Uma história cultural da epilepsia na Paraíba entre os séculos XX e XXI.

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze the constituted discourses about epilepsy and which were put into circulation by medical and popular knowledge, as well as by the Paraíba press throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Epilepsy is a neurological disease that is usually identified in childhood and for which a cure is not always found, but a form of control. It is a disease full of stigmas: the disease that makes you tremble, that provokes convulsions, that promotes madness. Thus, this “evil” began to be seen in Brazilian society. This research is theoretically located in the field of the History of Health and Diseases, as it is an illness analyzed from documentation under the procedures of History, and which is also full of sensitivities, thus demarcating it in the domains of Cultural History. Methodologically, we use document analysis as a way to extract from historical sources the silences, the unsaid and what sometimes goes unnoticed. For that, I focused on newspaper news published in the pages of A União, Diário da Borborema and O Norte; about the literature on the subject, texts that were published by doctors who treated epilepsy as a branch of madness, and about the oral history interviews carried out with women from Paraiba who live with the disease. It concludes that this is a story that still needs to be told, because historically it has been full of stereotyped prejudices and judgments, and that, despite advances in medicine and ways of dealing with epilepsy patients, much still needs to advance.