The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Publication date: 1985

The bestselling collection of clinical tales from the far borderlands of neurological and human experience.

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Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat

Here Dr. Sacks recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders: people 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.

“Short narratives, essays, parables about patients with a great range of neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions, written in a lighter, more informal style than I had ever used before. To my intense surprise (my publisher’s too!) this book hit some nerve in the reading public, and became an instant best-seller.”
Oliver Sacks on Hat

Praise for The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat:

“A provocative introduction to the marvels of the human mind….”
Clarence E. Olsen, St. Louis Post Dispatch

“Dr. Sacks’s best book….One sees a wise, compassionate and very literate mind at work in these 20 stories, nearly all remarkable, and many the kind that restore one’s faith in humanity.”
Noel Perrin , Chicago Sun-Times

“Dr. Sack’s most absorbing book….His tales are so compelling that many of them serve as eerie metaphors not only for the condition of modern medicine but of modern man.”
New York Magazine