67 pages • 2 hours read
Oliver SacksThe Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Oliver Sacks
Sacks is a British neurologist and writer. His work with patients who have unusual neurological conditions has earned him the title of “the poet laureate of medicine.” Born in 1933 London to parents who were both doctors, Sacks earned a medical degree at Oxford and went on to practice in San Francisco and Los Angeles before moving to New York, where he remained until his death in 2015. While in New York, Sacks was a consulting neurologist for the Beth Abraham Center in the Bronx, a facility for “incurable” patients. There he worked with patients who had the “sleeping sickness,” which swept the world in the early 20th century. Later, with the help of poet W. H. Auden, he wrote a memoir called Awakenings (1973), which documented his experience using L-Dopa to bring these patients back to life. Sacks wrote many books about neurology during his life. Thirty years after publishing The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, Sacks wrote an essay about how the patients he documented were still alive and thriving. That essay appears in the new edition.
A. R. Luria
Alexander Romanovich Luria (A. R. Luria) lived from 1902 to 1977 and was born in Kazan, Russia. He conducted research in the field of Cultural-Historical Psychology but is best known for research on the brain. He is often called “the father of modern neuropsychology.” Luria studied the brains of soldiers returning from World War II. He analyzed the different regions and the integrative processes that connect the brain as a whole. This resulted in his book Higher Cortical Functions in Man (1962) and The Working Brain (1973). He also published two case studies. The first is about Solomon Shereshevsky’s impressive memory, called The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory (1968). The second book is The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound (1972), about Lev Zazetsky. Zazetsky was a soldier in the Russian Army who was wounded in the head at Smolensk in 1943. After his injury, Zazetsky lost his ability to read, write, and make new memories. He diligently documented his life via journaling and fought to maintain his sense of being whole. Sacks makes frequent references to things he learned from Luria both by reading his books and via personal correspondence.
Hughlings Jackson
John Hughlings Jackson is a neurologist best known for his work on epilepsy. He was born in England on April 4, 1835. Before devoting himself to neurology, he studied philosophy, which influenced his way of thinking and writing about the brain. He conceptualized a “march,” called the Jacksonian March, of symptoms in focal motor seizures. He also identified the “dreamy state” that precedes the psychomotor seizures of the temporal lobes. In living and working in the 1800s, Hughlings Jackson did not have access to some of the tools that more modern researchers had at their disposal. He relied on clinical observations and what he could learn from autopsies. Later researchers criticized some of his theories, but many have benefited from the insights that Hughlings Jackson shared. He had a deep and lasting influence on psychologists and psychiatrists, especially in the field of epilepsy.
Kurt Goldstein
Kurt Goldstein was born in Germany on November 6, 1878. He was a psychiatrist and neurologist of Jewish descent who was forced to leave his home country when Adolf Hitler rose to power. He studied brain injuries of soldiers returning from World War I and co-established the Frankfurt Institute for Research into the Consequences of Brain Injuries along with Gestalt psychologist Adhemar Gelb. While displaced, Goldstein wrote The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man (1934), focusing on patients with disorders, including those with schizophrenia and trauma caused by war. His work looked not at isolated components of the brain, but at the whole organism and how individual pieces of it work together. He illuminated ways the body readjusts to loss of control. His work was termed “holistic” and led to the development of the term “self-actualization,” which influenced the work of psychologist Abraham Maslow and his “hierarchy of human needs.” The term refers to the innate ability of a human being to right itself and grow, maximizing its potential.
Henry Head
Henry Head was an English neurologist of Quaker descent who is known for contributions to the field of neurology. He was born in London on August 4, 1861. From an early age, he knew that he wanted to be a doctor and studied at Charterhouse, Trinity College, and Cambridge. He became a lifelong colleague of English neurologist and psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers, with whom he collaborated frequently. In 1903, with the help of British surgeon James Sherren and Rivers, Head conducted experiments on himself, studying the superficial ramus of his own radial nerve. His work, published in Brain in 1908, was widely acclaimed. Later, during World War I, he studied spinal reflex functions and paraplegia with Scottish neurologist George Riddoch. Head’s last major work was on sensory disturbances caused by lesions to the cerebellum, entitled Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech (1926), where he illuminated the link between intellectual and linguistic aspects of speech. His later work focused on attention, vigilance, and body image. Sacks mentions the work of Head several times, as his ideas were advanced for his time and have continued to impress neuroscientists to this day.
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