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A review by bookishsumaiyah
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks
5.0
A well-written non fiction book about the peculiarities of neurological diseases and how indicators of genius and brilliance can be found in places in which you least expect. Oliver Sacks lovingly describe each patient and their uniqueness in different clinical stories, and sets a gold-standard of neurologists word wide to perceive their patients more than just symptoms alone. Sacks language is cherry-picked to do his patience justice, and this creates one of the most beautiful enduring writing you will ever read:
“Empirical science told me there was not - but empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being. Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov's, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.”
- Oliver Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, p.42
“And not just stories - poetry too. This seemed a deep need or hunger in Rebecca - a necessary form of nourishment, of reality, for her mind. Nature was beautiful, but mute. It was not enough. She needed the entire world re-presented to her in verbal images, in language, and seemed to have little difficult following the metaphors and symbols, in striking contrast to her incapacity with simple propositions and instructions. The language of feeling, of the concrete, of the image and symbol formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter. Though conceptually inept, she was at home with poetic language, and was herself, in a stumbling, touching way, a sort of ‘primitive’, natural poet.
- Oliver Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”
“Empirical science told me there was not - but empirical science, empiricism, takes no account of the soul, no account of what constitutes and determines personal being. Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov's, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.”
- Oliver Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, p.42
“And not just stories - poetry too. This seemed a deep need or hunger in Rebecca - a necessary form of nourishment, of reality, for her mind. Nature was beautiful, but mute. It was not enough. She needed the entire world re-presented to her in verbal images, in language, and seemed to have little difficult following the metaphors and symbols, in striking contrast to her incapacity with simple propositions and instructions. The language of feeling, of the concrete, of the image and symbol formed a world she loved and, to a remarkable extent, could enter. Though conceptually inept, she was at home with poetic language, and was herself, in a stumbling, touching way, a sort of ‘primitive’, natural poet.
- Oliver Sacks, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.”