Scholar Award: Racialization of Spirometry: A Transnational Project

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

This project funded by NSF's Science, Technology, and Society Program will examine the history of the development and use of the spirometer, a machine that measures the capacity of the lungs, as it incorporated varying ideas of race in different national contexts from the mid-19th century to the present. Of particular relevance to this project is that the adjustment of volumetric measurements for lung capacity is routinely made for age, height, gender, and race of the subject. "Race correction," also referred to as "ethnic adjustment" is sanctioned by many professional societies without a full understanding of the limitations of such a practice. Specific contexts to be studied include military medicine, physical fitness movements, and workmen's compensation systems in three countries: The US, the UK, and South Africa. This project will draw extensively on the biomedical literature, physiology and medical textbooks, records of consensus conferences on standardization of the technology, personal papers of researchers and archives of governmental committees and spirometry manufacturers. Archival material will be supplemented with personal interviews. The era of genomics has brought with it renewed concerns about the meanings of race and ethnicity, the role of scientific theories, practices, and technologies in constructing such meanings, and the use of race and ethnicity in scientific investigations. As complex technologies become ever more central to daily life and the medical marketplace, it is critical to understand the mechanisms by which technological instruments have worked across national boundaries to naturalize racial and ethnic categories in the past and how this global history shapes present understandings of lung capacity measurements. By elucidating the historical process by which social and cultural beliefs about race got attached to spirometry and then built into the machine, this project will illuminate an understudied dimension of the history of technology and contribute to the cotemporary debate on race, genetics, and health.