Punch-Drunk Slugnuts: Violence and the Vernacular History of Disease
Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: The observation that neurological illnesses follow recurrent hits to the head was tempered by the terms that first called the diseases into scientific existence: “punch-drunk,” “slugnutty,” “slaphappy,” “goofy,” “punchy,” and a host of other colloquialisms accompanying class identities. Thus the discovery of disease and its medicalization ran straight into a countervailing belief about losers—losers in boxing, losers in life, losers in general. To medicalize such individuals was to fly in the face of a culture that made them jokes. Yet a subculture began to emerge around pathological understandings: first in medicine, then in journalism, then in the courts, and finally with patient accounts about illness.
Source: Isis
DOI: 10.1086/719720
Author: Stephen T. Casper
Institution: Clarkson University
Language: English
Subfield: Neurology
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4281401801