RESUMO
Historians have clearly articulated the ways in which sleeplessness has long been part of the human condition. As an object of medical expertise and public health intervention, however, insomnia is a much more recent invention, having gained its status as a pathology during the 1870s. But while insomnia has attracted considerable and concerted attention from public health authorities allied with sleep medicine specialists, this phenomenon is not well explained by classical medicalization theory, in part because it is the sleepless sufferers, not the medical experts, who typically have the authority to diagnose insomnia. The dynamics of insomnia's history are better described as those of a boundary object, around which concepts and practices of biomedicine and psychology coalesce to frame contemporary notions of self-medicalization and self-experiment.
Assuntos
Médicos , Distúrbios do Início e da Manutenção do Sono , Ocupações em Saúde , Humanos , Medicalização , Saúde Pública , Distúrbios do Início e da Manutenção do Sono/terapiaRESUMO
Historians have clearly articulated the ways in which sleeplessness has long been part of the human condition. As an object of medical expertise and public health intervention, however, insomnia is a much more recent invention, having gained its status as a pathology during the 1870s. But while insomnia has attracted considerable and concerted attention from public health authorities allied with sleep medicine specialists, this phenomenon is not well explained by classical medicalization theory, in part because it is the sleepless sufferers, not the medical experts, who typically have the authority to diagnose insomnia. The dynamics of insomnia's history are better described as those of a boundary object, around which concepts and practices of biomedicine and psychology coalesce to frame contemporary notions of self-medicalization and self-experiment.
RESUMO
Encephalitis lethargica, also known as epidemic encephalitis, emerged as a new infectious disease near the end of the First World War. Bacteriologic, epidemiologic, and clinical investigation produced no clear consensus regarding the nature of the disease, even as several other experimentally demonstrable "encephalitides" appeared on the scene. By 1940, new encephalitis lethargica cases had almost entirely disappeared, and neurologists renamed this once-novel infection as an amorphous syndrome of marginal interest. A variety of forces influencing the fate of encephalitis lethargica's epidemic status can be seen at work in the Matheson Commission, whose members hoped to use encephalitis as a model disease that might supplant their reliance on clinical phenomenology with a causal analysis of nervous disease grounded in the laboratory. When it failed to live up to these expectations, the model was abandoned. Epidemic encephalitis was soon forgotten.
