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9 Experimental Injury: Wound Ballistics and Aviation Medicine in Mid-century America Susan Lindee High speed motion pictures (2,000–2,800 frames/second) show that the abdomen of a cat swells greatly immediately after the passage of a high velocity steel sphere. . . . The general effect is that of an explosion within the abdomen. —from a manuscript for publication, W. O. Puckett, W. D. McElroy, and E. Newton Harvey, January 1945. Box W–Z, Harvey Papers I begin by conjuring for you the image of an explosion within the abdomen of an injured cat, shot in a wartime laboratory as part of a project to develop more effective bullets. My paper focuses on experimental injury, and on the ways that, as Donna Haraway suggests, “animals hail us to account for the regimes in which they and we must live” (Haraway 2003). One of the most powerful regimes we occupy in the twenty-¤rst century operates at the intersection of war and technical knowledge. Over the last hundred years, biologists, physicists, engineers, psychologists, and other scienti¤c experts have become critical to the practice of war. Indeed, war arguably has become the dominant scienti¤c enterprise in the industrialized world, absorbing more funding, time, and personnel than any other single technically driven domain. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, now feared for their potential use by terrorists, are all products of scienti¤c expertise. Meteorology became a science in response to the demands of air power (Jonasson 1958); ornithologists played a role in Paci¤c weapons testing (see range of essays in MacLeod 2000); the shape of modern bullets re®ects laboratory research in wound ballistics (Prokosch 1995, 1–29; Harvey 1948); nuclear missiles use advanced computing technologies (MacKenzie 2000, 1–94); and the high quality of care now available in an urban emergency room re®ects medical experience with battle¤eld trauma (see Cooter, Harrison, and Sturdy 1999). War, science, and the healing arts of medicine are bound up tightly together in twentiethcentury history. “Public health in reverse” is a term usually used to refer to biological weap- ons, but I want to expand the meaning and suggest that other technical realms devoted to producing human injury were versions of public health in reverse (see Balmer 2002). They involved the application of the sophisticated mathematical and experimental arsenal of Western science to the production of greater, more ef¤cient, more reliable bodily damage. As Larry Owens has suggested , ballistics has been the quintessential science, linking Galileo and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in a single arc of technical knowledge geared to the needs of the sovereign state (Owens 2004; see also Prokosch 1995, 1–29). In this article, I track some elements of this convergence of technical expertise and the state’s monopoly on violence, focusing on two scienti¤c enterprises as they evolved in the United States during and immediately after the 1939–45 war. Wound ballistics and aviation medicine both involved the creation of controlled , experimental wounds. Aviation medicine had its origins in studies in the 1880s and later of the biomedical consequences of high-altitude climbing and travel by hot-air balloon; wound ballistics began in studies in the 1840s of the effects of ri®ed ¤rearms. Terminal ballistics, the study of the general physical effects of projectiles, has a long history stretching back to the scienti¤c revolution , but wound ballistics re®ected battle¤eld experience with weapons that damaged ®esh in unexpected ways. Both enterprises are still underway—with specialized journals, international conferences, and so on. These two research programs during World War II and the Cold War were linked by their relevance to national security and by their embeddedness in the familiar networks of mid-century techno-scienti¤c mobilization in the United States. They were also linked sociologically,centering around a group of researchers at Yale and Princeton universities, some of whom worked on both topics. In twentieth-century scienti¤c research, human and animal bodies were experimentally starved, shelled, drowned, dropped from high places, shot through the abdomen, irradiated, or subjected to decompression or blunt trauma. Animals were surrogate humans in this military research. Their bodies were damaged in order to improve weapons technology. Technical experts in the United States studied bodies wounded in the lab and wounded on the battle¤eld. They studied body armor and radiation effects at high altitudes. They mapped the soldier’s cartography in con¤gurations that re®ected not function or structure, but relative vulnerability to missiles. Diagrams...

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