The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.’

This is a book with description on 24 different clinical cases of Dr. Oliver Sacks during his career. Sacks was a neurologist from the UK who practised in the US. It needs to be mentioned that the book was published in 1985 and thus, some of the terms used are not appropriate today (eg. retarded).

The book is split into four parts – losses, excesses, transports and the world of the simple. Each of these sections had clinical cases related to the main theme – the title story The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat was under the section of ‘losses’, which was about a music professor who was suffering from visual agnosia. Transports included stories (for lack of a better word) where the patients felt transported to another location based on their past memories. In most of these clinical tales, the author also added a postscript – of similar cases the author learnt of in the future or how their patient dealt with their difficulty.

To put it bluntly, this book was neither interesting nor informative. In any non-fiction, it is reasonable to demand who is the intended audience – the public at large or those involved in the field of neuroscience? However, I felt this book pleases neither; to someone like myself with no background in the subject – this book was very technical with several technical terms thrown at me as though it was a given that an average reader would understand them. On the other hand, for someone actually in the field might feel that they do not learn anything new from this book. Moreover, I thought I was in for a scientific reading and I was disturbed by the author’s use of the word soul as though it was a medical concept; I can understand the intent – that the author wants to bring out the human in his patients and is thus randomly throwing this word around like any philosopher does, but that just makes this book lose direction.

I did mention initially that the book was published in 1985 – but at the same time, there is a foreword from the author published in 2001. Considering that, the least that he could have done was to revise some of the words that he had used so casually in this book (like ‘retard’).

My only takeaway from this book was there are several rare neurological conditions which could lead to difficulties / advantages (in some cases) – this was something that I already knew, and this book added no further information to that.

The author was perhaps a great doctor, but writing is certainly not one of his skills and this could have been a better book if there had been a co-author. On that note, I would award this book a rating of two.

Rating – 2/10

Have a nice day,
Andy