Summary: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Hatem Alharthi
BME 24100 (28979)
Prof. Steven Higbee
Extra Credit
December 20, 2014
Personal Response to The Man who mistook his wife for a hat book
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a remarkable and interesting medical book and one of the top rated medical books as ranked by Goodreads website published in 1985 by Oliver Sacks. The book’s author is Dr. Oliver Sacks a British-American neurologist and writer. From my experience with Dr. Sacks’s books, I can see that his knowledge in neuroscience is very huge because I have looked at two amazing books of his books The Mind’s Eye and The Island of the Colorblind. His books are rich of sources of neuroscience. I read the first half of The Island of the Colorblind which has a scientific demonstration of achromatopsia, also known as color agnosia, from a neuroscience and clinical perspective. In addition of his knowledge in neuroscience, his positions as a researcher, professor, and a member of clinical faculty in several universities helped him in his writing
skills to get his readers’ attentions to deliver his messages and valuable information by using awesome stories about his patients or his personal life.
In this particular book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, he used storytelling method to share his experiences with the audience to completely end the preconceived opinion and debts against people who face some of neurotic diseases in their lives. He kind of describes how medical doctors tend to treat the disease rather than the patient because they may never get a complete picture of what a patient is going through or even how to treat him appropriately unless they understand his personality and daily life. The left side of human brain is specifically the most important factor in neuroscience, and I can see from his description that the left side
of the brain is like a computer and a software. The book is not a text book, it is not meant for students. It is a book with 24 chapter in 4 main parts. The 4 main parts are Losses, Excesses, transports, and the world of the simple. In the first part, he talks through face blindness and amnesia, phantom limbs and patients who lose the sense of their own body. Moreover, he talks about Tourette syndrome in the second part also the unpredictable effects of brain tumors. In the transports section, Dr. Sacks tells a story of a patient who have a problem in his temporal lobe, a temporal lobe seizure, and migraines. Finally, the last part includes two stories about a girl who was born mentally impaired, she seems to have a heightened sense compassion, and a kid who has despite mental impairment and awesome musical skills.
Reading this amazing book has been a very good start for me as a biomedical student who are interested to participate in neuroscience researches and labs. For researchers, in order to solve any problem, they need to recognize that there is one. However, recognizing and identifying the problems are the hardest steps in solving the problems but after reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, I am convinced by the author that many of the neurotic diseases can be identified and recognized. Furthermore, knowing the patient’s condition and his life is more important than the disease itself because things are changing so fast in neuroscience, and there is still an awful lot humans don’t know about neuroscience. What I want to explain is that demonstrate a patient’s personality and life in a significant way may take us to a new valuable information about neuroscience in general. Also, it is much better of reading a newer book than a 1985 book but it is good to know ideas and experiences 39 years ago and link them with the modern ideas and information about
I can see that this book might be helpful for Biomedical engineering students who are interested or willing to participate in any neuroscience research