Skip to main content

Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

by Oliver Sacks

This is my favorite Oliver Sacks book. Sacks relates stories about patients having neurological disorders. "Cupid's Disease" was a great chapter about a little old woman who heard music from the twenties in her head. It turns out, she contracted syphilis which went dormant for decades. When it began to re-emerge, she started having aural hallucinations. Her syphilis was cured, but only after Sacks assured her that she would continue to hear the music, as the damaged area would not heal. This was great for her - she wanted to keep the music and was refusing treatment if the antibiotics killed the music as well as the syphilis. This story was used in an episode of "House, M.D."

Another story from the book is about a man who had a stroke and could not sense his own leg. Lying in bed in the hospital, he reached down and felt a cold hairy leg in the bed with him. He became afraid and threw the leg out of bed - unfortunately, it was his own leg. He ended up on the floor with the "other person's" leg.

The format for each chapter is a case study written so that anyone can read it , followed by the neurological explanation for the disorder.

I really liked this book much better than Awakenings. How someone got that movie out of that book is a miracle. Awakenings - the book - is set up like the hat book - each chapter separate. Weaving the stories together was done by great screenwriting. Bravo.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Marie Curie: a Life, by Susan Quinn

Just like most of you, I read Eva Curie's biography of her mother when I was around 10 or 11 years old (mine was is the Reader's Digest for Young Adults). I was, like you, inspired. Recently, I saw the reenactment of Marie Curie by Susan Marie Frontczak, produced on film by Jen Myronuk. The presentation was AMAZING! I really did feel as if Marie Curie was telling her story just to me. MSTA will be discussing sponsoring this presentation at a conference in the future. Susan Marie Frontczak talked with the audience via Skype after the presentation. She told us that she had read Eva Curie's biography in her preparation, but she relyied on the Susan Quinn biography for much of her research and dialogue. I knew I had to read this book, so I downloaded it to my Kindle that very day! The book is, of course, enlightening. I just happened to be reading about Marie's viewing the total eclipse the night before our total eclipse in August. I stopped so I could read th...

Silent Witnesses by Nigel McCrery

I really enjoyed this book and I am including the book on my biology readings list.  The book gives the "first starts" for the many areas contained in forensics, and I do have students interested in this very type of reading. In this, we have a good overview of the Colin Pitchfork case, in which DNA fingerprinting was used for two 1sts:  proving a man's innocence and proving a man's guilt.  Also included are ballistics, trajectory, blood evidence, etc. Because each chapter is a "short story,"  this would be an easy biology book club book.

Survival of the Sickest: an Amazon Review

Amazon.com Review Dan Ariely on Survival of the Sickest MIT professor Dan Ariely has become one of the leaders in the growing field of behavioral economics, and his bestselling book debut, Predictably Irrational, has brought his ideas--and his ingenious experiments and charming sense of humor--to a much wider audience. With the simplest of tests (often an auction or a quiz given under a few conditions) he shows again and again not only that we are wired to make irrational decisions in many situations, but that we do so in remarkably predictable ways. I have always been puzzled by the way in which genetic diseases have managed to survive throughout the ages. How could it be that these diseases were able to withstand the evolutionary process, where only the most fit survive, and continue to be transferred from one generation to the next? Survival of the Sickest provides a thought provoking yet entertaining explanation to this puzzle. In this insightful book Dr. Sharon Moalem demonstra...