TheManWhoMistookHisWifeforaHat - (EPUB全文下载)

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Introduction
In his most recent book, Hallucinations, published in 2012, Oliver Sacks describes an experience he had when he was a newly qualified doctor in the late 1960s. Sacks
was researching migraine, which he went on to write a book about (Migraine, 1970), and had on his own account ‘read dozens of articles about migraine and its possible basis’,
but one book he took out of the rare books section of the medical library had a profound effect on him. Sacks read On Megrim by Edward Liveing MD in more or less a single sitting:
‘In a sort of catatonic concentration so intense that in ten hours I scarcely moved a muscle or wet my lips, I read steadily through the five hundred pages of Megrim. As I did so, it
seemed to me almost as if I were becoming Liveing himself, actually seeing the patients he described. At times I was unsure whether I was reading the book or writing it.’ Sacks was
transported by Liveing’s ‘humanity and social sensitivity’, which reminded him of Henry Mayhew’s pioneering social observations of the London poor, and was seamlessly
integrated with the author’s own training in biology and the physical sciences.
Even as Sacks read on, wholly immersed, it occurred to him that Liveing’s On Megrim represented ‘the best of mid-Victorian science and medicine’, and that this was an
approach to neurology – compassionate, humane, and above all deeply immersed in the narratives of individual patients’ lives – that had been lost in the dry, quantifiable
abstractions of contemporary medical ‘literature’. Sacks began wondering who among his contemporaries was best suited to be the Liveing of the current era – who had ‘that
mix of science and humanism that was so powerful in [him]’. Then it struck him with the force of an epiphany: ‘You silly bugger! You’re the man!’ That this experience took
place after he had taken a massive dose of amphetamines is in some ways crucial – and in others quite irrelevant. Writing about the organic basis of hallucinations in The Man Who Mistook
His Wife for a Hat, Sacks remarks, ‘valuations have nothing to do with aetiology’, and whatever the aetiology of his career-defining hallucination, the fact is that when he came
down from his amphetamine high, he did indeed set about writing not just a single book that would resurrect this lost tradition, but a whole series of them. Sacks writes: ‘The joy I got from
doing this was real – infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphe ............

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