The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Trials was truly an amazing novel. It was written by a professor of clinical psychology whose name is Oliver Sacks. He is a very interesting professor because he doesn’t just treat people like any other patient. Instead, he tries to get more personal with them so that he can get a better understanding of what they are really going through. He also says that he tried to present all of his patients as stories instead of case studies. Throughout the entire book, Sacks basically talks about different patients that he has dealt with over a majority of his career. Each going through something different such as mental losses, excesses, transports, and the world of the simple. For example, …show more content…
He was diagnosed with Tourettes. However, the syndrome did help him at some times like when he entertained everyone when he would go into a wild solo while playing the drums. A description of a patient with mental transports is Bhagawhandi. She has a tumor that is impossible to operate on. She learns to have comfort in pictures that will soon be too much for her to handle. The pictures transport her back to her native country although she cannot actually make the trip. One of the stories that Sacks told that was very important to me was Dr P, the first one. He was a teacher at the School of Music and was formerly a well known singer. Sacks said that he would not recognize someone by their face, but by the sound of their voice. Also that he would think that the head of a fire hydrant or parking meter was the head of one of his students. I thought this was interesting because he had no clue that it would be a fire hydrant that he was talking to. It wasn’t until he saw a ophthalmologist that he realized there was something wrong. The doctor said that there was nothing wrong with his eyes, but that there was something wrong with the visual parts of his brain. This was when Dr P decided to go see a neurologist, Sacks. During his meeting with Sacks, Sacks was immediately aware
In this paper I will detail the story, “Eyes Right!” by Dr. Oliver Sacks. This story comes from the book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. Dr. Sacks explains the story of Mrs. S who has suffered a massive stroke. I will begin my paper by giving a summary of the story, including the brain systems and functions that were affected. Next I will address the impact of stroke on Mrs. S occupational performance. I will then provide affective responses from Dr. Sacks, Mrs. S, and myself. Finally, I will provide a conclusion of how this story added to my learning for OT school.
The book "Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness" by Susannah Calahan is a narrative telling the life changing story of an unimaginable descent into madness, and the genius, lifesaving diagnosis that almost didn't happen. Previously healthy Susannah never would have imagined waking up in the hospital one day with no recollection of her battle with a disease that not only threatened her sanity but also her life. A team of doctors spent a month trying to pin down a medical explanation of what exactly what had gone wrong. During this time, we learn more about Susannah's family, friends, and loved ones and how each of them affect her overall wellbeing. Eventually, with the help of one special
At the end of the nineteenth century, Robert Louis Stevenson published his novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The fin de siècle saw the rise of different thoughts and ideas surrounding science and society. Late-Victorian psychology began to explore deeper into the mind, society grew weary of degeneration, and a new century was upon them which brought its own fears. Stevenson’s story played upon the many changes society was facing during this time. He took the scientific interest and created the character of Dr Jekyll, a scientist who created a potion that would unlock his inner, uninhibited self. These concoctions create a “mad scientist” effect and create an uncertainty around these scientific advancements of the fin de siècle. The evidence of multiplex personalities, or multiple personalities, in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a representation of mental illness. From Mr Hyde’s physical appearance to the transition between Jekyll and Hyde, these attributes explore the new
Doctor William Chester Minor, a protagonist in The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, was an unquestionable psychopath. His insanity has been confirmed by his deranged delusions and actions such as him murdering an innocent man and mutilating himself. Yet he still succeeded at being a highly praised surgeon and an intelligent scholar. These three facets of Minor’s life are strongly motivated by his personality. Minor’s story begins on the island of Ceylon, where he received an exceptional primary education, learned several indigenous languages, and became infatuated with the enticing local girls. For this reason, he was steered away from temptation and sent to America, by his parents. In the United States, Minor studied medicine at the prestigious Yale University and eventually joined the Union Army as a surgeon. Dr. Minor witnessed, while fighting in the Civil War, terrible events; the most traumatic occurrence being when he was forced to brand an Irish deserter. This experience sent Minor on a downward spiral. He began to illegally carry a gun, visit brothels, and show signs of paranoia; therefore, the doctor was discharged from the army and discreetly sent to an asylum. After his release, Minor traveled to London where he shot a man dead due to his paranoid delusions. Minor was sentenced an insane asylum and he spent the majority of the next thirty-eight years reading and secretly volunteering for the Oxford English Dictionary. James Murray, editor of the dictionary, eventually discovered Minor’s identity and they soon became close friends. Although Minor religiously read and acquired new knowledge, his mental condi...
