| In the United States in the 1980’s, everyone was talking about the disease of the decade: Alzheimer’s. Most work in the past has centered around scientific developments, and while this work is critical to develop our understanding of Alzheimer’s, the more cultural side of this question, focusing on everyday people, has been left almost entirely unexplored. This matters because Alzheimer’s is, for millions of Americans, a reality in their daily lives. It matters a great deal how regular people, and not just scientists, learned about Alzheimer’s, and what they thought about it. This project examines a component of this cultural history through women’s magazines and explores the perceived infantilization and lack of autonomy of Alzheimer’s patients, followed by an emphasis on personhood and their empowerment in the 1990’s which paralleled broader cultural change at the time. |
