An Anthropologist on Mars

by Sacks, Oliver W.

• ISBN13: 9780394281513
• ISBN10: 0394281519
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-02-13
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

Here are seven detailed and fascinating portraits of neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. Sacks combines the well honed mind of an academician with the verve of a true storyteller, and manages to produce a book at once accessible and challenging. The capacity to observe the patient as a different form of human being, instead of as just an 'interesting case', is a true insight into what Medicine should be; furthermore, as the author insistently teaches, neurological diseases differ from other ailments in that they become a true portion of the persona, and ,in a sense, they belong to the patient, whereas most people consider disease to be something that 'happens' to them, an outside influence not to be confused with the true Self. It is a truly accessible and moving book, and teaches us all something about the diversity and depths of the human kind.

Author Biography

OLIVER SACKS is a practicing physician and the author of twelve books, including The Mind’s Eye, Musicophilia, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Awakenings (which inspired the Oscar-nominated film). He lives in New York City, where he is a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface
The Case of the Colorblind Painter	p. 3
The Last Hippie	p. 42
A Surgeon's Life	p. 77
To See and Not See	p. 108
The Landscape of His Dreams	p. 153
Prodigies	p. 188
An Anthropologist on Mars	p. 244
Selected Bibliography	p. 297
References	p. 305
Index	p. 317
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.