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

Breathing Race into the Machine opens with an asbestos lawsuit from 1999 in which Owens Corning, an insulation manufacturer, proposed a motion to include race correction in measuring the lung capacity and assessing the disability claims of plaintiffs seeking compensation for work-related exposure to asbestos. This modification was rooted in age-old assumptions of racial difference in pulmonary medicine, which would require black workers to prove lesser lung capacity than their white colleagues in order to receive equal compensation. Although the motion was denied, as Lundy Braun indicates, this case "made public a longstanding – but rarely examined – history of racial assumptions informing the theories and practice of lung function research" (xv).

In her book, Braun endeavours to answer the question: "By what historical processes did racial discourses get attached to and embedded in the spirometer, such that a hierarchy of difference was established?" (xxii). Braun begins by tracing the origins of the spirometer in nineteenth-century Britain, when Victorian scientists used spirometric measurements and statistics to "probe the general laws of nature" (6). Nascent spirometric measurements emerged within the context of growing anxiety over the public's health and the effects of the industrial workplace on an increasingly poor and visible working class. Braun notes how the simultaneous rise of statistics in medicine enabled physician John Hutchinson, recognized as the founder of spirometry, to contribute to the rising global prominence of spirometric measurements in "scientific medicine." Though experimentation with the spirometer in Britain was initially framed in public health policy terms, as Braun maintains, "race hovered over the technology" (26).

Braun's book also spans antebellum and postbellum periods in US history in which spirometric measurements were intertwined with discourses of racial difference, and used to legitimate systems of forced black labour. In his work on respiratory physiology, Samuel Cartwright, plantation owner, physician, and pro-slavery theorist, concluded that African Americans were innately best suited to "compulsory labour under control of the whites" (28). Throughout the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the years of Jim Crow, spirometric measurements were used to reinforce notions of black pathology, deprive African Americans from access to life insurance, and "mark blacks as physiologically most suited to agricultural labor" (54). In short, the spirometer was a central legitimizing feature in the discourses and practices of white supremacy throughout much of US history.

In her two most compelling chapters, Braun demonstrates that racial assumptions of white lung superiority transcended numerous disciplines and were a foundational concept in the physical culture movement in Britain and North America. Braun illustrates how, primarily in elite British colleges, lung capacity became "enmeshed in a discourse of vigour and fitness" in the physical culture movement, which was permeated by imperial ambitions, eugenics, conceptions of Anglo-Saxon manhood, and Christian revivalism (59). Notions of vital capacity derived from anthropometry became central to physical education programs at elite universities and colleges, such as Amherst and Harvard. As Braun shows, studies of lung capacity within these contexts systematically excluded people of colour, and anthropometrics played a primary role in "stabilizing or enlarging a unified white race" within physical culture discourses (74). The standardization and professionalization of anthropometrics during the late nineteenth century in Britain involved the institutionalization of upper-class and distinctly white measurements of lung capacity, which significantly influenced medical and scientific understandings of lung function throughout the twentieth century.

In the remainder of the book, Braun notes how understandings of racially hierarchized lung capacity following the First World War became increasingly embedded in global medical practices. Research conducted by Pneumoconiosis Research Units, both in post-war South Wales in relation to compensation for miners' disability claims and in South Africa's segregated compensation system, laid the medical and scientific foundations for contemporary understandings of lung capacity and "reinforced a now familiar refrain – that blacks and whites differ in the capacity of their lungs" (165). Technological...