"Inventing" the spirometer: working class bodies in Victorian England -- Black lungs and white lungs: the science of white supremacy in the nineteenth century United States -- Filling the lungs with air: the rise of physical culture in America -- Progress and race: vitality in turn of the century Britain -- Globalizing spirometry: the "racial factor" in scientific medicine -- Adjudicating disability in the industrial worker -- Diagnosing silicosis: physiological testing in South African gold mines
Summary
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 th
Notes
"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."
