Emma Broder

My dissertation is a history of contested illnesses, from epidemic neuromyasthenia to chronic fatigue syndrome, in 20th century US medicine and public health. I ask how these conditions have been understood as epidemic threats and epidemiological objects to be studied at a population level, and how this intersects with individual patient and physician understandings in the past. Focusing on outbreaks which occurred from the 1930s-1908s, variously labeled atypical polio, Iceland disease, epidemic neuromyasthenia, and finally chronic fatigue syndrome, I argue that this set of illnesses have been an influential yet marginal presence in US healthcare as it transformed over the twentieth century. Influential because most patients in primary care have symptoms like fatigue and pain for which doctors can make no diagnosis; marginal because the mechanistic framework of biomedicine cannot manage such patients, who are therefore left without care.