when abstract or schematic forms of organization fail. Indeed, it is especially dramatic, as one would expect, precisely when no other form of organization will work. Thus music, or any other form of narrative, is essential when working with the retarded or apraxic—schooling or therapy for them must be centered on music or
whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost, did not indeed know that anything was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned— the man who knew it, or the man who did not? When the examination was over, Mrs P. called us to the table, where there was coffee and a delicious spread of little cakes. Hungrily, hummingly, Dr P. started on the cakes. Swiftly, fluently, unthinkingly, melodiously, he pulled the plates towards him and took this and that in a great gurgling stream,