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Straight From the Heart
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10973 |
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BOOK WORLD
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6 / 1986 |
1,778 Words |
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Ruth Jamison
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a seductive book, beautifully written by a vigorous and romantic neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks. In addition to being an author, Dr. Sacks is a professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and teaches occasionally at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He had a full-time clinical practice for twenty years.
In a telephone interview by Daniel Goleman, Sacks said, "I have no literary aspirations and don't regard myself as a writer. But I find that I need to convert the human spirit to written language. I always have pen in hand; I fill endless notebooks that I don't even look at myself. And I calculate I write nearly a million words a year in patient notes alone. The task of making sense of what a patient presents leads me to a powerful need to make a narrative." Hence the clinical tales.
All of his stories are about his patients who have suffered some sort of severe neurological problem.
Dr. Sacks' concern is not only with the disease itself, how to find it, understand it, examine it, describe it, but how to deal with it in ways that will not discount the person who contains the disorder--to respect the patient's continuing emotional, intellectual, and creative capabilities.
In his efforts to achieve his goals Dr. Sacks deliberately writes his case histories in a narrative style fashioned after the nautrualists' design of the nineteenth century. He uses highly articulate and descriptive language in order to present a distinct picture of his patients' pathologies and to offer a more realistic presentation of their behavior and symptoms. He feels that this description, along with the clinical history gives better understanding of the whole person, so necessary in treating his or her disease.
Sacks seems to feel that a heightened perception will be achieved by his word pictures and psycho-social histories, and that these can yield a more positive and compassionate methodology in his colleagues, especially in those whiz kids who are addicted to technological hardware. He wants them to be philosopher-healers. He looks for a new discipline which may be called the "neurology of identity."
This seems to be his main intention in writing this new book but I'm not sure that it is. He states also that his intention is to be "a storyteller, a describer, a detailer." Like a wise Zen Buddhist priest, he would hope to teach and communicate steps to enlightenment and truth. He feels this is best accomplished by telling stories about real people who have survived extraordinary disorders and managed to maintain their cherished "person-ness," their individual identities and dignity, in spite of disabilities.
Although most of the cases are fascinating and carefully described, sometimes I felt overwhelmed, as if I were in a room crammed with Victorian bibelots. Too many literary and medical quotations were distracting, and I regretted that the volume lacked a glossary and an index.
The book is divided into four parts: "Losses," "Excesses," "Transports," and "The World of the Simple"; and several of his favorite case histories are presented under each
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