The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

            Ever since I took AP Psychology freshman year, I have found mental disorders to be enticing. I found a book called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat that is basically an accumulation of many different stories about different people with strange disorders.

            The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a very interesting and different book then I have ever read before. It was written by a neurologist in 1986 and is about his experiences with patients and treatments for them. I have never read a nonfiction novel before, or at least a informational medical one, so it was an entirely new experience reading it. Each chapter is about a new patient or patients each with a different disease or mental disorder. Oliver Sacks wrote his observations of each one and followed it with a postscript that had all of his thoughts on the subject.

            It took me a while to read this book because Sacks uses a lot of very large medical jargon that I didn’t really understand and I found myself having to reread it again and again. The stories of all of his patients and their disorders were very interesting and unique. Some of them though were familiar and frankly a little dry. There are also stories with disorders that I still don’t understand how they work or what they do. This might have been due mostly to the fact that I didn’t understand his terminology while he was describing them.

            Even though Oliver Sacks wrote the disorders in the same way, I found myself liking some more than the others. My favorite chapters in the book were “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, “Witty, Ticcy, Ray,” and “Cupid’s Disease.” These were the most interesting stories I thought because they presented new cases and personalities to me.

            I found the book to be rather challenging to read because of my difficulty in understanding all of the jargon and learned diction. It also started to become a little difficult to keep track of all of his different patients and the diseases and symptoms. I would only recommend this book to someone who might be familiar with the medical jargon and still interested in all of the different mental disorders. (396)