The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Neurologist Oliver Sacks investigates the complex relationship between the brain and the mind and, almost impossibly, manages to make his subject matter not only accessible to the general reader, but utterly absorbing. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals suffering from perceptual and intellectual disorders: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; whose limbs seem alien to them; who lack some skills yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. Their struggles are recounted with sympathy and respect. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility to assist 'the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject'.
A work of profound humanity.

Oliver Sacks was born in London in 1933 into a family of physicians and scientists, and studied medicine at Oxford University. He moved to New York in 1965, where he began to work as a consultant for the Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital. Later in his career he became as a professor of neurology at Columbia University and at NYU. His first book, Migraine, was published in 1970; his last, Gratitude, in 2015, shortly after his death. Other books include Awakenings (1973), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) and The Mind's Eye (2010). He received honours from, amongst others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Art and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.