ABSTRACT
Witches, Criminals, and Huntington’s Disease. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Textual Bodies and Real Lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Historical Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Huntington’s Chorea as History and Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Narrative Appeal(s) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 The Social Impact of Eugenic Narratives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
In 1932 an American psychiatrist named Percy R. Vessie, medical director at an elite private sanitarium in Connecticut, published a paper about New England witches and ne’er do wells that became an unofficial origins story of Huntington’s disease in the United States (Vessie, 1932). Formerly called Huntington’s chorea on account of the jerky, involuntary movements called chorea that form its most dramatic symptom, this disorder is a dominantly inherited neurological illness also characterized by personality
changes and cognitive decline, leading inexorably to dementia and death over a period of 15 to 20 years (Harper, 1991).* In 1872 a young North American physician, George Huntington, wrote the classic description, which attracted the attention of eugenicists such as Charles B. Davenport after the turn of the century (Huntington, 1872). Davenport, in turn, commissioned Elizabeth B. Muncey to carry out the first large family field study of the disease under the aegis of his newly established Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Vessie drew on Muncey’s data when he wrote his own paper in 1932, by which time Huntington’s chorea had become widely known within the international neurological community.
