The Man Who Mistook His Wife

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a book describing the case histories of some patients of the author, Dr. Oliver Sacks. The book was first published by Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd in 1985. The electronic edition was published in 2010 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan. The author, Dr. Oliver Sacks, is a British-American physician and a professor of neurology and psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine and a visiting professor at the University of Warwick. He is also a bestselling author and has twelve books. He is best known for his book “Awakenings” (1973) which was turned into an Oscar-nominated film in 1990. He was born in 1933 into a family of doctors and scientists, where he was exposed to medicine at a very young age. He earned his medical degree from Oxford University and has worked in various places. He came across many interesting cases which he documented. His most famous one so far, Awakenings, documented his experience with survivors of the sleeping sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927. He was able to help them recover and bring them back to normal life. In 2001, he was awarded the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. His stories have a very anecdotal approach and he is often said to be a compassionate writer and doctor. Dr. Sacks has, …show more content…
The author, in many of his tales, asks questions that will truly leave the reader thinking about the answer hours later. Despite the use of many clinical terms, it is still a very easy to read two hundred and fifty page book. In a way, it links psychology and neurology, which are always seen as separate, and in a way helps the reader understand just how fine the line between the two are. One need not be only a psychology student to find this book to be enjoyable. Looking at it from a much broader point of view it does, in a way, look at what it means to be