Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to GeneticsPosted in Africa, Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery, South Africa, United Kingdom, United States on 2014-02-10 08:03Z by Steven |
Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics
University of Minnesota Press
February 2014
304 pages
29 b&w photos
6 x 9
Cloth/jacket ISBN: 978-0-8166-8357-4
Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University
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 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.
Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Measuring Vital Capacity
- 1. “Inventing” the Spirometer: Working-Class Bodies in Victorian England
- 2. Black Lungs and White Lungs: The Science of White Supremacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States
- 3. Filling the Lungs with Air: The Rise of Physical Culture in America
- 4. Progress and Race: Vitality in Turn-of-the-Century Britain
- 5. Globalizing Spirometry: The “Racial Factor” in Scientific Medicine
- 6. Adjudicating Disability in the Industrial Worker
- 7. Diagnosing Silicosis: Physiological Testing in South African Gold Mines
- Epilogue: How Race Takes Root
- Notes
- Index