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Breathing Race into the Machine - The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (Paperback)
Loot Price: R519
Discovery Miles 5 190
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Breathing Race into the Machine - The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics (Paperback)
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Loot Price R519
Discovery Miles 5 190
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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How race became embedded in a medical instrument 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
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. Honorable Mention, 2017 Rachel
Carson Prize, Society for the Social Studies of Science Winner of
the 2018 Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of
Science
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