The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat Sparknotes

Oliver Sacks’s nonfiction book, A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, was published by Simon & Schuster in New York in 1985.
The book consists of various neurological clinical cases related to intellectual and perceptual abnormalities. The case studies are directly from Oliver Sacks’ patients and are divided into four sections: losses, excesses, transports and the world of the simple. Section one consists of clinical cases where a loss of a certain function impairs one to go about their day. Section two consists of cases where an excess of something makes or breaks a person. Section three talks about preconscious or the unconscious, which is like transporting to a dream-like state. Lastly section four covers patients

who live “simply” and are “pure.” This section is different from the previous sections.
Oliver Sacks is a renown British author and neurologist who was raised in a family of doctors and scientists. Sacks earned his medical degree from Oxford University in the United Kingdom. After receiving his degree, Sacks was a professor at Columbia University and at New York University and a visiting professor at University of Warwick until his death in 2015 (Blatty). Apart from his most famous book, A Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, he wrote Awakenings, The Island of the Colorblind, An Anthropologist on Mars, Hallucinations and more. He also contributed to various journals including The New Yorker and The London Review of Books during his free time. He received numerous honorary doctorates from Bard College, Drexel University, Tufts University, New York University, Georgetown University and more (Blatty). His book contains case studies of his patients he had met over the course of his career.
Sacks divides the book into four sections consisting of twenty-four case studies in total.

Like mentioned above, the sections are losses, excesses, transports and the world of the simple. In the first section, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is the most popular and known case history in the book. It is about a music teacher, Dr.P, who loses his sense of perception as he sees features one by one when examining an object or a human being. Sacks claims that it is due to degradation in his visual cortex. An interesting aspect to this clinical case is that the Dr.P is unaware of his problem as he goes about his day. In the second section, there is a case study called Witty Ticcy Ray. It is about 24 years old Ray who has the Tourette’s syndrome. Even though he has abnormal reflexes, he uses sublimation and is able to play the drums extremely well. He accepts himself for who he is as he learns that something negative can turn into something positive. In the third section, there is a case study called The Dog Beneath the Skin. It is about Stephen D., a medical student later revealed to be Oliver Sacks, himself, who, after being under the influence of cocaine, amphetamines and phencyclidine (angel dust), develops a keen sense of smell. He has a sense of a dog, as he is able to identify shops and streets just by its smell. The last and fourth section has a case study called The Autist Artist. It is about a Jose, a man with autism, who is treated in an inhumane way by his caregiver. During one of the meetings, Sacks offers Jose a pencil and encourages him to draw. Sacks notices the great precision in his drawings and his awareness of his surroundings. This is a case that truly shows Sacks’ exploration and investigation when dealing with his

patients.
The author depicts psychological relationships, problems, disorders and therapy technique for most of the case studies because it was about his patients. He was able to explain the case studies in a way anyone can understand by using everyday language and defining different concepts. Sacks also provided additional information from other patients and researches about a certain topic in the postscripts. For example, for the case study The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks explained Dr. P’s problem not just as a degradation of visual cortex, which may be hard to understand, but as “not just visual perception, but visual imagination and memory, the fundamental powers of visual representations” (22). This description gives more information for people who might not know what the degradation of visual cortex can do to someone. Sacks also explains where the visual cortex is located in the brain and what it can do when it is damaged. Another example is for the case study Witty Ticcy Ray. Sacks shows the different techniques he uses to cure Ray’s Tourette’s syndrome. Sacks used Haldol, but “its initial effects were close to catastrophic: partly, no doubt, on a physiological basis” (99). Sacks then turns to therapy including sublimation. Ray is able to use his abnormal reflexes to play the drums and is successful at it. Sacks uses eclectic approach by using both psychotherapy and biomedical therapy. The last example is from The Dog Beneath the Skin. When Sacks describes that one of his patients has a keen sense of smell, or olfaction, he describes him as having his own olfactory physiognomy, “a smell-face, far more vivid and evocative, more redolent, than any sight face” (157). Rather than just explaining that his patient had an increase in smell due to excessive drug use, Sacks explains the changes and consequences that comes along with having a keen sense of smell. He describes one of the changes, which is having an olfactory physiognomy, a face one makes when they smell abnormally.
The book was accurate from my knowledge because Oliver Sacks was a neurologist and he wrote about his patients. The book shows that there was much effort and research put into it because of the postscripts after the case studies. Sacks also did follow up studies for some of his patients even though they were not his patients anymore to accurately give the reader information about the patient and what happened after his sessions with them were over. He also reflected on his encounter and met other patients with similar diagnosis and symptoms with his patients.
The different case studies that Sacks wrote about in his book amazed me because they were case studies that I have never heard of nor did I think it was possible. The cases were extreme and rare. Sacks’ case studies in context of a patient rather than the explaining about a certain disorder itself helped me understand what exactly these patients were going through. The postscripts also helped answer some questions I had while reading each case study. I was aware of terms such as visual agnosia, autism, Tourette’s syndrome, aphasia, etc. that were mentioned in his book, but I did not know how it applied to someone’s life until I ready case studies about them (Sacks). Sacks also wrote the book using everyday language, so it was easy to read. In his postscripts, he also explained in detail what certain concepts meant so I had no trouble reading the book. Many of the case studies Sacks wrote about gave me insight and understanding that if people lack a certain function, they tend to replace them by performing better in another function or adjusting to the lifestyle. What I learned about myself in this book is people are more powerful than they think they are. Their brain compensates when function is not working as it should.
There is a drama/musical film and an opera for the book. What is interesting is that Oliver Sacks is part of the cast and plays Oliver Sacks in the film. The film focuses only on one of the case studies talked about in the book, which is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. I found short clips of both the movie and the opera on the Internet, but it was not enough to grasp the whole idea of how the story was presented. I did notice some obvious similarities and differences though. A similarity is that the characters and the situation is the same. Dr.P suffers with prosopagnosia and Sacks struggles to identify the cause of the disorder. He visits Dr. P’s home only to find out how Dr. P goes about his day without much problem. A difference was that the film includes segments where pathologist Tighe and Sacks examined Dr. P’s brain. It also shows scenes where Sacks reflects and looks back at the encounter with Dr. P (Rawlence). The opera and the film were definitely more dramatic than I thought it would be. The book just had Sacks explaining a case study while the film had actors acting and showing the ups and downs of Dr. P’s life.