By the 1950s it was well understood that concussions could result in brain changes and degenerative nervous diseases. Yet where many experts saw an immediate, widespread public health problem, their warnings exercised limited influence in American culture. Why? Such ignorance, historian Robert Procter has argued forcefully for other historical episodes, is hardly accidental. Indeed the story of that ignorance as applied to concussions forces historians to confront a startling array of contexts, conceits and victims: fast cars, suburban masculinity, pro-segregationist rhetoric, the popularity of violent sports, boxers, and battered women and children. Meanwhile psychological theory cast the need for spectacles of public violence in sports arenas or on the silver screen as a necessary controlling force for the sublimation of internal drives. Underpinning such theories were different historical valences: ones sometimes engineered by scientific experts and at other times manufactured by the wellsprings of naïve faith in the universality of domestic tranquility, the necessity of racial segregation, and the naturalness of gender norms. Grounded in a rich archive of scientific and cultural sources, this story about the cultural history of head injury thus seeks to make an immediate and urgent contribution to social medicine today. In so doing, this paper shows how head injuries became a public health epidemic, how that fact was recognized by experts, and how, nonetheless, it remained a fact without an audience.
