Understanding the brain has been achieved by understanding what happens when things go wrong, which is why neurologists are often so fascinated by the term “deficits.” These deficits occur when a part of the brain is damaged and a person’s behavior or abilities are changes as a result. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist who is fascinated by diseases and people, examines neurological disorders with expertise and humanity. Born in London, he was a professor of clinical neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and viewed the human condition similar to a philosopher. He believed that therapy for brain-damaged patients should be designed in a way that restores …show more content…
Sack’s book, he discusses types of neurological illnesses that can be induced by an abundance of certain mental processes. By doing so, he describes the actions and effects of a neurological abundance on a patient’s day-to-day life, instead of restricting his story to the affected part of the brain, like most cases in ordinary neurology. He mainly focuses on patients who suffered from Tourette’s Syndrome, which was a relatively unknown and rare disorder until the middle of the 1970s. Within that decade, however, medical establishments finally came to the realization that Tourette’s was fairly common. Doctors’ low understanding was ascribed to the overly clinical style of most of the tests that neurologists used when examining patients. Dr. Sacks goes into detail and analyzes the different examples of illnesses that could be regarded as advantageous, like how bouts of syphilis left patients feeling vivacious and active. This allows his readers to understand the different components to neurological disorders. By including patients such as William Thompson, who was unable to remember things and equalized his condition by creating endless, contradictory identities for himself just so that he could achieve a sense of self despite not having any memories, the readers are able to comprehend the hardships that an individual would have to endure, thus humanizing the