Product Description

Over a century and a half ago, a French physician reported the bizarre behavior of a young aristocratic woman who would suddenly, without warning, erupt in a startling fit of obscene shouts and curses. The image of the afflicted Marquise de Dampierre echoes through the decades as the emblematic example of an illness that today represents one of the fastest-growing diagnoses in North America. Tourette syndrome is a set of behaviors, including recurrent ticcing and involuntary shouting (sometimes cursing) as well as obsessive-compulsive actions. The fascinating history of this syndrome reveals how cultural and medical assumptions have determined and radically altered its characterization and treatment from the early nineteenth century to the present.

A Cursing Brain? traces the problematic classification of Tourette syndrome through three distinct but overlapping stories: that of the claims of medical knowledge, that of patients' experiences, and that of cultural expectations and assumptions. Earlier researchers asserted that the bizarre ticcing and impromptu vocalizations were psychological--resulting from sustained bad habits or lack of self-control. Today, patients exhibiting these behaviors are seen as suffering from a neurological disease and generally are treated with drug therapy. Although current clinical research indicates that Tourette's is an organic disorder, this pioneering history of the syndrome reminds us to be skeptical of medical orthodoxies so that we may stay open to fresh understandings and more effective interventions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #505642 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Library Journal
Since the 1970s, the Tourette Syndrome Association has attempted to educate Americans to react compassionately to the startling involuntary gestures and vocalizations, sometimes shocking or obscene, of Tourettes patients. An increasingly common North American diagnosis, Tourette syndrome affects 2.9 to 5.2 per 100,000 Americans, most frequently male. Kushner (history of medicine, San Diego State Univ.) describes the shifting histories of this syndrome since it was first described by French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette in 1885. Experts have variously attributed the Tourette complex of behaviors to moral defects, neurological damage, repressed sexual urges, and chemical imbalances. Such explanations, Kushner argues, conceal cultural assumptions that prevent physicians from fully hearing their patients stories and thus influence medical practice in damaging ways. Kushner cautions his readers that patients themselves, unconstrained by medical orthodoxy, have much to teach. A compassionate and absorbing work of medical history for academic and larger public libraries.Kathleen Arsenault, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Reports of athletes with Tourette's syndrome, several autobiographical accounts of it, and especially Oliver Sacks' essay "Witty, Ticcy Ray," in the best-selling Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1987), have brought the previously little-known condition a lot of recent attention. Kushner combines the virtues of a detective story with those of a well-documented medical history in a fascinating narrative of the development of knowledge about, treatments of, and medical and lay attitudes toward Tourette's syndrome (TS) patients. The word histories in the subtitle points to a major TS reality. Many theories of TS have led into blind alleys and disputes that have not been resolved. Kushner takes us down those paths and brings to life the investigators and propagandists who sought data or pushed their own views with little to back them up. He shows us that even the name of the malady appeared and disappeared as psychological and organic causes rose and fell in favor. Many who intend merely to sample the scholarly book may wind up devouring it. William Beatty

Booklist, April 15, 1999
Kushner combines the virtues of a detective story with those of a well-documented medical history in a fascinating narrative of the development of the knowledge about, treatments of, and medical and lay attitudes toward Tourette's Syndrome (TS) patients. The word histories in the subtitle points to a major TS reality. Many theories of TS have led into blind alleys and disputes that have not been resolved. Kushner takes us down these paths and brings to life the investigators and propagandists who sought data or pushed their own views with little to back them up. He shows us that even the name of the malady appeared and disappeared as psychological and organic causes rose and fell in favor. Many who intend merely to sample the scholarly book may wind up devouring it.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating but a bit thick
This is a fascinating and well-researched book, both in terms of TS itself and the history of medicine and psychology in Europe and the US. Some of the stories are just heart rending. The writing is sometimes a bit overly academic, however, and readers without graduate degrees or lots of other practice reading turgid prose may get a bit worn out while plowing through some of the paragraphs.