The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (23-43)

Each chapter in this fascinating book is about a different patient studied by Dr. Sacks, a neurologist. This chapter is about someone with amnesia, who doesn't remember anything past his nineteenth birthday, even though he's an old man. In this excerpt, Dr. Sacks is interviewing the man for the first time.

'What year is this, Mr. G.?' I asked, concealing my perplexity under a casual manner.

'Forty-five, man. What do you mean?' He went on, 'We've won the war, FDR's dead, Truman's at the helm. There are great times ahead.'

'And you, Jimmie, how old would you be?'

Oddly, uncertainly, he hesitated a moment, as if engaged in calculation.

'Why, I guess I'm nineteen, Doc. I'll be twenty next birthday.'

Looking at the grey-haired man before me, I had an impulse for which I have never forgiven myself--it was, or would have been, the height of cruelty, had there been any possibility of Jimmie's remembering it.

'Here,' I said, and thrust a mirror toward him. 'Look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?'

He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of his chair. 'Jesus Christ,' he whispered. 'Christ, what's going on? What's happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?'--and he became frantic, panicked. (25)

What I find so fascinating and scary about this anecdote is how it shows what happens when we lose our memory. People are their memories, and Jimmie has been nobody for the last fifty years. What would it be like to have this kind of amnesia? It would probably be just the same as it is for the rest of us--Jimmy has no idea he's different until the doctor asks him to look in the mirror, and he immediately forgets about. Within a few minutes, he's happy again, a nineteen-year-old with a bright future ahead of him.

Another question I'm thinking about is whether the doctor's action was indeed cruel. If Jimmy is indeed nobody, than this was not cruelty. If Jimmy is nobody now, then is there any point to his continued living? Does his life have any meaning now? These seem like questions that will be answered differently depending on whether you believe in anything transcendent. If you think people's lives matter because people matter to themselves, or because people matter to each other, then (assuming Jimmy has no family) you might conclude that Jimmy as a person no longer exists. He's just a memory of himself. But if you think people matter because they matter to God or whatever you believe in, then you'll probably say Jimmy is still just as valuable as anybody else.

Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. New York: Touchstone, 1985.