Accident Prone: A History of Technology, Psychology, and Misfits of the Machine Age (review)

This is an exemplary study of an unusual topic which has close links with the emergence of the later-twentieth-century risk society and a bewilderingly rapidly expanding sociological and policy-oriented literature on the human and social impact of natural and man-made disasters. Historical investigation of the occurrence of individual or "group" accidental fatalities and injuries, whether related to mining, the construction industry, the railways, premechanical forms of traffic ("street accidents"), or automobiles, remains underdeveloped. John Burnham's study is a major synthesizing and deeply considered comparative contribution to that body of work.

In the early and mid-nineteenth century, manufacturers in the then economically developed countries showed scant patience and all too often dispensed with the services of workers who seemed more likely to be injured than others. As factory inspectorates became stronger, and what would now be termed health and safety legislation tougher and more consistently applied, employers feared that higher-than-average mortality and serious injury rates in their workshops or factories would lead to embarrassing official inquiries and a deterioration in relations with the local communities from which workforces were recruited. Surely there must be a way of weeding out the accident-prone—identifying employees who were physically, psychologically, cognitively, and "morally" less well-adapted than others to the demands of working with unguarded machinery? (Antiquated workshops were much more numerous, and, in terms of rates of industrial injury, much more dangerous than more intensively inspected factories.)

Burnham has assiduously reviewed and creatively criticized everything that we know about the incidence and social construction of accidents in modern and contemporary history. But he is primarily interested in a concept that obsessed Americans and Europeans between the very end of the nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth. "Accident-proneness" rose to prominence in continental Europe and Britain between 1900 and the 1920s. The primary founder of the idea of Unfallneigung, the psychologist Karl Marbe (who bore an uncanny visual resemblance to the young Albert Einstein) led the way. But he was rapidly followed by the British empirical and statistical school, which rose to prominence during the First World War working for the production-boosting Industrial Fatigue Research Board. Members included the eminent epidemiological statistician Major Greenwood, the Oxford physiologist and accident expert H. M. Vernon, and the little-known and the even-less-well-remembered industrial psychologist Eric Farmer. Burnham's portrait of Farmer is a verbal and visual mini-essay on the irretrievably anonymous. Understating the case, one might say that accident specialists tended to lack charisma: data collection and statistical analysis became an all-consuming activity.

Thereafter, the idea was elaborated in the United States, not least in the form of tests devised to identify "good and bad" public transit operators. Between the 1930s and the mid-1950s, accident-proneness ruled the roost. A deep trawl through Google Scholar reveals it to have been a topic of all-consuming interest for psychologists, industrial-efficiency experts, physiologists, devisors of simulation and testing systems, and emerging road-safety statisticians and analysts. Accident-proneness had become part of the texture of everyday industrial life, not least since some employees clearly and irrefutably suffered much larger numbers of niggling and more serious injuries than coworkers on the production line.

As one might expect, Freudians had a brief field day and came up with crazily suggestive ideas. Hardly surprisingly, Freud himself believed that the chronically accident-prone had a deep subconscious need repeatedly and subconsciously to harm themselves. Many early-twenty-first-century physicians, with a wide knowledge of health and safety, would undoubtedly agree with a diluted and differently theorized version of this gloomy view. As Burnham decisively demonstrates, physicalist psychiatrists failed to medicalize accident-proneness: it failed to mesh with any of their laboriously designed professional diagnostic categories.

Burnham is deeply concerned with why specific theories and explanations simultaneously come to the fore in different...