The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

by Oliver Sacks

Perhaps there is a philosophical as well as a clinical lesson here: that in Korsakov’s, or dementia, or other such catastrophes, however great the organic damage and Humean dissolution, there remains the undiminished possibility of reintegration by art, by communion, by touching the human spirit: and this can be preserved in what seems at first a hopeless state of neurological devastation.

Thus a gulf appears, indeed a chasm, between what we learn from our patients and what physiologists tell us. Is there any way of bridging this chasm?

We paid far too much attention to the defects of our patients, as Rebecca was the first to tell me, and far too little to what was intact or preserved. To use another piece of jargon, we were far too concerned with ‘defectology’, and far too little with ‘narratology’, the neglected and needed science of the concrete.