The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

By Oliver Sacks

First UK edition, first impression. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1985.

Octavo. Original black cloth, lettered in gilt to the spine. A fine copy in a near-fine, unclipped dust jacket, retaining the published price of £9.95, with some fading to the spine panel.

One of Sacks’s best-known works, this collection of clinical narratives became a bestseller on publication, bringing questions of perception, memory and human identity to a wide readership. In the title account, Sacks describes Dr P., a musician whose visual agnosia severely impairs his recognition of familiar faces and objects, while leaving important musical abilities intact. Other narratives explore disturbances of memory, movement and bodily awareness, examining how changes in neurological function affect a person’s experience of the world.

Throughout, Sacks’s concern is with the individual as closely as with the disorder: the ways in which people inhabit their altered worlds, adapt to their circumstances and draw upon the capacities that remain to them. Combining medical discussion with literary portraiture, the book makes a sustained case for understanding patients through their individual experience.

Sacks later associated the book with a revival of interest in the detailed, humane case history. In an essay written shortly before his death, first published as the preface to a new edition in 2021, he recalled that such accounts had been “considered archaic and ‘unscientific’”. Of the book’s suggested contribution to their revival, he added cautiously: “I like to think that is so.”

Its cultural reach is reflected in adaptations for music and theatre. Michael Nyman’s chamber opera, with a libretto by Christopher Rawlence, was first performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in October 1986; Peter Brook’s L’Homme qui was first staged at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris in 1993.