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

In Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, there is a very clear purpose. Sacks is aiming to resurrect the focus of medicine not on the what, but on the who. His goal is to bring healing back to where it started, with emphasis on patients and their personalized care. He does this in plenty of ways. Sacks chooses to proceed by utilizing ethos, and sets the foundation for the rest of his book. He then applies logos and pathos to convey his message, and to convince his audience.
From the very beginning of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Sacks has presented his audience with his distinguished ethos, or character. He introduces himself in a way that reveals his decorum, while still being subtle, and with just the right amount

Albeit enargeia is a simple strategy, it is also an effective one. Sacks’ entire book is a collection of his cases, retold distinctly and well. He is able to retell these stories in such a way that you can visualize and feel. “As I remember her, like Nina, in the April sun, so I remember her, etched with tragic clearness, in the dark November of that year, standing in a bleak cemetery in Queens, saying the Kaddish over her grandmother’s grave. Prayers and Bible stories had always appealed to her, going with the happy, the lyrical, the ‘blessing’ side of her life. Now, in the funeral prayers, in the 103rd Psalm, and above all in Kaddish, she found the right and only words for her comfort and lamentation. During the intervening months (between my first seeing her, in April, and her grandmother’s death that November) Rebecca - like all our ‘clients’ (an odious word then becoming fashionable, supposedly less degrading than ‘patients’), was pressed into a variety of workshops and classes, as part of our Developmental and Cognitive Drive (these too were ‘in’ terms at the time). It didn’t work with Rebecca, it didn’t work with most of them. It was not, I came to think, the right thing to do, because what we did was to drive them full-tilt upon their limitations, as had already been done futilely, and often to the point of cruelty, throughout their lives We paid far too much attention to the defects of our