Thesis ID: CBB723286083

Secrecy & Safety: A Cultural History of Seizures in Mid-twentieth Century America (2015)

unapi

This dissertation explores a major change in the modes of managing epilepsy in the United States between 1930 and 1960. At a time when seizure disorders were increasingly considered controllable and even curable, it examines the way in which rising expectations about medical control and treatability transformed popular constructions of "the epileptic" from a "diseased" to a "normal" individual. Yet as this dissertation also suggests, the fact that both seizures and the pervasive stigma attached to epilepsy persisted following the development of anticonvulsant drugs and the earliest advocacy groups in the late 1930s compelled the need for new forms of personal and public control over seizure-prone bodies. This was especially significant as persons with epilepsy were for the first time encouraged to engage in public roles according to normative standards of citizenship. This, I argue, shifted responsibility for the management of epilepsy and containment of seizures to persons with epilepsy themselves. Diverging from historical studies that approach epilepsy as a disease or project of medicine, the dissertation thus takes as its focus the phenomena of the seizure-prone individual, which it traces through a variety of cultural representations and public interventions. Bridging histories of medicine, technology, and cultural studies of the gendered and disabled body, it demonstrates that the management of both seizures and seizure risk present a unique opportunity for considering multiple negotiations around not only disease, but also codes of normality and social belonging. The subject of seizures - and equally, the "asymptomatic" seizure-prone individual - provides insight into broader changes in attitudes about personal information and disclosure, the dynamics of invisible disability, as well as complex values regarding the loss and maintenance of physical control. In effect, they reveal embodied practices of secrecy and safety - what this dissertation suggests were crucial strategies for maintaining control and its appearances - practices, which collectively, illuminate key dimensions of the body and identity, and how they were mutually constituted in the middle of the twentieth century.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB723286083/

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Authors & Contributors
Linker, Beth
Tamao, Shuko
Vieyra, Alejandra
Wald, Sarah D.
Sullivan, Evan P.
Fogarty, Rick
Concepts
Disabilities; disability; accessibility
Citizenship
Medicine and society
Medicine
Medicine and politics
Neurology
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
18th century
17th century
Places
United States
Americas
London (England)
California (U.S.)
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