The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined. - Oliver Sacks

This is my first blog post, and I want to gain some momentum as I hope to make this a habit, both to document my own notes and for any reader to hopefully take away some interesting information. I can think of no better way to start than to post some of my thoughts on one of the best books I read this past year: “A Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, a wonderful collection of short stories (anecdotes) by the insightful neurologist, Oliver Sacks.

In this book, Sacks presents the stories of some his fascinating patients, each of whom presents some curious sickness from some pathology in the brain. One recurring point that struck me throughout is that unlike patients afflicted with other pathologies of the body, several of these patients could live completely content and fulfilling lives when given the right opportunity to fit their world.

This book is divided into four parts: Losses, Excesses, Transports and The World of the Simple. In the effort to present my takeaways from the book, I’ll delve into a couple of my favorites:

  1. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Losses)
  2. Reminiscence (Transports)
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

This was such a fascinating story, partly because Dr. P’s (the patient) life seemed completely normal—he was a local and well-reputed musician and teacher with a charm and humor about him—except for some oddly specific idiosyncrasies that raised some eyebrows. First, he mistook his foot for a shoe. Next, during some tests, Sacks discovered that Dr. P “failed to see the whole” (Sacks, 10). Then, as hinted at by the title:

He also appeared to have decided that the examination was over and started to look around for his hat. He reached out his hand and took hold of his wife's head, tried to lift it off, to put it on. He had apparently mistaken his wife for a hat!

I recall reading this with a grin on my face, largely due to the absurdity that such a way of perceiving the world was actually possible. In another example, Dr. P sees a glove as ‘a continuous surface … infolded on itself’ (Sacks, 15).

As Sacks describes it himself, cases such as this one “constitute a radical challenge to one of the most entrenched axioms or assumptions of classical neurology—in particular, the notion that brain damage, any brain damage, reduces or removes the ‘abstract and categorial attitude’, reducing the individual to the emotional and concrete “ (emphases added, Sacks, 7).

Anyways, just some thoughts for now!