Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics by Lundy Braun (review)

Lundy Braun’s Breathing Race into the Machine examines the creation and evolution of the spirometer from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Used to gauge human health and fitness through the measurement of lung capacity, the spirometer first appeared in England at a time when the expanding industrial economy made respiratory illnesses and bourgeois fears about working-class laborers spreading disease more prominent. While not a therapeutic innovation, this instrument provided a means for researchers to collect large amounts of data on human lung function and to establish a numerical standard to aid in diagnosis. But the spirometer’s precise measurements also proved appealing to researchers in the field of anthropometry where its findings had greater social implications. Not only a measure of respiratory differences, it contributed to discourse on human “vigor” and “vital capacity,” technical concepts that carried larger cultural significance and influenced popular conceptions of gender roles, occupational differences, social hierarchies, and racial and national destinies.

In the United States, the spirometer’s measurements frequently appeared in the arguments of pro-slavery theorists. Southern physicians like Samuel Cartwright maintained that black Americans lacked the vigor needed to function as independent free men. During and after the Civil War, statisticians like Benjamin Gould of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and Frederick Hoffman of Prudential Insurance used spirometer-based evidence to argue that black Americans were in a state of degeneration that would lead to extinction. While such ideas were prominent, Braun shows that these theories were not universally accepted. Surgeons from the Freed-men’s Bureau of the War Department came to markedly different conclusions about the capabilities of black soldiers, favorably comparing them to whites. In addition, black physicians like James McCune Smith and black social scientists like Kelly Miller and W. E. B. Du Bois responded to the denigrating works of Cartwright, Hoffman, and others with rebuttals stressing the impact environmental factors had on health and fitness while raising questions about the validity of deterministic racial theories.

Breathing Race into the Machine demonstrates that theories of degeneration, often deemed unique to studies of black Americans, also were applied to people of Anglo-Saxon descent. Educators from Amherst and Harvard introduced physical education into their undergraduate curricula, afraid that white American men were declining in manliness due to the “feminizing” effect of intellectual pursuits. Wellesley’s administrators implemented similar changes, fearing the stresses of college life were diminishing the ability of white female students to procreate. British researchers focused on the fitness and vitality of the poor and working classes. Believing their lack of vitality could undermine the nation’s wealth and military prowess, researchers lobbied for large-scale anthropometric surveys to shape public policy and utilized eugenic science as a means to promote visions of national progress.

Throughout the twentieth century, the spirometer played a major role in the spread of anthropometric theories of human vitality. Supported by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, researchers conducted extensive studies on populations in South Africa, China, and India as well as in Britain and the United States. While directed at issues of extreme poverty and disparities in health, many employed complex statistical models intended to reveal “nature’s laws” and establish universal standards for “normal” health and vitality; standards that often allowed civic and corporate bodies to escape accountability for public health disparities and workers’ well-being. In the adjudication of workers’ compensation claims, for example, race-based diagnostic criteria put black South African miners at a disadvantage in seeking reparations.

Braun shows that crude assumptions about the nature of race and tacit beliefs in numerical precision have clouded research on racial health to the present day. By allowing statistics to “speak for themselves,” anthropometric narratives continue to scapegoat marginalized communities by ascribing health disparities to intrinsic physiological differences. Echoing works by Richard Proctor and John Wargo on the history of scientific knowledge, Braun...