Breathing Race into the Machine

Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics Hardcover – February 1, 2014

Author: Visit Amazon's Lundy Braun Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0816683573 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics – February 1, 2014
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"Breathing Life into the Machine brilliantly tracks the remarkable story of how ‘correcting for race’ in measures of lung capacity became standard scientific practice. This eye-opening account demonstrates that precision technologies and statistical techniques that supposedly measure biological differences accurately can mask racial myths and wreak devastating consequences for black people’s health and legal rights. Essential reading for everyone concerned about the impact of race on science and technology." —Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century

"Lundy Braun illuminates how the development of a new machine to measure lung capacity could begin with a benign purpose to assess the impact of working conditions in the coal mines in the early 19th century, but would later ‘morph’ into a justification for the putative relationship between difference and hierarchy that has remained intact for nearly two centuries. Braun documents how the social, economic and political fabric of each period is interwoven into the science of measurement—a theme that deftly carries throughout the book, and will establish Breathing Race into the Machine as a landmark contribution to the social studies of science." —Troy Duster, author of Backdoor to Eugenics

"In Breathing Race into the Machine, Lundy Braun powerfully reinvigorates our understanding of how racial formation happens. An incisive, considered study of a seemingly conventional physiology instrument, this book reveals science as a foundational feature of the social construction of race. We create our own difference engines, but Braun’s astute book reminds us that we do not have to remain captive to them." —Alondra Nelson, author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination

About the Author

Lundy Braun is Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence, professor of medical science and Africana studies, and a member of the Science and Technology Studies Program at Brown University.

Books with free ebook downloads available Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics Hardcover – February 1, 2014

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (February 1, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0816683573
ISBN-13: 978-0816683574
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #813,978 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Lundy Braun’s manuscript, Breathing Race into the Machine, is a significant achievement – at once a major contribution to several fields of inquiry, including but not limited to the History of Science, Epidemiology, the Sociology of Knowledge, Medical Sociology / Medical Anthropology, and Race and Ethnic Theory. Moreover, the chapters are written with meticulous care and attention to historical and technical detail, but without sacrificing lucidity. Braun manages to engage the reader with a fluid unfolding story-telling narrative. Any historical account of a scope that covers two centuries must find a balance between situated context and linear progression. The author has admirably accomplished this balance. To wit, by opening the book with a description of how the Industrial Revolution ushered unbridled havoc on worker’s health (thereby threatening productivity) in the early 19th century, she sets the stage for our understanding of how a new machine that promised precision measurement of worker’s capacity could dovetail so seamlessly with a need to assess the impact of horrendous working conditions in the coal mines. This provided the larger context for what she would later explain as a justification for the indelible and enduring relationship between difference and hierarchy in measuring lung capacity. More important, Braun documents how the social, economic and political fabric of each period was interwoven into the science of measurement. This theme deftly carries throughout the full manuscript, and will establish Measuring Life as a landmark contribution to the social studies of science.
Another set of issues will make this attractive to scholars and students of Epidemiology and Public Health, and will ultimately penetrate the curriculum of medical schools.