The Woman Who Walked into the Sea; Huntington's and the Making of a Genetic Disease

by Alice Wexler; Foreword by Nancy S. Wexler

• ISBN13: 9780300158618
• ISBN10: 0300158610
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-01-26
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

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 hereditary disorder of movement, mind, and mood her neighbors called St. Vitus's dance and doctors named Huntington's chorea and, later, Huntington's disease. In this first history of Huntington's in America, Alice Wexler uses Huntington's as a lens to explore the changing meanings of heredity, disability, stigma, and medical knowledge in the community as well as in the clinic. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Alice Wexler is a research scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the author of Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research. She lives in Santa Monica.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction	p. xvii
Family/Community
The Death of Phebe Hedges	p. 3
The Social Course of St. Virus's Dance	p. 22
Community/Medicine
Inventing Hereditary Chorea	p. 57
Chorea and the Clinical Gaze	p. 94
Medicine/Eugenics/Memory
The Eyes of	p. 125
Myths of Origins and Endings	p. 151
List of Abbreviations	p. 187
Notes	p. 189
Index	p. 243
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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