Jacob's review
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver W. Sacks
Jacob's review
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales by Oliver W. Sacks
Jacob's review
rating:
Some of the writings collected here were originally published under the heading "Curios", and they successfully deliver on that score -- fantastic, unimaginable, curious in the extreme.
But the book is about more than that --
Split between left and right brain, art and science, romantic evocation and clinical ___, emotion and cognition, experience and abstraction.
His case builds, curio after curio, for a "romantic neuropsychology," one of people, whole patients, with identities, selves, souls, in addition to bundles of neurons grouped into functional units. Were this a romantic outsider, the case wouldn't hold, but as a master clinician, Sacks beautifully illustrates what a softer science can do for patients. seeing possibilities where the standard view saw only deficits. At times the curio gives a distance that seems unsympathetic - the perspective of a naturalist when the subject is human beings feels weird - but we come around, in the end, to understand...more
But the book is about more than that --
Split between left and right brain, art and science, romantic evocation and clinical ___, emotion and cognition, experience and abstraction.
His case builds, curio after curio, for a "romantic neuropsychology," one of people, whole patients, with identities, selves, souls, in addition to bundles of neurons grouped into functional units. Were this a romantic outsider, the case wouldn't hold, but as a master clinician, Sacks beautifully illustrates what a softer science can do for patients. seeing possibilities where the standard view saw only deficits. At times the curio gives a distance that seems unsympathetic - the perspective of a naturalist when the subject is human beings feels weird - but we come around, in the end, to understand...more
