The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is written by Oliver Sacks. Dr. Oliver Sacks was a neurobiologist and taught at NYU School of Medicine. This book focuses on some of his most extreme and bizarre cases. I find some of his patient’s neurological conditions mind-blowing. *WARNING* There are a few minor spoilers dealing with patient’s diagnosis and if cured or not throughout the article. Like the title of the book, a patient actually mistook his wife for a hat and grabbed her head to try to put it on! The patient was diagnosed with visual agnosia, the loss of the ability to identify objects or people, which is likely caused by many lesions on the occipital or temporal lobe. This book is filled with many more cases just as unusual.
Book Stats
- Title: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
- Author: Oliver Sacks
- Genre: Case History
- Publication Date: 1985
- Pages: 233
- Est. Reading Time: 9-11 hours
- My Rating: 4/5 Stars
- Buy Now: Amazon
I will say, this book can be hard to read, as it uses a lot of scientific terminologies. I’m not trying to scare you away because he does do a good job of explaining the medical jargon, but be aware. I really wished I had read this in college when I was studying biology and the terms were still fresh in my mind but if you read this on a kindle like me, you can easily look a word up. With that being said if something is unclear or you would like to know more about it, leave a comment and I can explain it in a little more detail.
I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars because I am a biology nerd. This book is not for everyone, as I said before, it can be difficult to read. If you are not into human disorders or how the brain functions then you’re not going to find this interesting. I do highly recommend if you like the human aspect of biology, especially neurology. It could also possibly help with your studies and be entertaining at the same time.
Plot Summary of the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
This book is set up in 4 parts: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple. Every part has multiple chapters each about a different patient with a different disorder. The beginning of each chapter reminded me of an episode of House or of any doctor series. The patient is presented with all of their mysterious symptoms. Most of the symptoms are mind-boggling and leave you thinking what in the world is going on here. Even the doctors aren’t sure right away, but after some observations and tests, they begin to understand more. By the end of each chapter, they usually say what it most likely is and what caused it.
Losses
The first part, Losses, deals with deficits or impairment. Examples are loss of speech, language, memory, vision, dexterity, or faculties. An example of a patient from part one is a 27-year-old woman who couldn’t feel her body. She felt disembodied. The patient woke up one day and it was hard for her to walk or do anything without watching her hands or feet. She had lost her proprioception, the stimuli that connected the position of the body and the body’s movement. Eventually, she learned to compensate by relying on her vision to make life possible. Still, her movements looked artificial and if she lost concentration she would trip or drop what she was doing. She described it as “I feel my body is blind and deaf to itself…it has no sense of itself.” It’s hard to even imagine having such a rare disorder like that.
Excesses
The second part, Excesses, is the opposite, having too much of a brain chemical or stimulus resulting in a tic or other problems. One of his patients is a man with Tourette’s syndrome. Most of us have heard of Tourette’s syndrome: involuntary tics, jerks, noises, curses, or motions. When this book was written in 1985 it was a very rare disorder and almost unheard of. It shows how much neurology has changed in the last 30 to 50 years.
Transports
Transports, the third section, deals more with altered perception, imagination, or dream-like states. One older woman and somewhat deaf patient of his, heard very loudly a song from her childhood, over and over again. Turns out she was having temporal lobe seizures, non-life threatening but a nuisance to her. After putting her on anticonvulsants the music stopped. It’s crazy to think that one little thing going wrong could cause something so peculiar.
The World of the Simple
The last section, The World of the Simple, discusses people with intellectual disabilities and their ability to do extraordinary things. An example of one patient is a 61-year-old man who had meningitis as a child resulting in mental impairment. He struggled to keep a job and with many other aspects of life. Nonetheless, this man not only knew over 2,000 operas but he knew all the singers who had ever taken the role and all other details about the play. A very impressive memory for anyone to have.
Quotes
Some of my favorite quotes are from Losses in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat section. In the quote below, Dr. Sacks is talking with Dr. P, also known as “the man who mistook his wife for a hat.” Dr. Sacks hands him a glove and is trying to get him to tell him what it is. Remember he has visual agnosia so he can’t identify things.
“‘A continuous surface’, he announced at last, ‘in-folded on itself. It appears to have’—he hesitated—’five outpouchings, if this is the word.’
‘Yes,’ I said cautiously. ‘You have given me a description. Now tell me what it is.’
‘A container of some sort?’
‘Yes’, I said, ‘and what would it contain?’
‘It would contain its contents!’”
I found this interaction very interesting. Dr. P would try so hard but nothing seemed familiar to him. He couldn’t recognize faces but could immediately know who someone was by the sound of their voice. This is a good example of how the brain will overcompensate for a loss. But it still amazes me that someone could get by with the inability to recognize people and objects.
“But who was more tragic, or who was more damned—the man who knew it, or the man who did not?”
Dr. P did not realize anything was wrong with him. He would make up some reasons or his brain would overcompensate for his misidentifying. If someone pointed out his mistakes he would laugh it off. He lived a carefree life as a talented music professor. It was his wife who had to help. He had a routine but if he got off his schedule he would be stuck trying to figure it out.
What do you think about this quote? Which is worse, the man who knows he is ill and is desperately trying to get better or the man who doesn’t even know he is sick. I have always liked the saying ignorance is bliss so I would say knowing there is something wrong and struggling to fight it is worse.
My Thoughts
I liked the mystery of it all and how they presented each patient sort of as a puzzle. Some they never figured what caused it or how to cure the problem. I do find that scary and the fact that some of these happen completely out of nowhere. He also discusses how some issues could be psychological along with physiological. Especially the disorders that come on so suddenly and can’t be cured. That discussion has always interested me because there is still a lot to learn about the brain. The fact that it is so powerful it can make the difference between getting better or not is astonishing.
Final Feelings
I am not doing the book justice. My little snippets don’t show all the little intriguing and interesting details. Dr. Oliver Sacks knew his patients very well and it shows. He deeply cared for each one and not only the medical side but personally too. I learned so many things from this book that I couldn’t even imagine were possible.
Do you think you would read The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat? How do you feel about true medical mystery stories or clinical trials told as stories? Case histories aren’t a genre I usually read but I like to mix things up. Do you find them boring with too much science or do you find them exciting like me? Let me know in the comments!
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