Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics [Kindle Edition]
Author: Lundy Braun | Language: English | ISBN: B00IKXVK6M | Format: PDF, EPUB
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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.
- File Size: 5535 KB
- Print Length: 304 pages
- Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press; 1 edition (February 1, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00IKXVK6M
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #800,150 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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.
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