The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative—whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives.

Oliver Sacks is perhaps the world’s best-known neurologist, largely due to the 1990 Robin Williams film Awakenings, about his surprising results using L-Dopa to treat Parkinson’s patients. Nevertheless, this collection of sympathetic accounts detailing the trials of clinically extreme oddities is no less arresting. Take for example the title subject, a professor of music suffering from visual agnosia, or the inability to recognize ordinary objects and people out of context, as recounted in this 2014 film adaptation.

Other stories address maladies divided into the four categories of loss [involving memory, speech, equilibrium, and the senses]; excess [including Tourette’s Syndrome, fabricated identity, and a condition of heightened flirtation dubbed Cupid’s Disease; transports [such as visions, musical epilepsy, hallucinations, and other escapes]; and the world of the simple [including autistic savants].

These twenty-four essays [243 pages] are written in common parlance that enlightens with enough clinical jargon to satisfy the scientifically curious while still entertaining the merely curious. This is no beach read, but the characters will stay with you regardless.