The Woman Who Walked into the Sea

The Woman Who Walked into the Sea
Author :
Publisher : Yale University Press
Total Pages : 277
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780300151770
ISBN-13 : 0300151772
Rating : 4/5 (772 Downloads)

Book Synopsis The Woman Who Walked into the Sea by : Alice Wexler

Download or read book The Woman Who Walked into the Sea written by Alice Wexler and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 knowledge among ordinary people as well as scientists and physicians. She addresses these themes through three overlapping stories: the lives of a nineteenth-century family once said to “belong to the disease”; the emergence of Huntington’s chorea as a clinical entity; and the early-twentieth-century transformation of this disorder into a cautionary eugenics tale. In our own era of expanding genetic technologies, this history offers insights into the social contexts of medical and scientific knowledge, as well as the legacy of eugenics in shaping both the knowledge and the lived experience of this disease.


The Woman Who Walked into the Sea Related Books

The Woman Who Walked into the Sea
Language: en
Pages: 277
Authors: Alice Wexler
Categories: Medical
Type: BOOK - Published: 2008-09-30 - Publisher: Yale University Press

GET EBOOK

A groundbreaking medical and social history of a devastating hereditary neurological disorder once demonized as “the witchcraft disease” When Phebe Hedges,
The Woman Who Walked into the Sea
Language: en
Pages: 327
Authors: Mark Douglas-Home
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-01-14 - Publisher: Penguin UK

GET EBOOK

The daughter who nobody wanted learns the truth about the mother she never knew. A page-turning, heart-breaking mystery 'full of surprises ... this is a classic
The Sea Detective
Language: en
Pages: 336
Authors: Mark Douglas-Home
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2015-11-05 - Publisher: Penguin UK

GET EBOOK

The first mystery in a truly unique crime series. 'There comes a time when a novel raises the bar for a particular genre, and The Sea Detective does just that f
A Walk on the Beach
Language: en
Pages: 242
Authors: Joan Anderson
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2007-12-18 - Publisher: Crown

GET EBOOK

From the author of the bestselling A Year By the Sea, comes the inspiring story about how her and Joan Erikson's friendship pushed them to remember the importan
Walking Into the Ocean
Language: en
Pages: 510
Authors: Dave Whellams
Categories: Fiction
Type: BOOK - Published: 2012-04 - Publisher: ECW Press

GET EBOOK

Krimi. This novel finds Cammon journeying to the Jurassic Coast to solve a seemingly ordinary domestic crime. At first glance, the perpetrator appears to have m