The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NBC SERIES BRILLIANT MINDS • A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Dr. Sacks's most extraordinary book, in which the "poet laureate of medicine” (The New York Times) recounts fascinating case histories of patients with neurological disorders.

An influential landmark in the tradition of writing about the body and the brain, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with 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.

In Dr. Sacks’s splendid and sympathetic telling, his patients are deeply human and his tales are studies of struggles against incredible adversity. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine’s ultimate responsibility: “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

OLIVER SACKS (1933–2015) was born in London and educated at Oxford University and UCLA. Dr. Sacks spent more than fifty years working as a neurologist and wrote many books about the neurological predicaments and conditions of his patients. He received honors from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About the Introducer: ATUL GAWANDE, a noted surgeon, writer, and researcher, is a professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and at Harvard Medical School. He writes on medicine and public health for The New Yorker and Slate, and is the author of four books, including Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He is now assistant administrator of the United States Agency for International Development.