{"id":40735,"date":"2015-04-03T19:37:12","date_gmt":"2015-04-03T19:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=40735"},"modified":"2015-04-03T19:37:12","modified_gmt":"2015-04-03T19:37:12","slug":"breathing-race-into-the-machine-the-surprising-career-of-the-spirometer-from-plantation-to-genetics-by-lundy-braun-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=40735","title":{"rendered":"Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics by Lundy Braun (review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics by Lundy Braun (review)<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Configurations<\/a>
\nVolume 23, Number 1, Winter 2015<\/a>
\npages 127-130
\nDOI: 10.1353\/con.2015.0000<\/a><\/p>\n

Lindsey Andrews<\/strong><\/a>, Visiting Scholar of English
\nCenter for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory
\nDuke University, Durham, North Carolina<\/em><\/p>\n

Braun, Lundy, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics<\/em><\/a> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lundy Braun\u2019s<\/a> account of the ongoing and often invisible implementation of race-correction in pulmonary medicine is as much about the absence of the spirometer<\/a>\u2014a machine developed to measure lung function with accuracy\u2014as it is about its presence. Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics<\/em><\/a> asks how it is possible that, well into the twenty-first century, doctors continue to use technologies that \u201ccorrect\u201d for racial differences in lung function despite no existing physiological difference. How did buttons establishing separate norms based on race and sex come to be a surreptitious, yet pervasive feature of diagnostic machinery? The answer lies in a much larger story about the desirability, across multiple domains and professions, of a technically precise means for measuring the elusive quality that physicians, scientists, and insurance companies came to think of as \u201cvital capacity\u201d or \u201cfitness.\u201d Building explicitly on Keith Wailoo\u2019s<\/a> Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America<\/em><\/a> (1997) and contributing to a growing body of literature on race in science and technology, Braun\u2019s study \u201cexamine[s] the complex and contradictory historical processes by which differences such as race, class, and gender actually get embedded into the very architecture of scientific instruments\u201d (p. xxi).<\/p>\n

Braun tracks the proliferation of spirometric uses, from the machine\u2019s earliest emergence as a tool for monitoring laborers\u2019 fitness in the middle of the nineteenth century, through its development as a medical diagnostic tool in the twentieth century, to its contemporary role in adjudicating worker\u2019s compensation claims. One of the most intriguing aspects of Braun\u2019s book\u2014and at times its most challenging feature\u2014is its attempt to account for the ways in which the spirometer\u2019s flexibility (rather than its specificity) as a precision tool and its unclear object of measurement (vital capacity) made it, in fact, such a powerful tool that would come to play a crucial global role in health- and insurance-policy decisions. What Braun ultimately shows is that separate though related epistemological problems regarding vital capacity emerged across multiple fields\u2014including labor surveillance, fitness culture, and diagnostic medicine\u2014to which precision and numeracy appeared to be the answer. The spirometer provided both. As Braun notes, spirometry was not central to any one discipline, but instead found myriad uses in physical education, military testing and training, and insurance assessment. \u201cAs its epistemological relevance faded in one domain,\u201d she writes, \u201cit was taken up, adapted, and investigated in another\u201d (p. xxv<\/em>). Whether shoring up Anglo-Saxon masculinity by establishing the superiority of upper-class white lungs in nineteenth-century physical culture or enforcing anti-black workers\u2019 compensation policies that required blacks to demonstrate even lower lung functioning than similarly positioned white workers in order to receive remuneration, the capacity of the spirometer to produce numeric data was both its appeal in terms of authority and simultaneously its most easily racialized feature\u2014a feature made invisible in the apparent \u201cvalue neutrality\u201d of a scientific virtue (a concept that Braun draws from Lorainne Daston<\/a> and Peter Galison<\/a>) like precision.<\/p>\n

Tracing the international and professional border-crossing of the spirometer is one of the book\u2019s primary accomplishments, but also one of its challenges for readers. In the course of seven chapters, Braun is tasked with moving back and forth from the twenty-first to the early nineteenth century, and from Wales, to the US South, to South Africa, negotiating a narrative that is neither straightforward nor linear, although always following a through-line in which assessment of the laboring body and management of the laboring class drive spirometric racialization. Early chapters cover the stabilization of whiteness as a meaning of lung-capacity measurements. In the first chapter, Braun shows how John Hutchinson<\/a>, a Victorian<\/a> scientist and early developer of the spirometer, reconfigured pulmonary studies in terms of physiological functioning rather than anatomical construction, thus tapping into growing investments in scientific experimentalism and the \u201cquantifying spirit\u201d of the Victorian era by adapting the spirometer\u2019s use to large-scale population studies. Chapter 1 thus lays the groundwork for the third and fourth chapters, which also detail the ways in which lung-capacity measurements, along with anthropometry<\/a>…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics by Lundy Braun (review) Configurations Volume 23, Number 1, Winter 2015 pages 127-130 DOI: 10.1353\/con.2015.0000 Lindsey Andrews, Visiting Scholar of English Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory Duke University, Durham, North Carolina Braun, Lundy, Breathing Race into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,2039,459,8,10,20],"tags":[19799,19797,19798,2083,17219],"class_list":["post-40735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-health-medicine","category-history","category-media-archive","category-uk","category-usa","tag-configurations","tag-lindsey-andrews","tag-lindsey-c-andrews","tag-lundy-braun","tag-spirometer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}