Differentiating one’s identity from one’s abnormalities is often difficult for individuals with mental and physical disorders. In “Witty Ticcy Ray” by Oliver Sacks, Ray struggles to create an identity separate from his Tourette’s. Affecting each individual differently, Tourette’s syndrome “is characterised by an excess of nervous energy, and a great production and extravagance of strange motions and notions” (Sacks, 1981, p. ????). In 1971, following the popularization of Tourette’s syndrome, Sacks met with an individual, Ray, who had suffered from this disorder since childhood. Oliver Sacks and Ray worked to control Ray’s Tourette’s through different treatment techniques like using psychoanalytic drugs and performing deep analysis. Throughout
Oliver Sacks, MD, FRCP, was a neurologist and professor of neurology at NYU School of Medicine. He is also a best selling author, and is know by the New York Times as “the poet laureate of medicine.” He worked with music and music therapy and wrote Musicophilia: Tales of Music and The Brain (Knopf, 2007).
His family was said to have a history of mental illness. His uncle suffered from religious mania, his mother had “aural and/or visual hallucinations,” his brother was in a state mental hospital, his sister was diagnosed with a “mental affliction,” and a few other family members were diagnosed with mental illnesses as well.
The narrator is forbidden from work and confined to rest and leisure in the text because she is supposedly stricken with, "…temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency," that is diagnosed by both her husband and her brother, who is also a doctor (1).
Enter David – a middle-aged, lower-class husband and father of one. Raised by authoritarian parents and being no stranger to schoolyard bullying, David had a childhood fraught with feelings of inferiority. Seizures and other similar episodes made their mark on David from his earliest years and seemed to foreshadow of life of mental instability; although nothing but denials of mental illness were made at the time. These episodes became less frequent as David grew into early adulthood, and the episodes of his earlier years seemed like distant history. Then at the age of thirty-nine, while out on a typical neighborhood stroll, he suffered his first panic attack, starting a growing trend of panic attacks that has continued through the present day. That event set into motion the gears of his SAD, culminating in the panic attack he suffered at the manufacturing plant where he had worked for mu...
Raz, M. (2008). Between the Ego and the Icepick: Psychosurgery, psychoanalyses, an psychiatric discourse. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82, 387-420. The John Hopkins University Press. Retrieved February 23, 2012 from Project MUSE database.
...reader to gain inside thought into how bad the mental condition is affecting him as his behavior allows for further indication of craziness as a result from the schizophrenia. The evidence presented in this play for the scientific explanation of this literary classic is quite prominent as it gives an insight into what a schizophrenic acts, thinks, and behaves like.
The Wife 's Story is a story about a pack of werewolves, and the husband turns into a strange creature; a vampire. Even though a normal werewolf transforms into a human, the husband in The Wife’s Story transforms into something totally different. The husband is a compulsive lying werewolf that is actually a vampire that is out to kill his family, but his plan turns on him.
It is often difficult for individuals with mental and physical disorders to differentiate between their identity and their abnormalities. In “Witty Ticcy Ray” by Oliver Sacks, Ray struggles to create an identity separate from his Tourette’s. Affecting each individual differently, Tourette’s syndrome “is characterised by an excess of nervous energy, and a great production and extravagance of strange motions and notions” (Sacks, 1981). In 1971, following the popularization of Tourette’s syndrome, Sacks met with an individual, Ray, who had suffered from this disorder since childhood. Oliver Sacks and Ray attempted to control Ray’s Tourette’s through different treatment techniques like using psychoanalytic drugs and performing deep analysis. Throughout
This book is about a man called Dr. Henry Jekyll he is a rich man who lived in the city of London in 1885. He was a strange character, who was conducting experiments on him self by taking drugs and shifting into another character. He called this character Mr. Hyde thus living with two different personalities to an extent where he wrote a will leaving all his belongings to his other character in case he shifts to the other personality permanently. This confused his friend the lawyer Mr. Utterson who started investigating with common friends about the mystery of the will as Dr. Jekyll did not even introduce him to this unknown heir. At first Mr. Utterson discussed Dr. Jekyll's character with Mr. Enfield. Mr. Enfield told him about the most unusual story of a man who tripped over a little girl without realizing his fault and just stood there silently with out any reaction for his bad deed, while people gathered around to help the crying...
Men have been shown to be the prime cause of competition between the women characters in the novels “The Doctor’s Wife” by Sawako Ariyoshi and “So Long a Letter” by Mariama Bâ. This is strongly evident in “The Doctor’s Wife” from the time Umpei returns home, after completing his education. A major change is also noticed in Otsugi’s behavior towards Kae. The intense tension caused by the competition between the women characters is also shown in “So Long a Letter” when the two men, Modou Fall and Mawdo Bâ, marry their second wives. In this essay I will be discussing how men are shown to be the prime cause of competition between the women characters in the novels “The Doctor’s Wife” and “So Long a Letter” and why the writers use this element.