An Analysis Of Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks is a collection of patient histories and stories of peculiar instances that Sacks experienced throughout his career as a neurologist. He separated the book into four sections, entitled “Losses,” “Excesses,” “Transports,” and “The World of the Simple,” under which he gave descriptions of the knowledge he gained from observing and interacting with specific patients.

Part One, Losses, focuses on the deficits that cause disease, and how they impact oneself. The first chapter, from which the name of the book came, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” chronicles Sack’s experiences with a man who developed visual agnosia. The man often made visual mistakes (such

Basically, she could not relate herself to her body; she felt no sensations in her muscles, tendons, or joints, and as a result, she was forced to compensate with vision. In order to keep her hands from wandering, or even to stand, walk, or sit up in a chair, she had to visually concentrate on her movements, albeit unnatural, awkward movements. The man from the next chapter, “The Man Who Fell Out of Bed,” had a similar disconnect to his body. Although the patient did not complain of any issue, he was admitted into a hospital once doctors found a so-called ‘lazy’ left leg. After sleeping, the patient was found to have fallen out of bed, and told Sacks that he had woken up with a severed human leg in the bed attached to his body. As the patient punched his left leg and tried to rip it off of him, Sacks advised against such actions because the leg was, in fact, his own, a revelation that upset the patient greatly. The next chapter, “Hands,” portrays the story of a blind woman with cerebral palsy, who claimed that her hands were useless “lumps of dough.” Her sensory abilities were unharmed, but she could not perceive those senses. In order to incite the woman to discover her capacities to perceive those sensations, Sacks instructed her nurses to

Sacks uncovered that she had neurosyphilis, a disease which was suppressed initially but came back even decades later. She was prescribed penicillin to prevent any further damage, but still experienced some disinhibition due to irreversible cerebral changes. Sacks also describes a similar case of a man named Miguel O., whose neurosyphilis led to his elaboration and animation of drawings Sacks had him copy, but who, when given Haldol, copied the image with none of the original