The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a neurological test of Oliver Sacks, published for the first time in New York in 1985. In it, the author recounts some of his experiences of clinical neurologist and describes some cases of patients with brain injuries of various kinds, who produced the most sad and bizarre behavior. Approaching the neurological cases in a manner that today would be called holistic, Sacks provides an example for all those who have to deal professionally with the suffering. Before clinical cases, bizarre neuropsychological patients Sacks are men and women who, through illness, reflect a personal and original way of seeing the world, individuals are in their entirety. Sacks, referring to the tradition of Hippocrates and Lurjia, which advocates the reintroduction of the clinical history in medicine. In the opening pages, the book contains a significant quote from Lurjia: "The ability to describe, so common in the great neurologists and psychiatrists of the nineteenth century, today it is almost gone ... It 's necessary to bring it back to life."
the first U.S. edition are followed to this day many reprints, which made possible the translation of this essay in many languages. To determine the most diffuse, in addition to the weirdness of the cases handled by Dr. Sacks, romance is undoubtedly the way in which they are described: as the same author in preface, "I feel it doctor and naturalist at the same time, I'm interested in equal measure disease and people, and perhaps even together, albeit poorly, a theoretician and a playwright, are attracted by the romance no less than than scientific, and I watch them constantly both in the human condition, not least in what is the human condition par excellence, the disease: the animals get sick, but only man falls prey to the disease radically. "In each chapter, Dr. Sacks tells of specific cases that have come across in his clinical experience of every day, as a neurologist for a U.S. nursing home. The human component of each of its history, the patient, is described in tones sometimes burlesque, sometimes very sad and pitiful, and clinical analysis of the causes that led to this particular type of behavior is always precise and scientific rigor, sometimes even indulging in philosophical musings (and, rarely, even religious) on the deeper nature of the illness itself. This The Man Who mistook His Wife For a Hat, the English specialist he describes, in 24 chapters, case reports, each carrying a congenital or acquired characteristics of the nervous system and whether we speak of Korsakov's syndrome, or prosopagnosia , or unilateral neglect, or Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, of asomatognosia of aphasia, the syndrome Tourette's, of mental retardation, autism, does so with great professional competence and humanity, as well as with skill and sensitivity as a storyteller, which aims to capture the subtle nuances of each individual.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat THE CASE This case is considered so important by the author to make him entitled All the test, said Dr. P., "eminent musician," which gradually began to show a progressive inability to give meaning to what he saw, and to confuse each other's objects (and particularly people living) belonging to his daily life. The title derives from one of the gaffes of this patient, who at the end of an interview with Dr. Sacks confused head of his wife with his hat, and seized trying to put in your head. In his discussion, Sacks points out several times as Dr. P. had no visual impairment, and indeed had a very acute sense of observation: simply, he was missing the ability to assign meaning to visual objects he saw around him, although he was able to recognize them using the other four senses. In one experiment, Dr. Sacks gave him a glove, that he was perfectly able to describe but not to bind to its meaning, until it was forced to wear it (and then putting the field in the sense of touch). "A continuous surface," he announced finally "wrapped around itself. Equipped ... 'Hesitated' ends of five slots, so to speak. [...] A few container? "Yes," I said and what it might contain? [...] Does not look familiar? He does not believe that it could hold, bind, a part of his body? "No spark of recognition lit up her face. Following sticks it to the event: "My God! She said, "It's a glove! "
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