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A groundbreaking medical and social history of a devastating hereditary neurological disorder once demonized as “the witchcraft disease” When Phebe Hedges, a woman in East Hampton, New York, walked into the sea in 1806, she made visible the historical experience of a family affected by the dreaded disorder of movement, mind, and mood her neighbors called St.Vitus's dance. Doctors later spoke of Huntington’s chorea, and today it is known as Huntington's disease. This book is the first history of Huntington’s in America. Starting with the life of Phebe Hedges, Alice Wexler uses Huntington’s as a lens to explore the changing meanings of heredity, disability, stigma, and medical knowle...
This book covers the history of the World Federation of Neurology (WFN), the international society for the clinical neurosciences, from its founding in Brussels in 1957 to the present day.
First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book explores how the body was investigated in the late nineteenth-century asylum in Britain. As more and more Victorian asylum doctors looked to the bodily fabric to reveal the ‘truth’ of mental disease, a whole host of techniques and technologies were brought to bear upon the patient's body. These practices encompassed the clinical and the pathological, from testing the patient's reflexes to dissecting the brain. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum takes a unique approach to the topic, conducting a chapter-by-chapter dissection of the body. It considers how asylum doctors viewed and investigated the skin, muscles, bones, brain, and bodily fluids. The book demonstrates the importance of the body in nineteenth-century psychiatry as well as how the asylum functioned as a site of research, and will be of value to historians of psychiatry, the body, and scientific practice.
To early European colonists the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity; to the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy—African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites—the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture. Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture explores the interplay of contradictory but equally prevailing metaphors: first, the swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the antebellum South; and second, the swamp as the last pure vestige of undominated southern ecoculture. As the South gives in to strip malls and suburban sprawl, its wooded wetlands have come to embody the last part of the region that will always be beyond cultural domination. Examining the southern swamp from a perspective informed by ecocriticism, literary studies, and ecological history, Shadow and Shelter considers the many representations of the swamp and its evolving role in an increasingly multicultural South.
The United States Congress has designated the 1990s as the "Decade of the Brain" in recognition of the major importance of neurology and the other neurosciences in the health and well-being of Americans. It has been suggested that as many as 20% of all patients seeking medical treatment have neurologic problems, either as the presenting complaint or as an associated condition complicating the primary illness. Thus, it is fitting that Springer-Verlag should acknowledge the prominence of this medical specialty area by devoting an entire volume of the Oklahoma Notes series to neurology and clinical neuroscience. Of course, this text is an outline overview and does not attempt to provide ency cl...
Handbook of Clinical Neurology: Volume 95 is the first of over 90 volumes of the handbook to be entirely devoted to the history of neurology. The book is a collection of historical materials from different neurology professionals. The book is divided into 6 sections and composed of 55 chapters organized around different aspects of the history of neurology. The first section presents the beginnings of neurology: ancient trepanation, its birth in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt; the emergence of neurology in the biblical text and the Talmud; neurology in the Greco-Roman world and the period following Galen; neurological conditions in the European Middle Ages; and the development of neurology in the...
This new volume in the Handbook of Clinical Neurology presents a comprehensive review of the fundamental science and clinical treatment of psychiatric disorders. Advances in neuroscience have allowed for dramatic advances in the understanding of psychiatric disorders and treatment. Brain disorders, such as depression and schizophrenia, are the leading cause of disability worldwide. It is estimated that over 25% of the adult population in North America are diagnosed yearly with at least one mental disorder and similar results hold for Europe. Now that neurology and psychiatry agree that all mental disorders are in fact, "brain diseases," this volume provides a foundational introduction to the...
This 1998 book contains historical essays about how diseases change their meaning.