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BREATHING RACE INTO THE MACHINE : the surprising career of the spirometer from plantation to ... genetics by Braun, Lundy is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

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In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic. In __Breathing Race into the Machine__, science studies scholar Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the social and scientific processes by which medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. Routinely a factor in clinical diagnoses, preemployment physicals, and disability estimates, spirometers are often “race corrected,” typically reducing normal values for African Americans by 15 percent. An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, __Breathing Race into the Machine__ helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical resea

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Author

Braun, Lundy

Publisher

University of Minnesota Press

Published

2014

Language

EN

ISBN

9781452949185

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Medical, History, Engineering

Rating

3.67 / 5 (8 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14