About this event
This talk considers epidemic neuromyasthenia as a historical disease by examining three outbreaks from 1934-1956 in the United States and Iceland. It also asks how historians and other social scientists might think about EN in relation to similar diseases like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which it is often linked or compared to.
Occurring during a time where plausibly viral illnesses of unknown cause were common in medicine, outbreaks of neuromyasthenia were managed clinically and epidemiologically as if they were a more straightforward entity, granting the disease a greater legitimacy than ME/CFS has held. The ways in which the disease was not straightforward, and eluded (bio)medicine’s understanding, gave it a popular reputation as a possibly hysterical entity, an impression that still haunts illnesses like ME/CFS and long covid.
I argue that changing clinical and epidemiological technologies altered the way the complex, nonspecific condition was described and understood, at the expense of patient experiences which present a more unified picture of these conditions across time. The technical versus experiential lenses capture different afterlives of the epidemics, on the one hand a forgotten entity whose objective signs disappeared from it’s diagnostic criteria, on the other, as a debilitating chronic illness with the ability to shape lives.
