Medical Narration and the Every-Day Reader

Introduction: Approaching the Book

When we approach The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales, the title makes us wonder; it appears to be appealing to literature as well as to medicine. As readers, we might be confused without knowing what to expect. The title consists of a sentence written in the past tense, which evokes a rather strange event: A man who by some circumstance has thought that his wife is a hat. As we read this sentence, we may think it refers to an absurd experience. It may be something magical or fantastical which makes us think in a life out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, the title alludes to two perfectly every day life “elements”: A wife, and a hat; and thus, engages us in its reading.

However, the next part of the sentence joined with the copulative clause “and” gives an explanation to this weird fact: This event has a clinical cause. It is a sort of disease what has made this possible. Despite this explanation, the confusion doesn’t stop here. The last word of the title is Tales. According to the Oxford Dictionary of English, a Tale is a “Fictitious or true Narrative or Story, especially one that is imaginatively recounted; a lie”. We are redirected to thinking again about literature and other problems start to arise: We ask ourselves many questions of this nature: Is this a mixture of Narrative and Medicine? Are these tales real or made up? Fact or Fiction? How should we read them?

We open the book and notice it has been divided into four parts: Losses, Excesses, Transports and The World of the Simple, -each of which contains several cases or tales. Each of these cases/tales has a title that sounds as poetic as the title of the part containing it. There is the first case which gives the name to the book and some other examples are: “The Lost Mariner”, “The Disembodied Lady”, “Phantoms”, “The President’s Speech”, “Incontinent Nostalgia” and “A walking Grove”. All of these titles could be as well the titles of a...