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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 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.

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  • We started tracking this book on January 29, 2011.
  • This book was $12.64 when we started tracking it.
  • The price of this book has changed 176 times in the past 5,087 days.
  • The current price of this book is $28.66 last checked 4 hours ago.
  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past 90 days is $25.81.
  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past six months is $25.63.
  • This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $16.99.
  • The lowest price to date was $3.70 last reached on April 28, 2011.
  • This book has been $3.70 one time since we started tracking it.
  • The highest price to date was $29.00 last reached on December 26, 2024.
  • This book has been $29.00 17 times since we started tracking it.

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  • File Size: 3,190 KB

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