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American Lobotomy: A Rhetorical History
Jenell JohnsonAmerican Lobotomy studies a wide variety of representations of lobotomy to offer a rhetorical history of one of the most infamous procedures in the history of medicine. The development of lobotomy in 1935 was heralded as a "miracle cure" that would empty the nation's perennially blighted asylums. However, only twenty years later, lobotomists initially praised for their "therapeutic courage" were condemned for their barbarity, an image that has only soured in subsequent decades. Johnson employs previously abandoned texts like science fiction, horror film, political polemics, and conspiracy theory to show how lobotomy's entanglement with social and political narratives contributed to a powerful image of the operation that persists to this day. The book provocatively challenges the history of medicine, arguing that rhetorical history is crucial to understanding medical history. It offers a case study of how medicine accumulates meaning as it circulates in public culture and argues for the need to understand biomedicine as a culturally situated practice.
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Cover
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Title
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Copyright
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Dedication
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Acknowledgments
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Contents
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INTRODUCTION: Marvelous History
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CHAPTER 1: Thinking with the Thalamus: The Rhetoric of Emotional Impairment
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CHAPTER 2: Domesticated Women and Docile Boys: Lobotomy and Gender in the Popular Press, 1936–1955
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CHAPTER 3: Someone Else: The Cold War Politics of Personality Change
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CHAPTER 4: The Rhetorical Return of Lobotomy: The Campaign against Psychosurgery, 1970–1973
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CHAPTER 5: Not Our Father’s Lobotomy: Memories of Lobotomy in the New Age of Psychosurgery
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CHAPTER 6: How Weston State Hospital Became the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum; or, The Birth of Dr. Monster
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EPILOGUE: Haunted History
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Notes
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References
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Index
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Citable Link
Published: 2014
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- 978-0-472-12058-1 (ebook)
- 978-0-472-03665-3 (paper)
- 978-0-472-00416-4 (audio download)
- 978-0-472-11944-8 (hardcover)