The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea or Yoga for Children

The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntington's and the Making of a Genetic Disease

Author: Alice Wexler

A groundbreaking medical and social history of a devastating hereditary neurological disorder once demonized as “the witchcraft disease”

When Phebe Hedges, a woman in East Hampton, New York, walked into the sea in 1806, she made visible the historical experience of a family affected by the dreaded disorder of movement, mind, and mood her neighbors called St.Vitus's dance. Doctors later spoke of Huntington’s chorea, and today it is known as Huntington's disease. This book is the first history of Huntington’s in America.

Starting with the life of Phebe Hedges, Alice Wexler uses Huntington’s as a lens to explore the changing meanings of heredity, disability, stigma, and medical knowledge among ordinary people as well as scientists and physicians. She addresses these themes through three overlapping stories: the lives of a nineteenth-century family once said to “belong to the disease”; the emergence of Huntington’s chorea as a clinical entity; and the early-twentieth-century transformation of this disorder into a cautionary eugenics tale. In our own era of expanding genetic technologies, this history offers insights into the social contexts of medical and scientific knowledge, as well as the legacy of eugenics in shaping both the knowledge and the lived experience of this disease.

Books about: Cities and Privatization or Nursing Consultation

Yoga for Children

Author: Mary Stewart

Physical activity is natural to children and vital for their healthy development. But in today's mechanized society--with TV, computer games and competitive sports--it is becoming difficult for some children to get the exercise they need in a natural, healthy, and enjoyable way.

Yoga for Children provides simple exercises and games you and your children can do together that can help your kids:

• become stronger and more flexible
• develop good coordination and posture
• learn how to relax and concentrate
• let out their energy in a safe, health-promoting way

Suitable for kids from age three and up--no matter what their physical abilities, Yoga for Children is a safe, healthy, and fun way for families to exercise, play, and grow together.