Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics

Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the ways medical instrumentshave worked to naturalise racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, this book helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Measuring Vital Capacity1. “Inventing” the Spirometer: Working-Class Bodies in Victorian England2. Black Lungs and White Lungs: The Science of White Supremacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States3. Filling the Lungs with Air: The Rise of Physical Culture in America4. Progress and Race: Vitality in Turn-of-the-Century Britain5. Globalizing Spirometry: The “Racial Factor” in Scientific Medicine6. Adjudicating Disability in the Industrial Worker7. Diagnosing Silicosis: Physiological Testing in South African Gold MinesEpilogue: How Race Takes Root NotesIndex

About the Author :
Lundy Braun is Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence, professor of medical science and Africana studies, and a member of the Science and Technology Studies Program at Brown University.

Review :
"Breathing Race into the Machine brilliantly tracks the remarkable story—lasting to the present—of how ‘correcting for race’ in measures of lung capacity became unremarkable scientific practice. This eye-opening account demonstrates that precision technologies and statistical techniques that supposedly measure biological differences accurately can mask racial myths and wreak devastating consequences for black people’s health and legal rights. Essential reading for everyone concerned about the impact of race on science and technology."—Dorothy Roberts, University of Pennsylvania, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century "Lundy Braun illuminates how the development of a new machine to measure lung capacity could begin with a benign purpose to assess the impact of working conditions in the coal mines in the early 19th century, but would later ‘morph’ into a justification for the putative relationship between difference and hierarchy that has remained intact for nearly two centuries. Braun documents how the social, economic and political fabric of each period is interwoven into the science of measurement—a theme that deftly carries throughout the book, and will establish Breathing Race into the Machine as a landmark contribution to the social studies of science."—Troy Duster, author of Backdoor to Eugenics "In Breathing Race into the Machine, Lundy Braun powerfully reinvigorates our understanding of how racial formation happens. An incisive, considered study of a seemingly conventional physiology instrument, this book reveals science as a foundational feature of the social construction of race. We create our own difference engines, but Braun’s astute book reminds us that we do not have to remain captive to them."—Alondra Nelson, author of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination "A fascinating read."—Choice "Ultimately, Breathing Race into the Machine disrupts ideas about technology’s objectivity to show the pernicious persistence of racial bias."—African American Review "Great value to those with an interest in the history of science and technology, occupational health and disease, and the construction of whiteness and blackness."—Social History of Medicine "Intellectually provocative, original, and extensively researched."—American Historical Review "This book reminds us that tools have a history and that their history matters."—Journal of American History "Lundy Braun provides her readers with the most meticulously detailed, and I should add sophisticated, historical analysis. . . her account of the career of the technical device of the spirometer offers surprising and valuable insights."—Science as Culture "Breathing Race into the Machine is theoretically informed, well researched, and well written. Its compelling account contributes to the scholarship of racialization in science and medicine."—ISIS