Original title: > The Forgotten History of Head Injuries in Sports // Stephen Casper, a medical historian, argues that the danger of C.T.E. used to be widely a

Original title: > The Forgotten History of Head Injuries in Sports // Stephen Casper, a medical historian, argues that the danger of C.T.E. used to be widely acknowledged. How did we unlearn what we once knew? Automation has initially removed the "Forgotten History" part (then re-introduced appended by the submitter), but that is an actual core point in the article: > In July, 2015, Stephen Casper, a medical historian, [was contacted by] lawyers ... representing a group of retired hockey players who were suing the National Hockey League; their suit argued that the N.H.L. had failed to warn them about how routine head punches and jolts in hockey could put them at risk for degenerative brain damage. [...] A form of dementia called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., had recently been posthumously identified in dozens of former pro football and hockey players; diagnosable only through a brain autopsy, it was thought to be caused by concussions—injuries in which the brain is twisted or bumped against the inside of the skull—and by recurring subconcussive blows to the head. [...] In essence, the legal team wanted a historian to tell them what science had known about head trauma, and when > In her 2014 article, Harrison, the Harvard historian, wrote that the first concussion crisis in the U.S. faded, and then slipped from collective memory, “because work was done by football’s supporters to reshape public acceptance of risk”. [...] “A great deal of money and effort has gone into convincing people that risks that were unsettling should actually feel just fine,” Harrison told me