The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat collects 24 case histories from Oliver Sacks's neurology practice, grouped into four parts: Losses, Excesses, Transports, and The World of the Simple. Dr. P, the music teacher of the title, has visual agnosia: he can describe a glove as "a continuous surface infolded on itself" but cannot say what it is, and once reached for his wife's head thinking it was his hat. Jimmie G., a former sailor with Korsakoff's syndrome, believes it is still 1945. Christina loses proprioception, the felt sense of her own body, after a bad reaction to a drug given before surgery, and has to relearn movement by watching her limbs. A man wakes convinced someone left a stranger's leg in his bed, not realizing it is his own. Elsewhere, twin autistic savants swap enormous prime numbers, a woman in her nineties develops a late-life euphoria traced to syphilis contracted seventy years earlier, and a Tourette's patient works out a medication schedule that lets him keep his tics on weekends.
Sacks writes as a doctor who stayed curious about the person behind each diagnosis, treating these as case histories rather than case studies: less interested in cataloguing deficits than in how a damaged brain compensates, adapts, and sometimes produces its own strange gifts. First published in 1985, it remains one of the most widely read introductions to neurology for a general reader.