L. Stephen Jacyna and Stephen T. Casper (eds), The Neurological Patient in History

Extract

Studying the patient in history has only been moderately achieved since Roy Porter's prominent call for a patient-centred perspective.¹ Sensitive to this on-going need to incorporate the patient into the history of medicine, L. Stephen Jacyna and Stephen T. Casper compiled The Neurological Patient in History with the aim of investigating how the neurological patient has been ‘constituted in the era of modern medicine’ (p. vii). Although they focus on the neurological patient in particular, the editors are quick to identify that neurological patients are exemplars for patients of all kinds. Consequently, they offer this volume as ‘a history of the patient first and only secondarily as a history of neurology’ (p. viii).

The contributors to this volume demonstrate that the patient has not only been overlooked, but how historians might correct such oversight. The authors also vary in how they construct the patient—herein, the patient fluctuates between modern and postmodern subject. As such, the editors have purposefully divided the contributions into five sections that offer distinctive approaches to studying the patient. Ultimately, the contributors lend credence to the editors' claim that ‘neurological disease has a peculiar capacity to strike at the core of what in Western culture is taken to constitute personality identity, social status, and competence—indeed even what it is to be human’ (p. 1).