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A review by thaurisil
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
5.0
Arrogant, confusing, pretentious - I see these words in other reviews on the site and wonder if people are reading the same book as me.
I loved this book. Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, but he does not work with brains. He works with people. He truly cares for his patients, and the knowledge that he cannot properly treat most of them does not deter him from trying desperately to understand what makes them tick. He does his best to understand the thoughts, emotions and desires of his patients, all the while knowing that he never can. With deep sensitivity, he goes far beyond the role of a neurologist, doing his best to provide for his patients' emotional and mental wellbeing, and expressing genuine regret when he fails in this.
The friend who lent me this book told me that I would love the last section on the autistic. It was certainly interesting, the most eye-opening being a pair of twins who live and breathe numbers. They cannot do simple arithmetic, yet they can tell you on which day of the week any date within an 80,000 year timespan falls. Not only can they identify prime numbers, they savour the numbers. Sacks postulates that they see the harmony of the world in numbers, and it is such ideas on how those with neurological disorders perceive the world that make the book shine. The twins are later forced into pseudo-normal lives apart from each other and consequently lose their ability to 'see' numbers, raising the question of how much talent we lose in conforming.
But my favourite stories were of two men who had Korsakov's, and had no short-term memory, although they remembered incidents up to a certain point in the past (one thought he was a 19 year old living in 1945). I recently read Stiff by Mary Roach, and at one point she asked where the soul is located (heart, brain or liver?). Reading this book, I see a more pertinent question - what makes up the soul? Without memory, the men have no relation to the real world and cannot form relationships with real people. They cannot understand that they have a disorder because they have no memory of the disorder. Yet Sacks quotes A.R. Luria - "... a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being..." One man displays his soul in Chapel, and in his appreciation of art and music. The other man though is detached, disconnected - he shows no soul.
It is stories like these, some uplifting, some merely interesting, but many tragic, that allow us to enter the real world of Sacks' patients, and not just a superficial neurological world. He has seen an impressive range of disorders, and has studied many in-depth, such that the book never gets boring.
This book was written in 1985 - I am curious if anything has changed in the world of neurology since then. The idea of the autistic having remarkable talents seems to be more well-known than it was back then, but I wonder if other changes have been made, or if any research has been done in response to this book.
I loved this book. Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, but he does not work with brains. He works with people. He truly cares for his patients, and the knowledge that he cannot properly treat most of them does not deter him from trying desperately to understand what makes them tick. He does his best to understand the thoughts, emotions and desires of his patients, all the while knowing that he never can. With deep sensitivity, he goes far beyond the role of a neurologist, doing his best to provide for his patients' emotional and mental wellbeing, and expressing genuine regret when he fails in this.
The friend who lent me this book told me that I would love the last section on the autistic. It was certainly interesting, the most eye-opening being a pair of twins who live and breathe numbers. They cannot do simple arithmetic, yet they can tell you on which day of the week any date within an 80,000 year timespan falls. Not only can they identify prime numbers, they savour the numbers. Sacks postulates that they see the harmony of the world in numbers, and it is such ideas on how those with neurological disorders perceive the world that make the book shine. The twins are later forced into pseudo-normal lives apart from each other and consequently lose their ability to 'see' numbers, raising the question of how much talent we lose in conforming.
But my favourite stories were of two men who had Korsakov's, and had no short-term memory, although they remembered incidents up to a certain point in the past (one thought he was a 19 year old living in 1945). I recently read Stiff by Mary Roach, and at one point she asked where the soul is located (heart, brain or liver?). Reading this book, I see a more pertinent question - what makes up the soul? Without memory, the men have no relation to the real world and cannot form relationships with real people. They cannot understand that they have a disorder because they have no memory of the disorder. Yet Sacks quotes A.R. Luria - "... a man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibilities, moral being..." One man displays his soul in Chapel, and in his appreciation of art and music. The other man though is detached, disconnected - he shows no soul.
It is stories like these, some uplifting, some merely interesting, but many tragic, that allow us to enter the real world of Sacks' patients, and not just a superficial neurological world. He has seen an impressive range of disorders, and has studied many in-depth, such that the book never gets boring.
This book was written in 1985 - I am curious if anything has changed in the world of neurology since then. The idea of the autistic having remarkable talents seems to be more well-known than it was back then, but I wonder if other changes have been made, or if any research has been done in response to this book.