AUDIOBOOK

A Macat Analysis of Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Dario KrpanSeries: Macat Library
3.5
(11)
Duration
2h
Year
2016
Language
English

About

Neurologist Oliver Sacks's 1985 book “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”, challenges the impersonal approach doctors took to patient care and paved the way for a new literary genre: popular science.

At the time of its publication, neurologists and physicians relied mainly on clinical studies and their “own” expertise to set the course of treatment. Sacks found this inhumane and developed a very different approach.

He provides rich, narrative case studies of his patients, believing that neurology had lost sight of the high personal costs paid by those with neurological disorders. To this end, Sacks focuses on how patients cope with these disorders and their altered sense of self. Sacks talks of "romantic science," casting the patients in his 24 case studies almost as literary heroes and heroines, and borrowing from the realms of art, literature, and psychology to do so. This new approach proved very popular.

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