The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Neurology’s favourite word, Sacks writes at the head of the book’s first part, is deficit — a vocabulary of subtraction, with a privative term for every faculty a person can lose. His objection is not that the accounting is wrong, but that a list of losses is not a patient. Modern case histories, he complains in the preface, name the subject in a passing phrase — “a trisomic albino female of 21” — that could as well describe a rat. To put the person back at the centre, on Sacks’s argument, a case history has to be deepened into a tale, so that you end up with a who as well as a what. The twenty-four cases that follow are that argument carried out rather than stated.

Oliver Sacks on SummaryShelf

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales