The Man Who Mistakes His Wife For A Hat - Oliver Sacks

好書介紹

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
The man who mistook his wife for a hat. The book is a collection of 24 case histories of patients suffering from various degree of brain damage. The author, Oliver Sacks, comes from a family of doctors and scientists. He himself has been a neurologist all his life. Doctor aside, he is also a highly successful writer, The man being his best known book. It has been translated into 22 languages and turned into a drama and an opera as well.
What is so special about this book is that it bridges the gap between literary and scientific writing. On several occasions, Sacks emphasized that his goal in writing was to humanize medicine. So you won't be reading clinical reports packed with difficult jargon. Instead, you will find real life accounts of people trying to adjust to their neurological impairments. His narrative is clear, humane and at times moving.
There is Dr. P, a distinguished music professor with a tumor in the visual part of his brain. Dr. P can't recognize ordinary objects and faces. He can't tell a glove is a glove, a shoe is a shoe and as the title says, mistakes his wife's head for his own hat. There is also Mrs. S, a woman in her sixties, who, after a severe stroke, has completely lost the idea of "the left." She can only eat from the right half of the plate and see the right half of her face when she looks in a mirror. When she puts on makeup, naturally she can only do the right part of her face, neglecting the other half. There is Ray in his twenties suffering from a disease called Tourette's Syndrome which subjects him to violent tics (or twitching of muscles) and using crude abusive language at split-second intervals. He has been a social outcast since he was a child.
How can these people get on with their ordinary lives? Is there a cure to their conditions? You may wonder.
Dr. P has lost his power to visualize things as we do, but strangely, his great gift for music is still intact. This inner rhythm helps him move and act fluently. He does everything singing to himself, whether it's eating, putting on clothes or taking a bath. When his attention is interrupted, he comes to a complete standstill and can only carry on when he starts humming to himself again. Dr P remains an able and a well-loved music teacher until the end of his life.
As for Mrs. S, she figures out strategies to deal with her inability to look left or understand anything that has to do with "the left." What she does is to turn right and right through a circle, until the missing half of the thing comes into view. She uses a specially designed rotating wheelchair to help her. Although it doesn't solve all her problems, she gets by.
The young Ray is a bit more fortunate. With the help of medicine, he can live a normal working and married life. Ironically, he finds this renewed life too boring for him. When he suffered from Tourette's Syndrome, he excelled at Ping Pong and other games. He was musical, creative and full of energy. Now his life lacks these qualities. He and his doctor, Sacks, work out a compromise. Ray takes medicine Mondays through Fridays and becomes calm, sober and socially acceptable during the working week. On weekends, he is off medicine and in his own words, "let fly."
Other accounts on the life of the "simple" are just as engrossing. John and Michael are twins. They have been diagnosed as autistic and severely retarded since the age of seven. They receive no education and have IQs as low as 60. A pair of hopeless idiots, in the eyes of many. Yet, they possess incredible talents with numbers. Give them a date anytime in the past or future 40,000 years, then they will tell you instantly whether it is a Monday, Tuesday or Friday. People call them the ultimate "calendar calculator." You can drop a box of matches on the table in front of them and they will both cry at the same time, " 111." They murmur "37" three times, and repeat "111." When asked how they can count so quickly, they just say, "We didn't count. We saw 111." They are correct, 3 X 37 equals 111. Something obviously is at work in the brain of the twin brothers. Just exactly what it is, nobody knows.
As you read on, you notice that Oliver Sacks is not interested in treatment and cure. Most of his patients suffer incurable damage. All he does is to help them adapt to their changed lives and work out a new pattern of life. He shows that these afflicted people are dignified human beings who deserve neither pity nor fear, but respect. They are the true heroes of his book.
If you want to take a glimpse of the world of these characters, The man who mistook his wife for a hat is the book for you. The Library holds both the English (RC351 .S195 1998) and Chinese versions《錯把太太當帽子的人》(RC351 .S19512 1996). In case you want to read more of these clinical tales, there is a sister book, An anthropologist on Mars : seven paradoxical tales (RC351 .S1948 1995), also by Oliver Sacks. Or you can learn more about the author and his other books by going to his official website: http://www.oliversacks.com/