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Thesis ID: CBB001567576

Blind to Their Blindness A History of the Denial of Illness (2014)

Harrington, Anne
Kuriyama, Shigehisa
Harvard University
Kuriyama, Shigehisa
Rosenberg, Charles E.
Rosenberg, Charles E.

ISBN: 9781321021271

Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Advisor: Harrington, Anne; Committee Members: Kuriyama, Shigehisa, Rosenberg, Charles E.
Physical Details: 273 pp.
Language: English

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Denialism Disabilities; disability; accessibility Historiography Medicine Disease and diseases Authority of medicine

For many historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of medicine, "disease" and "illness" are not equivalent. Whereas "disease" denotes the physicians's ostensibly objective criteria, "illness" emphasizes the patient's subjective experience. This dissertation examines that distinction precisely at a point where it breaks down, in the history of a diagnosis called "anosognosia," also known as the denial of illness. In the 1890s, Austrian psychiatrist Gabriel Anton observed a number of patients who denied being blind, deaf, or paralyzed. "That is just how it is," a patient demurred, "one sees better in youth." The question to Anton was, were such patients truly unaware of their loss or did they sense it on some level, if only to deny it? The history of "Anton's syndrome," later called "anosognosia" by the French neurologist Joseph Babinski, spans more than a century and a half across two continents and through both world wars. I treat its history as a special type of lens to focus on some of the broader intellectual and professional differences between neurology and psychiatry. I argue that the clinical perception and portrayal of this apparent loss of the patient's experience depended on historical patterns of thinking about the distinction between conscious and unconscious perception as well as categories of health and disease. To think about the denial of illness was to think about the very meaning of illness and awareness, and the difference, if any, between the mind and the brain.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/10(E), Apr 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1557761513.

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567576/

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