Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (review)

The current enthusiasm for posthumanism among sociologists of scientific knowledge has provided a very useful corrective to any remaining tendency to view science as merely discourse and/or semiotics. A renewed focus on practical interactions between humans and inanimate objects— leading indeed to the blurring of the boundary between these two categories—will also, it is often claimed, encourage the development of a more satisfactory historiography of technology. In his introduction to Industrializing Organisms, Edmund Russell puts an intriguing additional spin on this argument by suggesting that a concentration on the history and sociology of technology may itself represent the same illegitimate prioritizing of the human that the proponents of posthumanism eschew. A more balanced historiography would move, it is implied, beyond a preoccupation solely with those material entities that are human productions toward a more inclusive study of practical interactions with all objects, whether human, artifactual, or natural. Living organisms constitute a good example of the nonartifactual material entities to which Russell alludes.

Yet the book is also organized around another question, apparently in tension with the first, namely, "Are animals [and plants] technology?" It is undoubtedly the case that people have shaped living organisms to serve human ends. Can we therefore apply the tools of the history of technology to the interpretation of biological objects? The several intriguing essays in the collection answer this query resoundingly in the affirmative. So we have a text that simultaneously expands the scope of the history of technology and problematizes its posthumanist credentials. All in all, Industrializing Organisms provides a stimulating and thought-provoking read.

Only one of the essays, that by Stephen Pemberton on the use of hemophiliac dogs in American biomedicine, could be said to fall directly within the category history of medicine. But Pemberton's contribution alone would make the book worth tracking down by the readership of this journal. He provides a most intriguing account of the status the afflicted dogs acquired in the laboratory of the leading investigative pathologist, Kenneth Brinkhous, at the University of North Carolina. They became more than experimental animals, more indeed than surrogate human sufferers. To keep the rare and valuable dogs alive in the laboratory, it proved necessary to manage their condition very actively. They became, in effect, the first patients to have their hemophilia successfully controlled by blood transfusions. The literature on tensions and interactions between the laboratory and the clinic is now voluminous, but Pemberton has provided an essential addition. Several of the other essays in Industrializing Organisms would interest veterinary historians—Ann Greene on war horses, Barbara Orland on "turbo-cows," Roger Horowitz on the making of the modern chicken, and Mark Finlay on the industrialization of pork production.

Generally, the style of the contributing authors is light and pleasantly humorous. I particularly enjoyed the ambiguity of the title of Mark Smith's chapter on the history of sugar production in Cuba, "Creating an Industrial Plant." There are signs, however, that the volume was edited in some haste. As already noted, the introductory essay was written not by either of the named editors but by Edmund Russell. In a very worthwhile passage he suggests several "research tactics" for the "evolutionary historian." To my mind his most convincingly argued suggestion is "deemphasize the plant-animal dichotomy as a primary way of organising ideas." Oddly, however, the book is divided into two main sections, "Part 1: Plants, Profits, Politics and Power," and "Part II: Animals, Aggression, Arrogance and Analysis." This is not quite joined-up thinking. Nevertheless, as a successful exercise in transcending the boundaries between the history of biology and the history of technology, not to mention economics, agronomy, geography, ecology, medicine, and much else beside, Schrepfer and Scranton's volume is to be most warmly welcomed.