The Woman Who Walked into the Sea

Alice Wexler's new book, The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington's and the Making of Genetic Disease, builds on her memoir Mapping Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), which blended the histories of her family and Huntington's Disease research. That study drew on bioethics, women's studies, and psychoanalysis while illustrating the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. The Woman Who Walked into the Sea can also be read as a prequel. The first chapter of Mapping Fate began with Wexler's mother, Lenore, who carried the disease (and, with it, the risk that Alice and her sister psychologist Nancy, the prominent Huntington's researcher, might also be affected). But while Mapping Fate occasionally reached back into the past to provide context for the dramatic unfolding of twentieth-century scientific discoveries to which the Wexler family greatly contributed, The Woman Who Walked into the Sea begins in the eighteenth century. Hereditary chorea was already rooted in East Hampton, New York when George Huntington's grandfather, Dr. Abel Huntington, treated the Hedges, a family afflicted with what was then known as St. Vitus's dance. The book begins with the obituary of Phoebe Hedges, whose final steps into the sea were “attributed to her extreme dread of the disorder called St. Vitus's dance, with which she began to be affected and which her mother now has to a great degree” (3). Although the book begins with a description of a hopeless sea, it ends with the birth of a “vast community” of Huntington's sufferers, activists, and researchers who rise to the challenge of “draw[ing] on our knowledge of the past to craft a wise and just future” (186).

Archaeology · Art history · Context (archaeology) · Environmental ethics · Honor · Memoir · Obituary · Psychoanalysis · Sister · Sociology · Anthropology · History · Medical History and Research · Philosophy · Psychology · Race, Genetics, and Society · Twentieth Century Scientific Developments

• ‘A medical case history … ’

  Open Access•Kathleen Flanagan•Social Science & Medicine•2022

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