Breathing race into the machine : the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to genetics / Lundy Braun.

• Introduction: Measuring vital capacity -- "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 -- The professionalization of physical culture: making and measuring whiteness -- 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 -- Epilogue: how race rakes root.

• In the antebellum South, plantation physsicians 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 unlit 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 diagnosis, 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. -- from dust jacket. 

Ämnesord

Racism in medicine.  (LCSH)

Spirometry  -- History. (LCSH)

Lungs  -- Dust diseases -- History. (LCSH)

Lungs  -- Dust diseases -- Social aspects. (LCSH)

Blacks  -- Diseases. (LCSH)

African Continental Ancestry Group.  (MeSH)

European Continental Ancestry Group.  (MeSH)

History, 19th Century.  (MeSH)

History, 20th Century.  (MeSH)

African Continental Ancestry Group.  (MeSH)

European Continental Ancestry Group.  (MeSH)

History, 19th Century.  (MeSH)

History, 20th Century.  (MeSH)

Spirometry  -- history. (MeSH)

Spirometry  -- instrumentation. (MeSH)

Lung  -- physiology. (MeSH)

Racism  -- history. (MeSH)

Pneumoconiosis  -- etiology. (MeSH)

Spirometry  -- history. (MeSH)

Spirometry  -- instrumentation. (MeSH)

Lung  -- physiology. (MeSH)

Pneumoconiosis  -- etiology. (MeSH)

Racism  -- history. (MeSH)

Racism in medicine.  (fast)

Spirometry.  (fast)

Blacks  -- Diseases. (fast)

Lungs  -- Dust diseases. (fast)

Lungs  -- Dust diseases -- Social aspects. (fast)

Spirometri  -- historia (sao)

Rasism  -- historia (sao)

Geschichte 1800-2010. 

Genre

History.  (fast)

Klassifikation

RC773 (LCC)

RC773 (LCC)

2014 E-908 (NLM)

WB 284 (NLM)

616.2/44 (DDC)

Vei (kssb/8 (machine generated))