Breathing race into the machine : the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Breathing race into the machine : the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics
University of Minnesota Press, c2014
- : pb
Available at 1 libraries
Note
"Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were previously published as "Spirometry, Measurement, and Race in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60 (2005): 135-169"--T.p. verso
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
How race became embedded in a medical instrument
In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device-the spirometer-to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic.
In Breathing Race into the Machine, science studies scholar Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the social and scientific processes by which medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. Routinely a factor in clinical diagnoses, preemployment physicals, and disability estimates, spirometers are often "race corrected," typically reducing normal values for African Americans by 15 percent.
An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, Breathing Race into the Machine helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice.
Honorable Mention, 2017 Rachel Carson Prize, Society for the Social Studies of Science
Winner of the 2018 Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Measuring Vital Capacity1. "Inventing" the Spirometer: Working-Class Bodies in Victorian England2. Black Lungs and White Lungs: The Science of White Supremacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States3. Filling the Lungs with Air: The Rise of Physical Culture in America4. Progress and Race: Vitality in Turn-of-the-Century Britain5. Globalizing Spirometry: The "Racial Factor" in Scientific Medicine6. Adjudicating Disability in the Industrial Worker7. Diagnosing Silicosis: Physiological Testing in South African Gold MinesEpilogue: How Race Takes Root
NotesIndex
by "Nielsen BookData"