The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
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
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Neurologist Oliver Sacks gathers twenty-four case studies from his New York practice, including a music professor with visual agnosia who reaches for his wife's head as if for a hat, a sailor stuck in 1945, and twin savants who trade twenty-digit primes. Each case becomes a small essay on the brain.
Yes. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is nonfiction, drawn from Oliver Sacks's clinical practice. Patient names and identifying details are changed but the cases are real.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat was written by Oliver Sacks, published in 1980 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is 308 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a standalone novel by Oliver Sacks, not part of a series.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
